Combatting security intrusive programs

[no2pencil]

The other day I got a rather interesting phone call. This woman calls into my repair shop & immediately informs me that she has no ability to pay me for my time other than to post some hand written fliers in her apartment building, but she's in a really difficult situation & potentially dangers situation. So I agree to listen & help her out the best I can with any free advice.

Her situation is that she feels she's being stalked online. This conclusion was reached by a couple of trial & error items on her end. What she would do is spend a day or two doing nothing but doing Google searches for specific items, & these were things she would normally not look for. We'll use a vacation to Tokyo Japan for example. The next day someone in real life would mention "So, looking to go to Tokyo huh?". That's all the more personal detail she gave me, & really all the more that I needed to know. So here is really what the question boils down to :

1.) Say someone installed a keylogger onto her computer, is there anything to defeat it?

My suggestions to her :

Look at the back of the computer, & make sure that there is nothing plugged in between the keyboard & the computer. Next, during a long time frame that she isn't going to use the computer, open notepad, & place an object onto the keyboard in order to flood the buffer by typing a constant letter.

2.) Say someone installed a piece of RDP software onto her computer, is there a way to defeat it?

My suggestion to her :

Unplug her DSL modem (she is in fact using DSL, I verified this) on a weekend or a holiday. It's my knowledge that this is when ISP companies will cycle their DHCP addresses & she'll land a new IP address at the next boot of her DSL modem. With a new IP she maybe able to dodge any future login attempts, assuming that the software is requiring the outside intruder to access her system via IP address.

I also suggested that she call her ISP to look for any traffic to a non-ip based service such as noisp.com or other similar websites.

The obvious solution would be to get the system & look over the running processes, & also format her system with a fresh install of the Operating System (which I verified is Windows XP). However like I said, she's unable to do so at the current time.

Just curious what pieces of defensive software, firewall, or other anyone else might recommend, or suggest.

[townsbg]

Those are good suggestions for anyone. I know that zone alarm will ask you if you want to allow a program to connect to the internet and even give you the ability to kill processes. I'm sure that other outgoing firewalls will allow you to do the same thing. However outbound filtering is really no good if you allow everything to go through without questioning it. Also I wonder if this is perhaps something that a virus or spyware scanner will pick up. For now thats all I can think of.