VMWindows backdoor 1471

General Schvantzkoph

From the millions of infected windows boxes on the Internet.

You appear to be either unable to understand or unwilling to accept the fact that other computers on the Internet can infect your fresh-install-from-the-CD Windows installation.

I don't believe you.

Either you are behind a hardware firewall, or you don't conect to the Internet to get updates from Microsoft, or you don't know how to recognize an infection, or you are incredibly lucky, or you are not telling the truth.

It isn't just the computers you access that can infect you. Just connecting to the Internet is enough.

Perhaps you are able to learn from hearing the experiences of others:

"I never had a chance to run the update. I had not been connected for longer than two minutes when I got an automatic Windows

"As it turned out, this shutdown was triggered by a (apparently well known?) virus, I had never heard of before. Can you believe this? I got infected in less than 2 minutes just by connecting

"True story: I was working at a help desk when Windows 2000-XP were affected by a worm that exploited an RPC vulnerability. Machines were infected just by connecting to the network."

"Since its release, a number of severe security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Windows XP. These vulnerabilities are used by worms and viruses, making it impossible to connect an unsecured, unpatched system to the Internet for any amount of time without risking exposure and infection. Users of new computers are faced with the dilemma of being infected by these worms before being able to download the necessary patches."

"All of the thousands of folks who were given a new computer for the holidays can expect to be hacked within minutes of connecting to the Internet--unless their new system came equipped with Linux. According to the Honeynet Project, an unpatched Linux system will survive without being hacked for about three months. That's up from roughly 72 hours in 2001. A recent study by a different group found that unpatched Windows XP SP1 systems without a firewall lasted a mere four minutes before being hacked.

"The catch here is that it takes longer--much longer--to download all of the system updates from Microsoft. So many users will have found themselves infected with a worm while, if not before, they started downloading their updates."

"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"

"What normally happens within twenty minutes? That's how long your average unprotected PC running Windows XP, fresh out of the box, will last once it's connected to the Internet.

"The SANS Insbreastute Internet Storm Center released those eye-opening numbers a few days ago. Go take a look at their graph, and you'll note that the current time of 20 minutes is half that of what it was a year ago, although, to be fair, the average has been both higher and lower - over an hour last Christmas and only about 15 minutes in the spring. That hour at Christmas seems like an aberration, and the overall trend has definitely been downward, towards far shorter times before your Windows box is not really yours any longer.

"As the SANS Insbreastute notes, 20 minutes is not long enough to update your Windows PC before it is too late. If you take a new PC out of the box, plug it in to the Internet, and power it on, most people (most people? OK - a lot of people. Uh, alright - some people. Erm ... *sigh*. A few people. Happy?) know enough to immediately hie thee over to Windows Update and get the latest patches from Microsoft. Then reboot. And get more patches. And reboot. Ad infinitum. Oh, and don't leave out the latest anti-virus updates either. Gotta have those. Oh oh oh - don't forget Windows XP Service Pack 2, the gotta-have update from Microsoft, which "may be as small as 70 megabytes (MB) or as large as 260 MB".

"And users are supposed to download all this in less than 20 minutes?"

-- Guy Macon