[nonhuman]

For some reason, the sharing pref pane is telling me that the Firewall settings are unavailable because there is other firewall software running on my computer. I did not install any other firewall software, and last time I tried changing the setting (admittedly a while ago) it worked fine. Ordinarily, this would not be a major concern, but the reason I was poking around at the firewall settings was that, according to gkrellm, I was pulling a lot of data down (steady around 50 K/sec) from one of my NICs, significantly more than I could account for based on my own usage. I closed all my open apps, but that didn't change anything. Checking top, I discovered that there was an active smbd process as well as a nmbd process. I don't know much about smb, but I'm asuming it works something like telnet, ssh, imap, &c, in that if there is a process running that means there is a connection open, and yet 'w' didn't report anyone but myself being logged in. Shutting down Windows File Sharing took care of that, and my computer is now as secure as I can get it without actually being able to access the Firewall.

Does anyone have an explanation for the massive data transmission other than someone accessing my computer, apparently through smb? Does anyone know how I can regain control of my firewall or at least what it is that's preventing me from getting at it now?

[Rainy Day]

If someone did hack into your system, one of the first things they'd do (besides try to cover their tracks) is disable any software which might thwart their efforts (such as firewall software). If you're not running a Samba server, you'd have to ask yourself how those processes got going on your system? Someone started them. If you didn't, then someone else did.

If you've been hacked, anything less that a clean system install may not get the intruder out of your system. You can't trust anything on your box, if it's been hacked, because hackers often replace standard system software with their own trojan horse versions (which look and feel right, but return bogus results designed to protect the hacker from detection).

Anything short of a hardware firewall isn't, in my opinion, real security. Get yourself something like the BroadGuard router for industrial strength protection.