I'm using Zone Alert?

Question

and have received a bunch of alerts already, though I've only been running the software since yesterday. When I trace the IP addresses on Whois I come up with all kinds of info about IP addresses from the US, India, Hungary and Africa. What's going on there? Some of them have abuse report addresses listed somewhere in this sea of gobbledigook. Someone explain all this to me, I'm lost.

OOPS, did I say ZONE ALERT?? I meant Zone ALARM. My bad.

Answer 1

Have no knowledge of "Zone Alert". If you open your Tools on the IE bar and drop down to Internet Options, open Security and the setting should be med. to high. (You can sent it yourself). and check of Apply & Ok. Open Privacy and the setting should be med. only. check off apply and ok.

Get rid of this so called "Zone Alert". An install yourself a good firewall that will protect your incoming traffice from rogue ports an al off your outgoing traffice to prevent private data from leaving your pc.

http://www.zonealarm.com Download their free home for personal use version. You will get daily updates if there are any, an any time there is a new version of Zone Alarm, you will ge the information via automatic download, that a new version is ready for download an installation. (All your zones will be protected).

Clinical Psychiatrist, France.

Answer 2

I guess the software you are using is "zone alarm" - a popular desktop firewall. The alarms you are getting are connection attempts. It's nothing to worry about.
This happens because when you establish an Internet connection your Internet service provider assigns an IP-number to your computer. This IP-number is from a pool of IP-numbers that your ISP has reserved for it's customers. The IP you have now was assigned to someone else's computer before. If a peer-to-peer software e.g. emule, edonky or bittorrent was running on this computer you will get a lot of connection attempts from other p2p-clients that still try to contact that now outdated address.
Plus, there are lot of wanna-be hacker out there who run port scanners on a random range of IP-addresses. As long as you (1) don't offer any unwanted server services to the outside world, or (2) have password-protected accounts for offered services (ftp, ssh) and (3) update your software and operating system frequently, there is nothing to worry about.
BTW: Desktop firewalls like zone alarm are snake-oil. Often, they have security issues themselves and can be attacked. But they can teach you a bit about networks, network topology and about your operating system itself.

Answer 3

All that means is your firewall is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Keeping out all the bad guys.

Answer 4

Do you have msn messenger or similar incoming messages may triger it off.