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Windows Infected in 12 Minutes
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."
Honestly, who cares anymore? We've all seen this exact same story with some slightly different words or numbers in about 100 different places. Use a firewall or don't use windows, I get it. Let's get on with our lives plz.
London-based? They're based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England. Does English now automatically mean London-based or what?
+Pete
Score:-1, Funny
I'm tired of talking about tech fixes to Slashdot's dup plague. It would stop if the editors would just read the damn front page.
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make install -not war
Do the editors of Slashdot actually read the site regularly? If not, should they be posting articles to the front page?
Followup question: Isn't this common sense?
I seem to recall some cases of software firewalls (if this is what you meant) which don't initiate before the NIC driver comes online, meaning the PC has a few seconds where it can acquire an IP and receive packets before protection commences.
Good design practice should prevent this but it'll never be quite as good as a hardware f/wall. Decent FW devices can be found for very cheap prices now.
If you really can't run a hardware firewall due to a need for many open incoming posrt, the 2nd-best solution is to use a modem with routing ability and direct ports 445, 593 and 135-139 to a dead address (remember to send them to an address outside the router's DHCP range so that address can never be assigned to an unprotected machine). These ports represent Windows file/print sharing, RPC Endpoint mapper (a major exploit target) and RPC comms ports. Killing those 5 ports stops 80-90% of remote attacks, although if you are running a web server, but not actually serving remote users, block ports 80 and 8080 as well to kill frontpage server extensions overflow attacks.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
This would be cool if the hunting actually culled the herd but it does not. The infested members of the herd continue ramble on like... zombies. In so doing they are able to impact the rest of the herd and slow it down rather than speed it up.
An Ebola type strain of computer virus might actually be a public good. It would kill off these flu ridden beasts, put them out of their misery and prevent them from continuing to harm the rest of the herd.
Ra's al Ghul anyone?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
By "Windows" they mean Windows XP pre-service pack 1 which was released in 2001.
So, what they're saying is: "if your unpatched 4 year old operating system is connected to the internet, it'll get infected pretty quickly."
Granted, pre-sp2 versions of XP has security that wasn't exactly the greatest and, granted, post-sp2 it still isn't perfect (and I'm not defending that) - but the above statement is like saying "if your vanilla install of Redhat 7.2 is connected to the internet, it'll get infected in a couple of hours".
The latter isn't fair to Redhat and so I don't see why it's particulary fair to Microsoft either.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Maybe you are on some strange subnet that bots don't scan too much. Maybe you don't visit sites that track your address for "who-knows-what-purposes" (OTOH - at least you've successfully posted to /. so you have your port 80 scanned back). Maybe your provider filters bad traffic (or even NATs you). Maybe your connection is so unreliable that they don't bother. Maybe you just don't know. Lots of options.