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Idle Windows XP and 2000 machines get infected with viruses within minutes of being exposed online — legacy OSes compromised by just connecting to the Internet (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 5 months ago

Well, no shit.

This would likely happen to any machine directly exposed to the internet that hosts any kind of service intended for local networks only... (which is the network stack on Windows, and has been so since 1990 with NetBEUI/NetBIOS), and has been intentionally left insecured to boot.

Hell, in the 90's we put windows desktops directly on the internet just to see what would happen (yea, our bosses would yell at us when they caught it). They didn't get hacked much or very fast then, which shows how much automated intrusion scripting is happening today.

Bunch of clickbait nonsense.

Local machines aren't servers. And servers aren't directly exposed to the internet without routers/firewalls/IPS/IDS, etc. The only devices that should be directly connected to the internet are edge routers. And even they should have very secure, layered setups to ensure malicious traffic can't transit to the LAN.