For the past couple of days and while looking at AB pages Avast antivirus keeps popping up with a warning of a DCOM exploit at 217.137.177.218.135/tcp.
I have Googled this and found several explanations as well as a couple of sites which claim to cure it ( which of course I avoid like the plague).
I could just tick the box in Avast not to remind me again but I would value your opinions whether any action is required.
I am running Vista Business and all updates have been applied and virus scans and Malwarebytes finds nothing amiss
AB had(has?) a problem where some virus checkers were reporting it as a malicious site. We are assured by the ED that Answerbank is a prefectly safe site and so the "virus" message can be ignored.
shouldn't be a major problem, it's somebody trying to exploit your computer from outside rather than a problem on your actual computer and your anti-virus is doing it's job and stopping them.
You can disable the local DCOM service on your computer for added protection, it's very rare that any one uses the DCOM service on a home computer so it shouldn't effect anything else.
Thanks to you both for the answers.
I am using Comodo firewall and have been doing for a couple of years with no problems. However I remember about a week ago I got a reminder to update it. I have just checked the settings and the level was set at it's lowest value and I have now moved that to "Safe Mode". I also used your link Chuck and disabled DCOM so hopefully everything is now safe. I put this PC together a year ago and since then haven't even received one spam e-mail or virus so wanted to make sure I kept it clean.
Once again many thanks for the input.