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Surviving your first day with Windows XP.


homecomputeraid
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According to the latest statistics available on the SANS Internet Storm Center, your computer will probably only survive about 19 min. before being attacked if it's exposed to the Internet! If you check out the SANS Internet Storm Center using the link, click on Survival Time in the menu on the left then look in the upper right hand corner for the present average survival time between attacks. If you have an unpatched operating system, non-functional antivirus, or no antispyware, and it's exposed to the Internet your computer will be attacked. Protect yourself by patching your computer immediately and always keeping it up to date with the latest Microsoft patches.

If you have, or are getting a new computer, you can follow the step-by-step procedures in this SANS Whitepaper on surviving your first day with Window XP. If your survival time on the Internet is about 19 min., and it takes 2 hours to do all of your patches using a High Speed connection, how do you protect your computer with the latest patches without getting hit with a virus? This article tells you how.

I hope it's ok to link to a guide. If not, maybe I should move the article to headlines? :biggrin:

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According to the latest statistics available on the SANS Internet Storm Center, your computer will probably only survive about 19 min. before being attacked if it's exposed to the Internet!

This is one thing that I have never been able to understand and that is how you never seem to get malware intrusion warnings from worms (as an example) once you have patched your PC or updated your virus signature?

In the unlikely event of my backup failing and me having to re-install the operating system, I would install SP2 off the CD before going online to hopefully cut down on the time that I would be exposed while downloading the very latest security updates.

My firewall would automatically be on by default running SP2 and with me also installing my anti-virus, anti-spy applications off a backup CD/DVD, I would only need to update the signatures which wouldn't take too long and I hope less than 19 minutes!

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My firewall would automatically be on by default running SP2 and with me also installing my anti-virus, anti-spy applications off a backup CD/DVD, I would only need to update the signatures which wouldn't take too long and I hope less than 19 minutes!

CurlyWhirley, it sounds like your method is reasonably safe. If you're able to rebuild the OS to a state where it has all the updates to the time of failure, you're right, your exposure should be minimal. You might take a look at the referenced whitepaper anyway though. :biggrin:

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I have all my protection programs and the MS updates on a regularly updated CD

I have never found out how to do that :ph34r:

p.s. the MS updates I mean!

MS security updates can be downloaded from :- http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/current.aspx

any other patches can usually be got from the download centre :- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search....?displaylang=en

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