Watch Windows XP become infected in minutes without protection

Windows XP is known for its low security. “Lunch an XP computer onto the Internet and suddenly it will be infected with all kinds of viruses.” Is this really true? Does the user not even need to open Internet Explorer? Eric Parker wanted to test this, and a YouTube video shows how he did it.

Eric Parker installed Windows Eric Parker says in the video that he wants to emulate how most people connected directly to the Internet using modems in the 1990s. He also turned off Windows' built-in firewall, just to see how quickly the computer would actually become infected if left alone with an open Internet connection and a public IP address.

The answer: very quickly. Just ten minutes later, traces of at least one malware had already appeared in the form of a “conhoz.exe” file, which appeared to be trying to look like the Windows conhost.exe process. The program also connects to the Russian domain.

An hour later, all kinds of malware had found their way onto your computer – Trojans, backdoors, DNS switches, and adware. Some make laughable attempts to hide themselves from the user, for example by claiming to come from “www.google.com”.