Comment by stouset
2 months ago
I too remember the days when every unpatched Windows PC was a member of a botnet. Perhaps less fondly than you.
And thankfully this was before a time when everyone’s computers and phones had access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and before email was the gateway to virtually your entire life.
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Most of your account's comments in the 13 days since it was registered have been flamebait, fulminating or trolllish, and are being flagged by other community members. Please stop this style of commenting or we'll have to ban the account. HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards. For accounts that are dragging the standards down, sooner or later we have to do what most of the community expects of us, which is to uphold the guidelines and ban accounts that continue to post in this style.
If you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and start taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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I remember installing plain Windows XP at a time when Service Pack 3 had already been released. Since I had only recently gotten cable internet, it didn’t cross my mind to disconnect the network cable, and my PC got owned almost immediately. IIRC, some dialog just popped up as an artifact of a successful penetration, right after the network connection was established - before I even managed to insert the SP3 CD. So it was pretty bad for a while.
> According to the researchers, an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware, on average. That figure is down from around 40 minutes, the group's estimate in 2003.
This was from two decades ago, and cursory searching suggests the average lifetime of an unpatched system is even lower now.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/study-unpatched-pcs-compro...
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I do also recall having a fresh XP install and getting owned in a few minutes because I connected to the internet.
Not sure what you guys were trying exactly and what tools you had at your disposal.
FYI, malware researchers deliberately infect a VM and then analyze the malware. Here are some present-day examples of such investigations using the open source Garuda framework: https://cysinfo.com/introduction-to-threat-hunting-using-gar...
You just had the wrong classmates
FUD? Blaster said otherwise.