"first thing i don't understand right... On the Norton Tracer Map, it highlighted South Nevada and placed up Sunnyville - yet Sunnyville is literally on the otherside of the states in Virgina (thats weird on its own)"
Herein lies a problem with the Norton service IMHO. All it can ever do is give you a very very approximate
guess of where the IP address of the attacker is located. It is impossible (as in - technically impossible) to geographically pin-point someone on their IP address to anything more meaningful than their local phone exchange (and as you know they service very large areas).
Which is why the Norton thing bugs me a little because all they are doing is a trace-route back to the source and a reverse-DNS lookup on the IPs they get and then trying to figure out location based on the results (a router might come back as being called "gateway-sf-cali.isp.net" for example.
The reason they could never trace an IP geographically is because that information isn't located anywhere! Your phone line doesn't have lattitude and longtitude associated with it
Your ISP knows your address (usually, for billing purposes) and they know when you've logged-in because they monitor it - but they don't then broadcast out the two sets of information. Norton is very misleading
"Secondly if someone attacks my AOL account, they have to know my router IP to be able to actually reach my system - because my account is a standard international package"
Nah, they don't need to know your IP, just the range it's sat on. Think about it like this:
for ip=1 to 255
portscan x1.x2.x3.ip
next ip
voila - you've just scanned 255 potential hosts. Do the same for variables x1,x2 and x3 and you can literally scan every single possibile public IP address in the world.
That is all they've done - started off scanning a range and found something they liked the look of so dug a bit deeper. If it was a "personal" attack I would expect to see much more than SubSeven knocking on your firewalls door! (trust me, it doesn't take much to bring down Norton, but 99.9% of the time it's fine for detering the script kiddies which I why I use it too).
"so i'm confused how can they actually reach my system when the first IP range they have is the Home AOL ... then it'd hit the Router ... so then they'd need a second range for my Local AOL - then finally they can get on."
They don't need to know ANY of the hops inbetween - they only need the final destination IP address. Sad but true!
If you think about it - your system might mask your real (local) IP address, BUT it has to present something to the outside world - something
valid that the Internet can use in order to send those packets of data your way. Otherwise you'd never be able to visit a web site, post here, etc. All an attacker needs to do is hit lucky while scanning the valid range you are part of and he'll soon enough find your host - this part is unavoidable due to the way networks function. What you can do (and what Norton does) is limit how far INSIDE he can get. He might reach your box but Norton will hide anything important from him and stop anything he might try to send at you from doing damage. That is the whole function of a firewall - it's not to make you "invisible", it's to stop people giving you grief
(and to hide your home network perhaps, local printers, that kind of thing).
"i know SubSeven isn't exactly the best software to use (which begs the question why try) - but it seems like alot of trouble to go though just to hit a single computer."
No trouble at all - fire it up, whack in a random IP range (or a range you've acquired from someones email address and a quick DNS look-up) and let it rip. They might have been bored, looking to inflict some damage for fun, who knows. SubSeven does at least demonstrate they weren't particularly bothered about the results they got (i.e. this was no Pro hack). More like a joyride.
"but its worrying that i get so many warnings per hour"
I'd be more worried that you DIDN'T get any warnings - that means Norton has been disabled somehow
It does me good to know that my little Norton globe will start flashing up a couple of times a day, it reassures me it's still working. If it sat there and did nothing ever I'd be VERY worried. That's just the state of the Internet today.
Cheers,
Rich
"Gentlemen, we are about to short-circuit the Universe!"
DB Team / Atari ST / DarkForge / Retro Gaming