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Survival Time for Unpatched Systems Cut by Half

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the fire-your-walls dept.

UnderAttack writes "The Internet Storm Center published a graph showing historic trends for the "Survival Time" of unpatched, unprotected (windows) computers connected to the internet. Turns out, this number dropped from about 40 minutes last year, to 20 minutes this year. The survival time is calculated as the average time between reports for an average target IP address. If you are assuming that most of these reports are generated by worms that attempt to propagate, an unpatched system would be infected by such a probe. The data is collected from a large number of networks with different types of upstream protection. So if you are on an unprotected cable/DSL line, you may see probes much more frequently. Either way, 20 minutes is not long enough to download patches. The Honeynet Project did publish a paper with some stats back in 2001."

3 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. 20 minutes?? by AnswerIs42 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Try 50 seconds :(

    No, not joking. At work, somewhere, there is an infected computer and while rebuilding a computer I plugged it in to run the updates for 2K and antivirus. Less than a minute after pluging it in, I was crashing and burning.

    Had to go to a patched computer, download the needed updates and burn them to CD and update the computer that way first before plugging it onto the network.

    REALLY anoying.. and when I find the user with the infected computer.. well, lets say I'll have a new storage location for this dead notebnook hard drive...

  2. Is anyone else... by ScytheBlade1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...not suprised at all? This isn't intended to be a troll, but back when blaster was "new" and I was formatting, I was hit three times within two minutes of booting, which gave me a whopping 3 minutes to download (not an issue) and install (BIG issue) the corresponding patch.

    In the end I had to swap some CD burners around, download+burn the patch, and then unplug the box from the internet while booting.

  3. Re:Patch CDs by moojuece · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm just trying to understand how you don't see the need to reinstall the OS 'every few months' as being a problem.

    not trying to start a flame/OS/holy war, but I would deffinatly see this as a problem