Infected In Record Time (8/18/04)

[weremermaid]

...researchers at the Internet Storm Center claim that "an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware."

...After all, this is a pristine Wintel PC, fresh out of the box, connected to the Internet and then left to do nothing-- no surfing to dubious porn sites, no running illicit peer-to-peer software, no other just-asking-for-it sort of behavior. Nothing. Could it really be compromised in twenty minutes, just by sitting there?

According to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the answer is a big fat "Yuh-huh." Perhaps skeptical of the twenty-minute infection claim, the school decided to try the experiment for itself; it put two unpatched Windows systems on the 'net, and voilà-- "both were compromised within 20 minutes." So apparently this is a real metric and not just some sensationalistic scare tactic.

Read more here

Another reason to help people switch to Mac.

[Edited on 8-20-2004 by weremermaid]

[Macmon]

When I bought my Toshiba satellite with windows XP home edition last year, PRIOR to my ibook conversion.

I was using a dial up and just surfed the net for 5 mins. Voila!!!! I got infected. So I had to reformat the hard drive.

So 20 minutes is already LONGGGGG.

[berniej]

Actually, that is one of the things I have to live with daily with my 200 windows workstations and a dozen windows servers. A lot of my users already accepts the answer of "windows eh!" whenever they complain of virus infections and other weird stuff that happens to their machines.

What's worse is that my LAN is connected to other companies within our corporate LAN, making it more vulnerable because I have no direct control over the machines connected to the whole network infrastructure that comprises of around 7,000 PCs and servers.

One of the skills I have to develop with this is how to just learn to simply "grin and bear it".

BTW, one exasperated VP of our company even told me to start advocating Mac use in our company (he is one of my Mac converts and he bought an iBook for his daughter) to help minimize or even eliminate the malware threat that hangs over each windows machine.

[Arel]

Great "evangelizing" work, Bernie! Keep it up. :beer:

Originally posted by berniej
BTW, one exasperated VP of our company even told me to start advocating Mac use in our company (he is one of my Mac converts and he bought an iBook for his daughter) to help minimize or even eliminate the malware threat that hangs over each windows machine.

[jerrytieng]

Question, if 95% of the world's desktops run on Mac OS and Steve Jobs is in Bill Gate's shoes

[weremermaid]

I rather liked the idea in that article, of fastforward a few years and people buying a wintel box essentially melt the moment they pay for one.

"...I'mmm mmeeelllltingggggg!!!"

Tee hee hee!

C