[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

First off, it's likely a dynamic IP, which means it might belong to a spambot one day and your cousin the next.

Well, if it's a dial-up account. For a broadband account, the IP may be dynamic, but likely won't change once allocated. My cable modem account IP hasn't changed since I got it. My previous DSL account didn't either.

Second off, it sets a bad precedent for the ISP; there are roughly 4 billion IP addresses, many changing hands regularly (see above reason).

And I think ISPs want a bit more proof there's a bad guy out there.

Steve (Spinrite) Gibson went on a while back about a DDOS attack on his server, and the fun he had getting his host to block the offending traffic.

He wound up tracking the attack back to a source, and popped up in an IRC channel where the kid who had launched it hung out. Turned out it was a case of mistaken identity, and the script kiddie had launched the attack from his botnet under the impression Gibson had said something he didn't actually say.

At any rate, you must have a really powerful antenna if a machine on the mainland is making it all the way to your wifi.

I suspect Geoff is seeing access attempts on his IP address that have nothing to do with wifi. You can get that sort of nonsense, and it doesn't matter how you're connected: merely that you are visible. I got grim amusement a few years ago when I connected my laptop in a hotel room, and watched something try to contact the VNC server instance I had running. That's what I have a firewall for, so I blocked the attempt, thumbed my nose and shook my head.

At home, there's a wireless router with the firewall enabled, and desktop and laptop both have software firewalls. Two, in fact: I left Windows firewall up since it hasn't conflicted with anything, and have Sygate Personal Firewall in addition. The file system is pretty well locked down, so even if someone gets past the WPA2 in the router, they aren't likely to get anywhere else.
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Dennis