At 3:42 am this morning, I encountered a strange connection.
I work on three computers, all within my turning distance, at most times (1 desktop, 2 laptops).
While I was on my desktop, I turned to a laptop, only to see a connection established.
I netstat'ed 2 different IP's "81.177.0.219" established connections through two different ports, and "81.177.0.199" had just sent a "SYN" packet.

I ran a "WHOIS" search, and discovered it was with "RIPE".
Used RIPE's WHOIS, and got "Epolis hosting" in Moscow, Russia.
While visiting www.ripe.net, in "Announcements and News", I happen to see "RIPE NCC Regional Meeting Moscow, Russia Registration Now Open"; I don't know if that could explain anything.
I didn't have any browsers, or anything open on the laptop and it's running XP.

I turned off the laptop to kill the connection, and once rebooted, it displayed "The system has recovered from a serious error". I looked at the technical data and it says something about "Mini081705-01.dmp" and "sysdata.xml" (Could someone explain those to me?).
Microsoft's website claimed it was a Device Driver error, yet, I have not changed or installed anything lately.

My desktop's logs, have tons of "Failure Audits" for "unknown user or bad password".
My other laptop is running SuSE, so of course, I've had no problems with that computer.

Can someone give me their two cents on what's going on?!

(As was typing after 3 hours passed, I got those same two connections to my laptop)



--ThePastorGang