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Help Combat Spam on DALnet - Secure your system.

Many of you have noticed the recent upsurge in spambots and similar problems on DALnet. In conjunction with the Massads team we have discovered that a large number of these are in fact the result of users visiting the website that's being spammed and either downloading trojanised software or becoming infected through one of many Internet Explorer vulnerabilities.

To help reduce the risks of infection, you should take the following precautions :

- Do not visit any site you see being advertised on DALnet. The vast majority will attempt to infect your PC with a bot of some kind which will spam for the same site.

- Either do not use Internet Explorer or make sure you have the latest version and all appropriate security patches. You should also consider disabling ActiveX for untrusted sites and disabling Java & active scripting.
To achieve this in IE6, follow these steps :

-- Open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options.
-- Select the security tab and make sure the Internet Icon is highlighted.
-- Click CUSTOM LEVEL and make the following changes :

--- Set 'Download signed ActiveX controls' to DISABLE
--- Set 'Script ActiveX controls marked safe' to DISABLE
--- Set 'Java Permissions' to DISABLE JAVA
--- Set 'Launching programs and files in an Iframe' to DISABLE
--- Set 'Active Scripting' to DISABLE
--- Set 'Allow paste operations via script' to DISABLE
--- Set 'Scripting of Java Applets' to DISABLE

-- Click OK
-- Click OK again to close the Internet Options dialogue.

-- Note that this procedure will break some sites which rely on ActiveX/scripting/Java. That's the price to be paid for securing IE unfortunately. If you find it too high a price you can try Netscape 6 instead. The modifications above can be reversed by re-opening the security setting dialogue and selecting 'Reset'

- If you have mIRC's URL catcher switched on, SWITCH IT OFF!

- Don't download untrusted files, especially not .exe files from porn sites (no matter what they promise to give you). These are almost always trojanised in some way and frequently contain dialer software which dials a premium rate number (sometimes overseas!) leading to huge telephone costs.

- Keep your anti-virus software up to date and scan regularly for any viruses you may have picked up.

- Consider a personal firewall application such as Tiny Software's Personal Firewall (free from http://www.tinysoftware.com) which will prevent most of these bots communicating from your machine should you become infected.