Unpatched PC’s cracked in 20 minutes

The SANS Institute performed a study on the survival half-life of the standard unpatched personal computer. What they found is that if a fresh PC is connected to the internet without any kind of prior patches or protection software installed, that PC will be compromised within 20 minutes and left open to hacking, cracking, and hijacking by viruses, spyware, adware, downloadware, bugs trojans and most of all… human hackers.

Last year, the same study showed that an unpatched PC would become compromised after a full 40 minutes, twice as long as it takes now. What does this say about the computer using public? They are using out of date software and are not patching and updating their systems, and are not educated on the matter enough to know otherwise. If the time it takes to bypass the security of a PC today is half what it was a year ago, how easy will the PC be to crack next year? Will the community be educated enough to know the seriousness of having a fully updated and patched computer? Microsoft really needs to step up and put their teaching caps on, because if this problem isn’t remedied soon, we’ll all be running on a collapsing network.

Here’s hoping Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 can help ease the pain.

Source | Neowin.net
Microsoft | Windows Update

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