About a week or so ago my Avast! started telling me it’s blocking DCOM exploits, now they seem to be happening atleast 2-3 times a day it doesn’t seem to be affecting my internet or PC but iv’e done some research already and from what iv’e heard it mean’s someone is trying to hack you by sending packets or something to your PC through your network, (I may not be correct there.) i have Avast! mcaffe and Malewarebytes (latest versions) and none of them are picking up any infected files/registry keys, so i’m not sure what to say about this, but i’m worried about my personal information as well as my online passwords to sites i go on, can anyone help me resolve this?
Also iv’e heard turning off DCOM will solve the problem, is this safe to do?
EDIT:
Malewarebytes also blocked it it said the process was svhost.exe, (might of been svchost but i’m sure it was svhost) and the port is 45556? what’s going on now?
DCOM Attacks are speculative, external to your system, not targeted and tries to exploit a vulnerability in out of date OS, if your OS is up to date then you aren’t vulnerable to the exploit. That doesn’t stop them (usually someone from the same ISP with an infected computer) trying to see if it can infect others.
Your firewall should be the first line of defence in this, but avast also monitors common attack ports using the Network Shield, ideally the firewall should block it and avast wouldn’t know about it, but for whatever reason avast is first in line over your firewall.
What is your firewall ?
If the firewall is McAfee, do you also have the McAfee anti-virus installed ?
Is so that isn’t advisable - Having two resident anti-virus scanners installed is one too many and not recommended as rather than provide twice the protection it can cause conflicts that could leave you more vulnerable.
I don’t think my default firewall was ever enabled, when i got my PC i’m pretty sure it wasn’t turned on and the last time i tryed to turn it on it wouldn’t let me, i can’t remember exactly what it said, also my PC is outdated i never bothered to do the update, could that be causing the problem? if so, ill update after Malewarebytes finish’s another full scan.
EDIT: I also forgot to add this, i have trouble installing free firewall’s, the last one i tryed
was PCTools firewall 7 plus, i think that’s what it’s called, and it caused my PC to be a LOT slower so i uninstalled it, can you recommend any good firewall’s?
Well the ‘default’ firewall when you get your PC is generally the windows firewall and that should be on by default unless you have installed a 3rd party firewall.
You don’t say what your OS is, if windows 7 then earlier versions of PCTools firewall ‘may’ have had a problem, but the latest version should be OK. I don’t have a lot of personal experience with different firewalls as I have had Agnitum’s Outpost Firewall Pro (paid option) for a great many years.
Many forum users are using these:
PCTools Firewall Plus. This is a relatively user friendly firewall, however, for a time there were problems with this firewall and avast 6.x auto updates (blocked) and there didn’t seem to be a way to resolve this other than to uninstall the firewall. There has been a new version of PCTools Firewall Plus released, but I don’t know if that resolved this issue as I don’t use it.
Online Armor for the most parts fine for most users.
Outpost Free Suite 7, which should still provide good protection, http://free.agnitum.com/. Whilst this is a suite, when you install it, it detects avast and asks if you have it installed, answering Yes will mean it doesn’t install the antivirus, anti-spyware and web control modules to maintain compatibility.
You didn’t answer the question about McAfee directly, but given your answer about having McAfee anti-virus, if it were the suite version with firewall and AV (this could have a direct impact on other firewalls) ?
Then you have to get rid of one of your firewalls (before installing the second), as two firewalls are more likely to cause conflict. Generally the same applies to not having two resident anti-virus applications installed, you shouldn’t have two 3rd party firewalls installed.
That is like two dogs fighting over one bone and could well have been the problem with PC Tools Firewall if you also had McAfee installed, no wonder it was slow.