I can feel your pain on this one, when I first downloaded zone alarm, I had it configured for the highest settings possible and was getting people trying to connect to port 80, 21, 139 ect. First of all, if your firewall is allerting you, its doing the job. From what I understand people all over the internet send you little packets of information all the time, its just part of the package for being online. Ive heard that dsl and cable are worse. Ive tracked some of the port scanners that I have had hit me and found them to be korean websites, Russian, even had one in france. I came on here as well and asked the same questions, and found that you dont have anything to worry about as long as its not the same ip address doing repeated hits. I have windows xp firewall setup with a log, and zone alarm as well set for loging "hits". I periodically will review them and check to see if there are any ip's that are repeadilly trying to gain access to my system. I have yet to find one, but if I did, you better believe an email to that persons isp is going to take place (basically, a repeated ip trying to connect to your system could mean that someone is trying to gain access to your comp). Now..port scans, there is software out there that is called a port sniffer. Matter of fact, there is alot of them, what this software does is scan a range of ip's to find what ports are open. Now, what the heck is a port? There are two different types, hardware ports and software ports. Hardware ports are the plugs on the back of your computer like usb, serial, printer port, ect. Software ports are little..."doors" that different things. For example, when you open Internet explorer and connect to the net, port 80 gets opened. Port 21, I believe is assighned to telnet. So..a port sniffer is like someone on the other side checking to see wich " doors" are open. Now a firewall will keep all the ports basically locked, or pulls a curtain over all the doors to make sure no one sees them. That way when the person trys to sniff your ports (I know sounds vulgar doesnt it), he sees the curtain and moves on.

*Takes a deep breath*

If you want to go to a site to check how secure your system is...go to

Shields up
https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

This site will try to optain your ip address, then try to connect to your system to see what type of information is available. The cool thing is they post the results back to you. They also have a port sniffer button that you can click on. I beleive its "check my ports" or something like that. This is cool because it actually will tell you how well your firewall is working.

Well...I hope all this information helps you out.

If you think this topic has alot of info....try researching anonymous proxies. Ive been reading for about 3 weeks on it, and just now starting to put the puzzle pieces together.

The_Adairs