Personal Firewall....
 

I know this has been covered relatively recently, but my wife has just installed a personal firewall on her machine and keeps getting a "So-and-so is trying to ping your computer" warning (same id every time).
Now if she hadn't got this firewall we would have been happily oblivious, so my first guess is that this is probably innocuous.
But can someone please tell me what it means :) and also how dangerous can someone pinging the computer be?!

Fitz,

It's probably nothing, what happens is that ppl try to port scan your computer looking for a port that's been opened by a trojan backdoor program. If you're virus clean, you'll be fine. I run a hardware firewall system here at work, and we get them all the time - noneventful. Unless you're being pinged all the time (a dozen or more times a minute) and it's slowing your connection then I wouldn't worry.

Aq

Thanks a lot, Matey, she is now a happy bunny once again :)