Can anyone tell me what a 'Syn port attack' is ....

[carla]

.. and should I be bothered by them? Every time I use my PC I get a bubble telling me to click here to trace the attacker, but what am I being attacked by? (Dumb icon)

Mr Flip says you are being port scanned. It means that either someone is trying to find out if your PC is vulnerable actively like a hacker or someone has a virus on their PC and it's port scanning.

You need to find out the IP address of the person doing it by doing( ping -a ipaddress ) from the dos prompt. The ipaddress should be shown in the bubble on your PC that's warning you. This will give you the name of the PC if it has one. Then the only thing you can do is send an email to post master of that domain eg :-

ping -a 192.168.1.51

pinging attacker.domain.com [192.168.1.51]with 32 bytes of data

Reply from 192.168.1.51: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=247
Reply from 192.168.1.51: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=247
Reply from 192.168.1.51: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=247
Reply from 192.168.1.51: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=247
Reply from 192.168.1.51: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=247
Reply from 192.168.1.51: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=247

Once you have the DNS name (attacker.domain.com), send an e-mail to [email protected] (they all have one, it's internet "law") and notify them of abuse. They can then trace the owner of the machine and get them to sort it out. This is the only way.

HTH - Mr Flip typed it and it only made a little sense to me.

Could be a potential virus or trojan horse attack, I have had alot of these messages lately. If you trace attack you can see where it has been sent from. Yesterday I was "attacked" from France, Spain, South Korea and Canada. Just releived we paid for protective software.

Thanks for these. Could you ask worldwise Mr Flip if he's ever heard of RIPEWhois?

Hey that's the same as the one's trying to attack us. Have sent to postmaster and do not appear to have been attacked since.

Gothicmama, who is postmaster and how do you, erm, get in touch with him?

I clicked to trace attack and then clicked details button an dscrolled loads of techie stuff saw something like for spam or hacker contact and the address was there. Not v. good at explaining cos I not very PC literate, good luck