[boomclart]

Does anyone know how I can go about doing some penetration testing on my machine... is there a service out there that I can stick my IP address in and give it the go ahead to do its best and the receive the results afterwards?

Or do I have to do it manually myself from another box? If so what apps/tools would be needed.

[leroys1000]

Secuity tests.

[lunarlander]

http://www.qualys.com/index.php

[lotuseclat79]

Before you begin, you should try to scan your computer ports with nmap - the scanner of choice for both IT pros and miscreants looking for vulnerable machines to infect.

There are 65,536 ports on every computer (0-65,535). If you can have all of your ports closed (blocked) and you use a good enough firewall to drop all of the unsolicited traffic then you will only receive requested traffic back to your computer (like web browser requests when you visit a web site). Use common sense here, and don't surf on the wild side, and you should then be ok.

You can download nmap from here and try it on your computer - i.e. it will be driven from the download location directed toward your computer's ip address and give a report.

-- Tom

[TechOutsider]

You can try the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. At least it won't load malicious programs onto your computer based on the weaknesses it finds.