According to Dave Martindale :
(Donald Nichols) writes:
I think you're being excessively paranoid about Windows. What do you think
will happen if you "let a Windows system touch the outside net"?
It will get infected by a virus through one of a gazillion
possible paths.
My Windows system has never had the security patches added,
because they are not needed while it is hidden behind my firewall, and
not allowed to touch the outside net.
If you have a firewall between your Windows box and the outside world,
and you don't run anything but Windows Update (which is really internet
Explorer) on your Windows box while you're updating, I don't know of any
attack from outside that can affect you. Your firewall probably won't
even let the Windows system be visible to the outside world.
My firewall is set up to keep even the web browser from
reaching the outside, as I normally don't even *want* to use a browser
from the Windows box. It is used for a very few functions these days,
and I do normal browsing from unix-based systems with Mozilla, FireFox,
or Opera, depending on the system and what I want to do -- plus wget for
downloading images to which direct urls have been posted, or very
occasionally lynx, for text-only browsing.
And some of the biggest holes are in IE itself. (Some of them
are accessed by e-mail being passed off by OE to IE.)
As a result, the process of applying all of the security patches
to make it (temporarily "sorta" safe) is a royal pain, as Microsoft's
site really wants the system to connect to their site and talk to the
site to determine which patches are needed (thus being exposed to the
attacks which my firewall sees being attempted against my unix boxes,
treating them as though they were running Windows -- and thus failing).
Connecting to the outside world doesn't automatically mean being exposed
to attacks - that's what the firewall is for.
And that is what I keep it set up for -- to totally eliminate
connections between the Windows box and anything other than things
within my own local network.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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