A YouTuber demonstrates how dangerous it is to use an operating system without security updates
It seems incredible, but there are still teams that use Windows Xp in the middle of 2024. Just a few months away from saying goodbye to official Windows 10 support, this does not mean that the majority of users have decided to make the leap to Microsoft’s most current operating system: Windows 11. In fact, as the weeks go by Windows 10 share increases and, with this situation, it makes one certainty clear: the average user does not fear for their security nor are you worried about changing your digital habits.
Therefore, even if residual, there is a significant number of users who are still using Windows XP. Whether for administrative reasons, personal preferences, leisure or any other aspect of a diverse nature, many still have computers that have an operating system installed that was released last year. 2001. And this, in short, led a YouTuber to propose a most striking experiment: How long does it take for a Windows XP computer to fall into the clutches of a hacker?
It’s only a matter of minutes
As the portal indicates PC Gamer in a recent publicationthis was the question he answered Eric Parker in a video on his channel. In it, she shows how he set up a computer with the company’s old operating system and opted to do not install any protection. After this, he left the computer unattended and checked how long it took to lose all protection even without accessing the Internet. The answer? Just 10 minutes.
As can be seen in the original video, less than a quarter of an hour later the computer had already been infected. Thus, the Task Manager was run with conhoz.exe, a well-known Trojan. After this, in the following minutes a new user, several new processes and an FTP server were added. As a curiosity, he checked the origin of the attack and saw that it took place in Russia. Unfortunately, the computer continued to become infected as the minutes passed and, in less than an hour, it had become a zombie with four Trojans, two backdoors and a multitude of junk applications. And, thus, his experiment demonstrated how dangerous it is to use a PC with an operating system without updates.
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Main image by Tadas Sar (Unsplash)
