Windows Infected in 12 Minutes 355
Uber-Review writes "The speed with which PC's can become infected has now shortened. If your Windows computer is not properly protected,it will take 12 minutes before it becomes infected, according to London-based security company, Sophos. They have detected 7,944 new viruses in the first half of 2005, a 59% increase over the same time span last year."
variants... do they count? (Score:5, Interesting)
ogg
Some paranoid speculation... (Score:0, Interesting)
Now, as a citizen of such a government, I have to ask, "why when 80-90% of domestic PCs are infected, is nothing being done at the legislative level?" Could it be that a world of zombied PCs is just too useful as a tool of control?
Just thinking out loud...
What'd I'd like to know (Score:4, Interesting)
For years I have run Windows straight out of the box (no firewall, no security software, nothing), and I've only ran into two viruses -- one through Kazaa, and one through IRC (both my fault).
I can understand that Windows is vulnerable -- but if I've managed to run Windows for many years without any major problems, then I'm curious what they are doing during these 12 minutes to arrive to such a conclusion.
Re:I'm a little sceptical (Score:2, Interesting)
It's even faster if you have a static I.P.
I know, i was testing some vpn inside my company and i hooked the laptop to my external hub and it took about 20 minutes to get a worm, and i wasnt doing anything and my win2k was fully patched.
Re:Woop-de-freaking-doo. (Score:5, Interesting)
email dangers and within 12 minutes? (Score:2, Interesting)
So apparantly people start an email client _on average_ within 12 minutes after an install and catch a virus? That is pretty rough, and IMHO unrealistic. I don't know what most people do, but I'm usually still install drivers, turning off teletubby mode etc.
Sounds like the vendors included a few old worms that snatch chronically unpatched systems, and gave it a spin to boost antivirus sales.
Re:Nice... (Score:1, Interesting)
This is indeed the new form of trolling - except way better than ever before. With no way to mod the article, submitter, or editor, this new trolling can go on for months or years. Rather than troll 1-2 people who then get modded "-1 offtopic", and the troll modded "-1 troll", they can now troll entire articles by submitting dupes. No mods, no karma hit, no being buried by higher-modded comments.
It's god-damned brilliant.
12 minutes is faster??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Destroy Slashdot (Score:0, Interesting)
To explain further, Slashdot exists for one purpose: to make money for parent company OSDN. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but don't expect a high quality site the way its currently run. The Slashdot business model (if you can call it that) seems to be to provoke reaction from the loyal crowd of slashbots that frequent the site. Inflammatory / trollish stories (e.g here [slashdot.org]) and dupes cause the page hits (and therefore ad revenue) to go through the roof.
As a result, most of the comments I see on the stories are neither insightful, interesting or informative. There seems to be no real balanced discussion - something I feel is a product of the moderation system which rewards those who conform to the slashbot mindset and censors everything else. This democratic method of editing the comments is terrible - especially where technical issues are concerned, as a lot of nonsense is modded up by people who don't know otherwise.
You are probably wondering why I read Slashdot. Partly morbid curiosity and partly to laugh at both the flame wars which invevitably break out and the well crafted trolls.
To conclude, Slashdot is neither really "News for Nerds" nor is it "Stuff that matters". If you want the former, go to somewhere like arstechnica [arstechnica.com]] or kuroshin [kuro5hin.org] and if you want actual stuff that matters: Infoshop [infoshop.org]
Re:oi vey... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is certainly easy to get infected while using e-mail or surfing. But now that SP2 comes with a firewall turned on by default, shouldn't it now be impossible to infect a SP2 machine without some sort of user intervention?
Does the SP2 firewall have some holes pre-poked in it already? Are there flaws in the firewall?
Re:What'd I'd like to know (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had my "NAS pr0n box" (an old Athlon 1600+ w/250GB worth of misc drives) running un-updated WinXP Pro (the "reset5" 30-day hack precludes updates) for over a year on the same static IP, open to the whole intarweb, and it hasn't picked up a single virus. I use it for torrents, eMule, kazaa-- basically all and sundry untrustworthy site scouring-- and still it works. I recently installed McAfee on it, just to see what viruses I'd "collected", and there's nothing! I think the biggest deciding factor in how fast your exposed windows machine gets "pwned!" is whether or not it's in the IP address range assigned to a large ISP that caters to the Unwashed Masses (e.g. Comcast). Using an ISP that markets to the bespectacled nerd crowd puts your IP address in a range that probably won't be tapped for a "zombie harvest".
Most retarded story. (Score:3, Interesting)
Big suprise, the world most popular OS has the largest number of virus's written for it. Another big suprise, leave your machine unpatched and unprotected on a network and it'll get infected.
-Rick
Suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about Fedora? (Score:2, Interesting)
But theoretically, those ports should be closed on Fedora already. And since most internet attacks are meant for Windows anyways, I should be safe not using the hardware router. But the truth is I don't know enough about the innards of Fedora 4 to know if it's a safe move or not.
That's why I asked. Because Windows problems != Fedora problems necessarily.