****/Advertisements through Messenger Service??

I'm running WinXPPro.

Something happened tonight and I wonder if this has happened to anyone else: I came back from being AFK for a while, and I'd left my DSL connection connected in my absence. When I returned, a Messenger Service app popup had appeared from "WET LANA ", with a little **** message and 800-number to call. Needless to say I was a tad freaked, since I didn't have MSN messenger logged on, etc, etc. I'm assuming they randomly pinged my IP address.

2 questions:

1) Has anyone seen/heard of this before, i.e., is this some new, creative attempt at advertising by frustrated spammers, etc.

2) Will disabling Messenger Service keep this from happening again? If yes, will I lose any desired functionality if I disable it?

If you want the full text of this from my event log, I can email it to you. It was just a little too tawdry to post here in its raw form (so to speak).
-Clinton

 

Are you sure that it was a Messenger window rather than a browser window in disguise?

 

Nope, it was definitely a messenger window. I checked my event report to be sure, and it used the messenger service, addressing to my IP#.

 

Strange indeed and I cannot explain it I'm afraid.

 

Do a search on "wet lana" at http://groups.google.com and you will see other complaints, for example:

From: James Wendt (jameswendt@hotmail.com)
Subject: WET-LANA Windows Messenger Pop Up
Newsgroups: alt.computers.security, alt.current-events.net-abuse, alt.current-events.net-abuse.spam,
comp.os.ms-windows.nt.admin.security, comp.security.misc
Date: 2002-08-29 06:44:22 PST


I received this message on all of my servers with external cable modem IP addresses at 8:40:35 PM on August 26th, 2002.

I expect that others may have been struck by the same thing. (snip)

 

GOt it. Thanks for the info!

 

You're welcome