Strange pictures on desktop sent from another computer

[str8chevygirl]

My father has some pictures that showed up on his destop one night while he was out of town. He lives alone so no one has physical access to his computer. It is a home photo of some chic in a wedding gown and he has no idea how they got there. It says in the properties of the file that it was sent from another computer. He has had a psycho ex girlfriend that has messed with his emails and other stuff from a distance. Is there any way for me to be able to find out who or what sent these to his desktop?? Thanks in advance!! Tela

[Yogesh]

Please note:
Thread moved from Introduce Yourself to Networking & Security.

Title edited suitably. Always give proper title that best describes your thread.

[Spyrus]

I dont know if it is possible to check from where and who sent files to one's desktop but you can do 1 thing, you can enable windows firewall and set password to the windows user account (if it is not there). This is to get secured from any crappy intruder.

[Fleming]

First disconnect your PC from internet and do a complete scan of your system for viruses, and set your firewall permissions to block the remote access.

Disable Remote Connections to Computer

Firstly, if you are not using Remote Desktop, go ahead and disable it. If you want to learn more about Remote Desktop, read my post on some features of Remote Desktop. To disable remote desktop, right-click on My Computer and choose Properties. Now click on the Remote tab.

And uncheck Allow users to connect remotely to this computer. Now people cannot connect to your Windows XP machine using the remote desktop protocol. Of course there are other protocols a hacker can use, such as Telnet or FTP, so you should make sure those are not enabled.

Turn on Windows Firewall to Block Incoming Connections

You also want to make sure that you either have Windows Firewall turned on or that you have another third party firewall program installed. The Windows XP firewall will only block incoming connections to your computer, unlike Vista, which can filter both incoming and outgoing traffic.

You can turn on the firewall by going to Start, Control Panel and clicking on Windows Firewall. Make sure that the On radio button is selected. Note that there is also an option called Don’t allow exceptions.

This option is very useful when you are at the airport or some place where you have to connect to a random unsecured wireless network. It will block all incoming connections, meaning you won’t be able to use programs like Yahoo Messenger or GTalk, but you can browse the Internet. When you are back to a secure trusted connection, just uncheck the box.

Also, on the Exceptions tab, make sure that you do not have any unnecessary ports that are being unblocked. You’ll have a list of programs and that’s fine, but if you have lots of open ports, they can be used for attacks on your computer.

Disable Windows Services for Remote Access

Finally, you can disable several services in Windows that will help reduce the “surface area” of an attack to your PC. By default, Windows starts a couple of services that do not really need to be on at all.

For example, there is a service called Remote Registry that is on by default, which allows the registry to be accessed via a remote computer. You can turn off these services by going to Start, Run and typing in services.msc. Scroll down to Remote Registry and right-click on it and choose Stop.

Then right-click again and choose Properties. In the Startup Type combo box, change the value to Disabled.

You also want to do this for the Telnet service as it allows users to connect to the computer using Telnet. That’s it!

So those are some of the easy and common way to help protect your computer from being accessed remotely without your permission! Enjoy!

[Milton.J]

But I wonder how it is that someone logs in to your computer, sends files to your computer and you are not aware at all You should follow all above procedures and get yourself secured. That should ensure your security from any such creepers unless they use some expert hacking tools.