Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

glassmen07

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 23, 2008
72
0
First- I'm sorry if this is in the wrong section

Anyways, I keep getting this pop up from my Norton and I didn't know what to make of it. I live on campus at my school and I use their internet and I wondered what roll that plays. here is a picture

Norton.png
 
First- I'm sorry if this is in the wrong section

Anyways, I keep getting this pop up from my Norton and I didn't know what to make of it. I live on campus at my school and I use their internet and I wondered what roll that plays. here is a picture

Norton.png

as it says on the error message. Someone is trying to portscan your computer, attempting to break in.

A portscan is when the person sends a series of messages to a computer, to find out which ports are doing out, in order to find a weak spot for the person to hack into.
 
You need to uninstall Norton. Who sold you that? Shame on them. I hate to see that product installed on any computer, let alone a Mac.

If the school requires you to have an Antivirus program installed to protect the Windows users on campus, then get ClamXAV it's good and it's free and it's for OS X.

Norton will only hog your system resources and slow you down ultimately. There's just no need for it on the Mac.
 
You need to uninstall Norton. Who sold you that? Shame on them. I hate to see that product installed on any computer, let alone a Mac.

If the school requires you to have an Antivirus program installed to protect the Windows users on campus, then get ClamXAV it's good and it's free and it's for OS X.

Norton will only hog your system resources and slow you down ultimately. There's just no need for it on the Mac.

Mmm its comments like that, which breed complatency. Norton does its job (I agree that its a resource hog, but it does work). It identified a potential threat to the OP.

People who belive macs are invenerable to security risks are mad (imho). While I do not run a seperate firewall, I do take measures to harden my system. Not everyone has the aptitude or inclination to do this so they rely on packages such as Norton.

Explaining the port scan was far better advice. Many users get port scanned and dont realise. My sandbox was penatrated the other day within hours of me deliberately opening vnc server to the world.

The best advice is to be cautious - read up on how to take the basic steps to secure your mac (file, web sharing off, securing ssh, not running apps as root etc).

I have ClamXAV and its good when I need it. Clam doesnt automatically provide scanning btw - it needs to be actioned manually. At least Norton hangs around keeping an eye out for nasty's.
 
Well I'm not too familiar with this stuff so thank you very much for the help :)

As for Norton, I had it put on last year and I can't remember why. I forget I have it on usually.

I have my iTunes library sharing on. Could someone from my dorm trying to listen to that maybe setting it off? If not, what else could it be?

*bump* :)
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.