Stopping hackers and scanners?

Is it possible to stop hackers and scanners from finding you while doing a 'search and destroy mission?' If you have a presence on the net through either a DSL or Cable connection, you are going to get hacked. one of the only ways to really stop this crap and protect your data is to run a router. I am not going to go into the hundreds of ways to protect yourself, I am just going to go over a couple of ways I found which work best. If you want to chat about this or anything associated with "self preservation", click on the yahoo messenger link at the top of the left frame or e-mail me. The only people I know who were not slammed the last round of malicious code (i.e., the Blaster Worm) were the ones who were running a router. I even had one associate who was using a dialup and they said Blaster got them and their NT4 box. One thing is clear, no one I knowdon't know one person that could afford to waste the time to reformat and reinstall everything. Of the hundreds of people I work with or support, only 5 are running routers between their machines and their cable / DSL modems. So, for the few who are running routers and want to keep your machines online, I have found several sites to assist us in our quest to keep others out of our system. LinkLogger is an application which assists you in determining who is out there, and trying to hack in. This app is free for 30 days so it is a good practice application to show you 'what to do to protect yourself' and 'what to do with what you find'. Even if you want to keep it, it's only 20 bucks. Most people waste that amount on computer games they never play. I am not one, I don't have time to play games anyway. VisualZone 5.7 This is a free application which works with Zone Alarm and you can even get a free version of that too! Shoot, if you don't have Zone Alarm, you can get a free version of that too. VisualZone does for ZoneAlarm and ZoneAlarm Pro what VisualICE does for BlackICE. Although truly one of the best software firewalls around, ZoneAlarm does an even worse job of gathering and displaying information about attacks than BlackICE. With VisualZone, the information that is collected during the intrusion is complemented by all the information ZoneAlarm missed. And ZoneAlarm misses a lot! VisualICE Report Utility 4.7 The VisualICE Report Utility is an intrusion analysis tool, purpose built to be used with BlackICE Defender from Network ICE, without doubt one of the best intrusion detection systems around. But however great a product, there is always room for improvement. BlackICE does an absolute bang-up job of detecting intrusions and keeping hackers out. That's what it was built for and that's what it does, period. Yes, period! Because that's ALL it does. So what do you do if you would like to know more about what the hacker tried to do? Or who he is? Or where he's from? Or how to report him to the proper authorities? Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) Microsoft has created a tool to help you. The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA), analyzes Windows systems for common security misconfigurations. Version 1.0 of MBSA includes a graphical and command line interface that can perform local or remote scans of Windows systems. MBSA runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems and will scan for missing hotfixes and vulnerabilities in the following products: Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 and 5.0, SQL Server 7.0 and 2000, Internet Explorer (IE) 5.01 and later, and Office 2000 and XP.