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GoneInEightSeconds

How fast will an unprotected PC last on the internet?

article from BBC World, Oct 2006, permalink

 

I ran across this article last week. It's hard to imagine this, but all the evil PC's in the world are just waiting for you to drop your firewall for just a few seconds. That's what former hacker, now security expert, Jacques Erasmus recently found. Below is an excerpt from the article.

 

Quote from BBC World source

We set up a poor Windows XP machine with no firewall or anti-virus software ... How long would it be before we were hit by something nasty on the net? Hours, minutes? As it turned out - eight seconds!

 

We were hit by Sasser, one of the fastest spreading worms on the 'net, and it wastes no time at all in taking over your PC. Within seconds of infection, our PC started downloading some strange programs, or payloads, from mysterious Internet addresses. These payloads are the programs that can take control of your machine and turn it into a remote controlled bot.

 

Our machine then started scanning random Internet addresses, looking for other vulnerable PCs to infect. Then Internet Explorer started downloading spyware. Within 5 minutes our PC was running so many malicious programs, that the CPU was running flat-out at 100% - and we weren't even touching it.

 

Of course, if you've been a victim of hacking, it's no laughing matter - it certainly wasn't for our PC, which crashed completely in under 30 minutes.

 

If you have time, tell me what firewall and anti-virus software you are using, and why you like it.

 

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