Re:Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?
by marcodiego on Friday April 02, 2021 @08:13PM
(#26677219)
Extremely vulnerable. The whole time you're running the machine as root, there's simply no other option. Drivers could be in 16 or 32 bits causing instabilities and kernel-level vulnerabilities. Memory protection was easy to circumvent and no special rights are needed to listen to keyboard, record audio, video or take screenshots.
Auto-run was enabled by default. It was very easy to make bomb-cd's that installed anything just by inserting it on the drive. No centrally verified software repository and hard to acquire dev-tools forced the users to basically run whatever software was needed without compiling it themselves or by passing binaries from person to person. This alone made viruses spread vastly.
And it created bad habits that survived to this day like hiding extension of files and installation processes that encourage the user to not pay attention on what is happening and simply accept what is asked.
Auto-run was enabled by default. It was very easy to make bomb-cd's that installed anything just by inserting it on the drive. No centrally verified software repository and hard to acquire dev-tools forced the users to basically run whatever software was needed without compiling it themselves or by passing binaries from person to person. This alone made viruses spread vastly.
And it created bad habits that survived to this day like hiding extension of files and installation processes that encourage the user to not pay attention on what is happening and simply accept what is asked.