Don't get too happy now that you've inoculated yourself against the nukers. Several other "denial-of-service" (DoS) attacks similar to WinNuke are making Net users grind their teeth. One called "The Ping of Death" and a cousin, "Teardrop," exploit known holes in TCP/IP implementation, as does the "SYN" attack and its mutant cousin, "Land." The "Smurf" attack targets your Internet protocols directly and causes major net congestion, while the "UDP Flood" uses the widely accepted User Datagram Protocol to flood LANs and PCs with useless data. The good news: Most problems generated by these beasties are experienced by networked PCs who belong to targeted LANs. The home user isn't seeing these very often. Still, forewarned is forearmed; check out the good people at www.cert.org at Carnegie Mellon University for the latest info about these critters and how to shield yourself from them. Also look into Microsoft's security site at www.microsoft.com/security.

More about security: it's absurdly easy for amateur hackers to invade your PC over the net, root around in your files, even reformat your hard drive. Yeesh. Get a quick security check from ShieldsUP! at grc.com/default.htm. You'll need to download a very small program which, after you connect to the Internet, allows the ShieldsUP site to probe your computer for security breaches. Are they trustworthy? I hope so.... Anyway, this site contains tons of information on how to seal security breaches, firewalls, etc. etc., so it's worth a visit. Forewarned is forearmed. If you want to know just how easy legal hacking is, visit the Happy Hackers at www.happyhacker.org and be prepared to be shocked. These guys seem harmless, but there's plenty of people out there who aren't. Another site worth visiting is HackerWhacker, at www.hackerwhacker.com. HackerWhacker scans over 130,000 possible port addresses on your PC for security flaws and examines your Windows NetBIOS configuration. HackerWhacker's first scan is free, but subsequent uses cost $10 per scan (or you can pay $30/month for unlimited scans). Another place for free PC scanning is www.pcflank.com/, and DSL Reports offers broadband scanning at www.dslreports.com/ Others that are useful can be found at www.vulnerabilities.org/ and www.it-sec.de/vulchke.html.

Check Steve Gibson's site for a detailed discussion of a wholesale DOS attack he recently survived. Good reading and lots of ideas for upgrading security: grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm.

Fear-mongering sites are out there, too. Fred Langa discovered one called "How Secure is Your Computer?" at www.robrob8.com/online_security.htm that uses a harmless display of your C:\ drive to scare you into thinking your PC is vulnerable. The site wants you to buy a copy of BlackICE Defender, a well-regarded firewall.