Comment by ralferoo

Years ago back in 2001, I had a /29 giving my 5 real IP addresses from my ISP.

Back then, I mostly only ran Linux, but for some reason, I needed to run something on a Windows machine, so started installing Windows 98 SE onto a machine, and set it up with a public IP address without even thinking about it. It crashed before it'd even finished installing [0], and investigation showed that it'd been whacked by an automated RCE exploit scanner.

I immediately decided it was never worth the risk of putting a Windows machine on a public IP, and set up a NAT even though I had 3 spare public IPs.

[0] There was already a published update to protect against this exploit, but I was scanned and hacked between the base install exposing the bug and the automatic update patching it.