Steve & everyone, when you get something opening like that, the first thing to do if you are not totally aware of what to do is unplug the back of your computer by disconnecting power. Sure, a hard crash of your machine is usually not good but where it's opening numerous applications, and in this case outbound telnet sessions to something else, it's your quickest prevention of problems...
Then, reboot your computer with the network cable disconnected. You should run a full virus scan on your machine, in DOS with a emergency disk if you know how, before going back online. If you don't know how to do this, at least run a full scan in normal mode. Also watch your system's behaviour closely.
There are other things to do, but they become very diverse by tech skill level and system OS and are really beyond the scope of what I can post here...
Anti-virus can protect from a lot but there are a lot of loopholes as well... I'm still scanning my machine, as I've scanned 575000 files so far (I got a lot of stuff
) but so far, no viruses.
I HIGHLY recommend that everyone run both the latest Anti-virus software (on every computer) AND some kind of firewall, hardware or software - especically if you have a high-speed internet connection AND multiple computers accessing the Internet...
As for the firewall? When I'm view logging my home firewall, sometimes I see as many as 5-10 hacking attempts/vulnerability scans per day (port scans, straight attacks, etc...) - A great source for testing machine vulnerability is to go to
http://grc.com and run "Shields Up" for a shield test and then run a port probe. There are some very good articles on that site regarding securing personal systems and it would be wort anyone with a broadand connection to follow some of the tips for securing a home system.
Ask away if there are any other questions and I'll do what I can for answering them...