Unprotected PCs hit by viruses in minutes

'Survival time' for an unpatched PC down to 20 minutes, warn researchers

Iain Thomson, vnunet.com 18 Aug 2004

Network worms can get onto a PC within minutes of connecting to the internet, according to security researchers at the Sans Institute.

The "survival time" for an unpatched PC connected to the internet averaged 20 minutes in 2004, compared to 40 minutes the year before.

Users of broadband, or poorly secured public networks, would be infected much more quickly, in under 10 minutes after connecting in some cases.

"The main issue here is that the time to download critical patches will exceed this survival time," the researchers said.

Security companies are also monitoring the state of play, and are even more pessimistic. Symantec estimates that it could take seconds rather than minutes to lose control of an unpatched PC.

"The Blaster worm is still the largest source of these sort of attacks," explained Tony Vincent, lead global security architect at Symantec Managed Security Services.

"It's like space junk: everything we've launched from the Earth is still up there in orbit. These attacks are all still out there on the internet due to unpatched servers, and never stop running."

Symantec runs a simulated network that is left poorly protected in order to track the methods used to enter it. The company has found worms written three or four years ago still in circulation.

Once worms infect machines the host PCs can be used to build networks of zombies that send out spam, or launch distributed denial of service attacks against web servers.

See also:

Operating systems could be months out of date

Beware of Christmas PCs bearing viruses

Shop-bought computers often unpatched and vulnerable to malicious code 14 Dec 2004

Security: the bigger picture

Symantec chairman and CEO John W. Thompson tells vnunet.com about the company's strategy, and why he's not bothered about Microsoft's entry into the market 06 Sep 2004

Worms put on burst of speed

The survival time of unpatched PCs has been halved, research has claimed 22 Aug 2004