Tomas Larsson wrote:
I have never been infected with virus, when connecting to the net for the first updates, not even when using one of the original pre-SP1 CD's. Not even running in front of my firewall. Yes I use a firewall, before it was an old AMD-K6 with RH9, now it is an P2-400 with FC5, using gShield script. I have never used a dedicated firewall, probably by habit, since they were so expensive onece upon a time, and a scrap P1-160 with RH7/9 was a cheaper solution. So I simly don't buy that you get infected first time you are connected.
You don't today - or you don't see it because the viruses are more stealthy and designed to spread slowly and remain undetected while permitting remote control of the machines to send spam or participate in an occasional DDOS attack. A few years back an unprotected, unpatched box would be hit by something in a couple of minutes on a random internet address. The 2003 slammer worm was probably the most dramatic of the bunch, practically knocking out the internet. It sent UDP packets out of RAM as fast as the machine could generate them.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
