>>If you are interested in testing your vulnerability while connected to the Internet, I came across this in a post: it's a tool Steve Gibson has created.
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>>http://grc.com/x/ne.htm?bh0bkyd2
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>Thanks for the tip, Nancy. Do you know this guy? His site appears to have a lot of good technical information too. Ironically, I just installed (and paid for) a different protection product last week. Now I'm wondering if it's one of the ones he's critical of. Off to read more bout it...

I don't personally know Steve Gibson, (at least not *this* Steve Gibson), but I can vouch for him as being a technical wizard and all around good guy. I used to (and still do!) use a product he made called Spin-rite, for detecting/repairing bad sectors on hard drives. Great product. (even if you *think* bad sectors aren't a problem with IDE drives, guess again, it still is). Another product I used of his, is TIP (TroubleInParadise) for testing and using IOMEGA ZIP drives. I downloaded an improved driver for my parallel Zip drive and got about an 8 fold performance increase!

But it is extremely scary to find out you've been exposed to the outside world without your knowledge!