Why did comp just ping other computers randomly?

[Giscardo]

I was playing starcraft and my I had three games in a row get laggy so I Alt+Tab out of SC to check to see if maybe there was some crazy activity on Kazaa. But to my utter surprise when i get to the desktop the first open app was 3 command line windows (i'm running w2k), and a fourth popped up right in front of me and all these command line windows were running instances of the ping program. Um I am kinda stupid for not saving the IP addresses as I was in the middle of a Broodwar game, I am not sure if all four windows were trying to ping the same address or not either.

The lag in my Broodwar game disappeared when i closed these windows, I kept alt-tabbing for the remainder of my game to check to see if any more ping windows had come up, but it didn't happen again. I ran a housecall.antivirus.com on my comp, which found nothing, and then installed ZoneAlarm, so I think I should be safe for now.

But what I would like to know is what could have caused these pings to come up? Was someone trying to use my computer in some sort of distributed attack? If so how did they get access to my comp and will zonealarm prevent it from happening again? Anything else I should know? Am I asking the right questions...????

 

[chsh1ca]

On the surface, I'd bet you have a trojan. You're better off installing a real AV scanner on a permanent basis. Give Norton a shot, I use corporate edition here to manage network clients, but from everything I've heard the home version is acceptable. Once you've installed it, try running a scan and see if there was something that Trend Micro's House Call missed.

Alternately, it's possible that your link to Starcraft was toyed with to run some kind of batch script to do this by a friend or something. Check out the link you used to run it and see if it is what it should be.

Personally, on the surface, I'd favour the Trojan answer.

 

[mboy]

Originally posted by: chsh1ca
On the surface, I'd bet you have a trojan. You're better off installing a real AV scanner on a permanent basis. Give Norton a shot, I use corporate edition here to manage network clients, but from everything I've heard the home version is acceptable. Once you've installed it, try running a scan and see if there was something that Trend Micro's House Call missed.

Alternately, it's possible that your link to Starcraft was toyed with to run some kind of batch script to do this by a friend or something. Check out the link you used to run it and see if it is what it should be.

Personally, on the surface, I'd favour the Trojan answer.

See if it happens when u arent gaming. Maybe the game is trying to ping servers on it's own to check latencey or whatever for some reason.