I just ended a session early to find some solution to this because keep getting more and more attacks every day. And it's not the same buffer overflow exploit over and over again like it used to be, it's getting diversified. I'm not incredibly worried about my money directly because I guess it's hard to get around rsa security but I still feel I need to do something about it. I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that people would fetch ip's from irc and then try their luck.
I have Kaspersky installed, but I guess a router or even a dedicated firewall would be good.
problem is the firewall in the up to $200 range cap out at 24mbit and I plan on upgrading to 30 soon. My isp offers up to 100 for a reasonable price, so I would very much like my router /firewall to be able to handle that.

Does anyone here even use a dedicated firewall... gawd as I just got about 30 individual attacks while writing this. Imma shut down now and read a book because this is getting irritating.