Just want to confirm the need for a firewall. I was working recently on a mobile phone/internet development project, with one guy fully occupied on security testing. Even so, within a few hours of opening up to the real internet, someone had tried to hack in and set up a WAREZ site on the server. On my own machine, I use Zonealarm, and it often detects attempted hacking within a minute or two of dialling up. Apparently there are people who continuously run programs which try to 'ping' all possible numbers within a domain or subdomain. Once they get a reply, it is known to be a valid address and can be attacked in many ways. At the very least, they will try to seach the hard disk for useful items like credit card numbers.