I work as a help-desk tech for a large DSL service.

Zonealarm ain't a bad idea, but it can also mess up your connection so you can't browse. So we spend a lot of time telling people to disable it in order to be able to use the DSL service. Not that it doesn't work well most of the time, but it'a a frequent source of problems as well.

The bottom line is that there are millions of very novice users (I hear this a lot: "What's a browser? I lost my internet. All this stuff just came up. You know what it is?"and "This was supposed to be easy!") who are convinced that they have to have high-speed, (saw it on TV), just got their first computer out of the box, don't know the first thing about either computers or Internet protocols. And most of them have their connection set up as always-on with no firewall ("What's that? No I don't think I have one").

I'm not being critical of these people, everyone has to start sometime, but there is no doubt that this provides lots of potential resources for more big DDOS attacks.

Be on your guard at your end, because millions of people aren't.

Surf safe, eh.
Willie-O