Remote Assistance

A friend of mine had someone help her on her pc via remote access.
This was a few months ago, and she is worried that the helper could still have some sort of access to her pc? Is this possible?
She has Sygate firewall, plus Spybot,Adaware,Panda AV, Spywareblaster and Spywayguard. XP pro.

 

There is setting that might allow constant invasion from Remote.

It depends on what software/application was used for the remote control and how it was set.

 

I think there has to be an exception on your firewall to allow remote assisance, she can shut down her remote assisants and close the exception on her firewall.

 

But most of them, like VNC have an easily visible 'server' program which needs to be running to allow remote access... Plus they are usually a bit of a bandwidth hog...

Its worth :
going through the Add/Remove Programs on her PC to identify if any of these are installed - either remove or reconfigure them (stop it automatically loading etc)
doing as Halo said and deactivating the Windows Remote Desktop option
And going through the firewall exception list to remove any suspect entries which are allowed access through.

Should be sufficient... and definitely worth doing immediately - remote access to a PC is a dangerous thing!

 

Some small remote control programs like VNC can install the server as a running Service in Windows. As a result they even "Hog" less, and hard to be detected by inexperience user.

The best thing is to help the person to download two programs (StartUp and Process Explorer) instructions here:
http://www.ezlan.net/infestation#process

It is very simple to download and Run these two (they are stand alone files no installation needed).

If the person can take a screen shot, or just read over the phone the StartUp and the Running processes it is very easy to find out whether some thing "Bad" is running.