"Remote Procedure Call terminated" problem

[Doobrey]

Gawd, I`ve only just got back from sorting out a friends system that got infected with Bugbear.
 The silly moo had a firewall and anitvirus installed, but she hadn`t updated them since they were installed last November  :-o

 I`ve just checked my firewall logs, and in the last 12 hrs, 75% of attempted connections are for the RPC port 135...Times like this makes me glad that I refuse to upgrade from Win98... ;-)

And Microsoft want us to believe in their "Trustworthy Computing Initiative"...
 However many $$ they spent on those couple of months of bugfixing and security checking last year, it wasn`t enough..

[Doobrey]

Phew..I think I managed to lock down my parents XP box just in time today.
 Luckily I came equipped with an upto date virus checker and firewall on a flash disk, so I didn`t have to risk connecting to the net!
 
 The thing that really bugs me (no pun intended) is how insecure a standard XP Home edition machine is.
 My parents are your average PC newies, they can just about manage to send an email and browse Ebay..how the hell do MS expect people like this to know howto lock down a system?
 Why should these services allow incoming connections with no easy way to disable them?

To make my day even better, I thought I`d better check windows update..
 Yup, they hadn`t even run that in the 2 months they`ve had the PC. And in that 2 months..32Mb of updates waiting for them to download..over a poxy 56k dialup line !!
 I started downloading, Windows Update said something in the region of 6 1/2 hours to download..so I left it running. I came back later to check, and the bloody ISP had cut the connection because of a 2 hour dial up limit..  :-x
 Tried again, and Windows Update said it needed to start from the beginning again !!! ...I gave up, and gonna get a mate to burn them to CD for me!


..Nope, didn`t work..still mad as hell as MS and their usual crappy standards.
 I told my parents to buy a Mac, but did they listen...?
 Anyway, just checked the firewall logs again, and it`s about 99% now of port 135 probes at a rate of about 2 attempts a minute ( of which about 50% are coming from my ISP`s netblock.)