ok...
first, i use norton now. i find it better than the free one (sysomething?) which i used, but unfortunately...
when we recovered from the blackout (ny state), i accidentally said 'yes, let him in' to a hacker trying to get in via an open account on my pc. about 15 seconds later, my computer was trying to ping to hundreds of machines all over the world.
needless to say, i stopped trading. called IB immediately, they were NOT nonchalant about it. i told him my account may have bene hacked - could they put a stop on my account for 24 hours? - and he said that if they put a stop, it would be for 1 week (because of hacking) - however, because of the blackout, they wouldn't be able to do monet withdrawals that day anyhow. i decided to chance things, and was fine.
the firewall in XP does NOT help you.
> go to grc.com - that will help stop some things.
> go get a good firewall. set it up to notify you - you'll find out that there are a lot of 0wn3d machines on cable modem / dsl lines that are now spam servers. why? because of those stupid email viruses that people downloaded, and outlook or some crappy MS product automatically opened (and therefore, ran, infecting the user's machine).
> if you don't need them, immediately block off all IPs from 200.*, 202.*, 211.*...those are brazil, china, korea. some admins in those countries are inept (because of gov't intervention preventing the admins from acting) or corrupt, and american spammers have bought off people there to get free spamming / hacking.
that's a start.
what was said before about the keystroke logging program - yes, they exist, and yes, someone can log ANYTHING you do.