Protect your computer from spammers

You can opt to make your computer invisible to pings from the Internet, a common tactic of spammers who are looking for available machines to turn into spam relay stations.

Hide your PC or Mac from this parasitic spamming strategy and switch to Ninja mode.

On both Macs and PCs it is disabled by default. Here’s how you can turn this protection mechanism on:

Apple Mac OS X

On Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger:

1. Go to System Preferences > Sharing
2. Click the Firewall button
3. Click Advanced
4. Check Enable Stealth Mode

On Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard:

1. Go to System Preferences > Security
2. Click the Firewall button
3. Click Advanced
4. Check Enable Stealth Mode
5. For additional protection you can also turn on the firewall (I recommend the: Set access for specific services and applications option.)

Windows PCs

On Windows XP:

1. Go to Control Panel > Windows Firewall
2. Click the Advanced tab
3. Next to ICMP click Settings
4. Uncheck the first option “Allow incoming echo request”

On Windows Vista:

You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps.

To find ICMP and logging settings, open Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.

1. Click to open Administrative Tools.* If you are prompted for an
   administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide
   confirmation.
2. Double-click Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.

To change logging settings:

1. Under Public Profile, click Windows Firewall Properties.
2. Click the tab for the profile that you want to change.
3. Under Logging, click Customize.
4. In the dialog box that appears, change the settings you want to
   change, and then click OK.

You can specify ICMP settings by creating inbound or outbound rules using
the ICMPv4 or ICMPv6 protocol.

This will set both systems to drop any incoming ping request and effectively hide your computer from this type of spamming strategy.