Just how vulnerable PC's have become in the internet!!

[Tomas]

What is even more funny is this: If you have your lan cable plugged into your broadband modem, you actually get automaticly infected with viruses during the windows installation process! As soon as windows setup the network, it will be infected unless you are behind a router"NAT" or some other kind of firewall.

So if you do infact have no protection on the router side, you will have to install a firewall on the computer before hooking up the lan cable. Sadly most people dont have a firewall already on a cd, so the only way to get a firewall is to plug it into the internet which means it will be infected already before you got to download it  :-(

Pretty amazing for a modern OS to be so unsecure.

[Tomas]

amije wrote:
amiga scene was full of viruses when amiga was the top in the market, so don't blame pcs for this, but the guys which make them. as they say, the scorer gets the cheerleader :-)

Maybe not pcs, but we can certainly blame Microsoft for making a OS with so many open security holes. Even if linux was as popular as windows, it would still be pretty impossible to get viruses the way i described earlier.

It is also a really pain in the a*s to use windows as a regular user without admin or install access. Alot of programs refuse to work without admin priviliges, so that way most people are forced to use it in a really insecure way.

[Tomas]

Use NAT (either from the routing network hw, or from linux/bsd). This is the single most effective way to block tons of malware coming thru OS service vulnerabilities. No-one from outside world can access your box directly. This also allows you to safely (re)install Windows without fear of instant infection.

But most people who have single pc in their home has no router and just instead hook up the cable/adsl modem directly into the lan port. The fact still is that this OS is way to unsecure for the average person to use.

Sadly 90% of the the computer users is far from as experienced as most of us, and thus will not be able to follow all these tasks just to get a reasonable secure OS.
I dont think Windows will get any better before they completly rewrite the OS from scratch and then write it with some focus on basic security.

I personally wish Windows adopted the unix way of multiuser capability. I have a WinXP pc setup for my parents and i gave them a user account with only a very limited set of priviligies, which means they wont be able to change settings, install software and so on. But the sad part is that this also gives alot more hassle, since alot of software wont even run properly without admin priviligies. I also wonder why i should have to login as a admin when using the control panel?? Why dosent it just ask me for the login info for admin priviligies, like most window managers on linux does? If i want to change some setting using kde, it will come up with a popup asking me for my root password, which makes my life a hell of alot easier.