There is an e-mail being sent out as coming from pay pal claiming that to update your account with them you need to click on the link below and run the application on your computer. I am also receiving some very good ones from phony yahoo sources telling me that my account will be terminated unless my up to date info is given....I even went to the yahoo security section and e-mailed contacted them through there. My e-mail was re-routed back to the hacker and I received a response that requested both my secret question and answer not to mention every other important piece of information I have. Right before I started to get these e-mails I started improving my security and found two anonymous keyloggers on my system (thankfully they were fairly new additions) and a slew of other things not caught by my firewall and norton professional.

Since this started I have done alot of investigating and educating myself on security for my computer. This is what i have found to be the reccomended and minimum required for my system. I thought I would pass it along to others here. Espeically providers as we often attract the attention of those hacker types that for soem reason love us and our systems

In addition to your anti virus software get
SPY-Bot search and destroy here is a url for finding out more about it and dl'ing it. http://www.safer-networking.org/
this is the one reccomended to me by the guys at alt.compsecurity's usenet group and a friend who does comp security for the army.

*IMPORTANT read the tutorial for this. It is short and to the point but removing some adware that is requred by some programs will make them not work. There is a restore feature though incase you screw up.

in addition the program they reccomend on the initial page of the programs first run for activex and java code. I installed it and that found a whole slew of other things on my system that were not trackable by norton and spy-bot combined.

If there are any comp security types on here that have feed back on this is it would be apppreciated as I am a complete newbie to this type of thing and have noticed alot of bogus software out there that is suposed to do the same things but actually loads more spyware and ad-ware onto your machine.

Since i have done this my machine is running better and better and security scans are coming back with two thumbs up status.