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Most of your account's comments in the 13 days since it was registered have been flamebait, fulminating or trolllish, and are being flagged by other community members. Please stop this style of commenting or we'll have to ban the account. HN is only place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards. For accounts that are dragging the standards down, sooner or later we have to do what most of the community expects of us, which is to uphold the guidelines and ban accounts that continue to post in this style.

If you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and start taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Please spare us the defiant strutting. This is a discussion about operating system upgrades. Whether I "like" what you're posting or not hasn't even crossed my mind. The guidelines apply regardless of your position. This place has happily existed for nearly two decades as a place where anything can be disagreed about, precisely because we have guidelines that keep people focused on curious conversation rather than flamewar and personal attack. You're welcome to go elsewhere if our ways are not to your taste.

I remember installing plain Windows XP at a time when Service Pack 3 had already been released. Since I had only recently gotten cable internet, it didn’t cross my mind to disconnect the network cable, and my PC got owned almost immediately. IIRC, some dialog just popped up as an artifact of a successful penetration, right after the network connection was established - before I even managed to insert the SP3 CD. So it was pretty bad for a while.

> According to the researchers, an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware, on average. That figure is down from around 40 minutes, the group's estimate in 2003.

This was from two decades ago, and cursory searching suggests the average lifetime of an unpatched system is even lower now.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/study-unpatched-pcs-compro...

I do also recall having a fresh XP install and getting owned in a few minutes because I connected to the internet.

Not sure what you guys were trying exactly and what tools you had at your disposal.

The real problem was pre-Windows XP. Anyway, just because you failed your assignment doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real problem. You should probably trust actual IT administrators over your experience as a college student.

I was there. Windows XP on cable-modem = "free shutdown message".

FYI, malware researchers deliberately infect a VM and then analyze the malware. Here are some present-day examples of such investigations using the open source Garuda framework: https://cysinfo.com/introduction-to-threat-hunting-using-gar...

You just had the wrong classmates

FUD? Blaster said otherwise.