Hacked after placing my laptop outside the firewall?

[aljames]

Was wondering if someone with big knowledge could shed light on what happened to me today?

Today I placed my laptop outside the firewall (via the dmz feature of the firewall control panel) so that I could play a game online and as soon as I did this, I got messages popping up, e.g. windows messaging service your registry has corrupt entries" etc... lots of these similar type of pop ups were appearing, one after the other.

I believe I was hacked, or my browser was hacked having read into this a bit more. So what I did was reformat my laptop hard drive from a backup image I'd taken a few weeks ago, then that got my system back up and running perfectly.

So I again tried to place my laptop outside the firewall (again via dmz) and as soon as I did this, exactly the same thing happened???

Could I have some hacker watching me and waiting only to do it repeatedly?

Any thoughts on why this is happening to me?

Many thanks
Al

al@aljames.co.uk

p.s. I'm using a Belkin cable 4 port router and the built in hardware firewall. - is it better to use a software firewall, do they give more protection?

[DaveLegg]

What you described sounded like Messenger Service spam, so check the messenger service it turned off. Also its a good idea to run a software firewall as well as a hardware firewall, as this prevents any malicious programs on your computer from connecting to malicous sites. You should run up to date anti virus and antispyware programs also. For the latter I can suggest both Spybot Search and Destroy and Microsoft Anti-spyware (I run both)

[aljames]

Dave, thanks a lot for your reply.

I have downloaded sygate personal firewall for free and am using this, also I disabled MSN messenger, seems to have doen the trick so far, cheers mate!

I also started using firefox as I heard it's better against hackers.

Al

[DaveLegg]

It's not msn messenger that causes the pop-ups its the messenger service. goto Start -> run and type services.msc. Scroll down to Messenger and make sure it is disabled.

If you are using firefox, I can suggest that you install the adblock extension, it doesn't only stop you having to see adverts, it stops them before they are even downloaded, which can speed up your web-browsing quite a bit on some sites.

Also, if you work on websites a lot, the Wed developer toolbar and html validator come in handy. The html validator also fixes errors in pages on the fly, meaning pages render better in the browser.