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Sounds like the sys admins at the target site left some screen doors open. I'm a recovering computer luddite, and even I know that there are programs that can monitor installed programs and control their network activity. I run ZoneAlarm on my Win 98 machine at home. I know it just improves my illusion of security, but it did alert my to the fact that my ISP was regularly sending me PCAnywhere pings. It also tells me that it controls network access of installed programs although I don't fully believe that. The fact that I am aware of these things tells me that security was pretty lax at the targets.

As an aside, I wish I had skipped reading most of what what I've read about Linux. After weenying around for about a year, I finally bought Redhat Linux. What a snap it's been to install and use.

Sounds like the sys admins at the target site left some screen doors open.

It was probably an unpatched version of IIS. Remember the CodeRed worm? All you would have to do is look at your own webserver log to get a list of servers that had been compromised. After that, it would have been a trival exercise.

Or you, could have modified a copy of the worm to target a specific IP address range. Your probes would have been lost among all the other unwitting participants.

I run ZoneAlarm on my Win 98 machine at home. I know it just improves my illusion of security, but it did alert my to the fact that my ISP was regularly sending me PCAnywhere pings.

Are you using dialup or cablemodem/DSL? If it is the latter, invest about $80 in a dedicated firewall/router from someone like Linksys. I have Win2K, WinXP and Linux systems, but all of them are behind a firewall.