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
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
Hackers are always on the lookout for legacy operating systems.
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.
I wonder how many people still directly connect to the internet without a gateway. It seems sensational to say "INSTANTLY INFECTED" and then tiny print (in a way that nobody connects to the internet since 1999). But maybe I'm just ignorant to how large a market still use direct connection.
I doubt many people would do that. You would have to intentionally set it up that way. Residential ISPs almost always supply a modem with a built in router which will have a firewall. You would have to set it to bridge mode, enable the DMZ, or use your own modem.
I haven't connected a computer directly to the internet since I used dial-up.
The takeaway I think they were trying to give was that the same experiments done on a more modern OS does not have these same "instant" infections (they reference having windows 7 under the same conditions without any issue)
What are they going to write about next, the dangers of unsigned drivers and how easily they infect Windows 98? lol
I saw someone suggest they connect their switch dock directly to the internet elsewhere on Lemmy. Granted the attack surface for a switch is basically non existent but if people are suggesting that then certainly people are still connecting their other machines directly to their modems/CPEs as well
That would be Nintendo themselves. The fools recommend port forwarding everything to the Switch.
How to Set Up a Router's Port Forwarding for a Nintendo Switch Console
Lol I watched the vid and it turns out the guy did the same thing with Windows 7 and nothing even happened. The article is such clickbait garbage and it gives cybersec a bad name.
It's nothing new. I remember doing this for fun about 16 years ago, putting a WinXP machine on the internet with no firewall and waiting. Even back then, it was immediately hammered by traffic and quickly started doing dubious things.
I've seen videos of people doing this for fun to see what happens.
Sadly now it's not even fun "for teh lulz" kinda compromise, either. Everything is just a million varieties of crypto miner or ransomware now.