What happens to a Windows XP computer if it doesn’t have a firewall or anti-virus software
Published October 16th, 2005 in Internet, Microsoft, Technology, Virus & Spyware
BBC Reporter Spencer Kelly sat down with ex-hacker Jacques Erasmus and talked about hacking, Jacques even showed Spencer what would happen to a Windows XP computer when it connected to the internet if it had no firewall, no anti-spyware or anti-virus software. So how long did it take for the computer to get infected, 8 seconds! The computer was infected with the very wide-spread sasser worm. Just goes to show how vunerable XP is. This may not happen for everyone but that doesn’t mean you don’t need any anti-virus / anti-spware / firewall software, unless you use a Mac like me! My Mac has been online for 2 months without any anti-stuff software and it is fine.
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.
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