So you bought a new computer? And you’re going to connect it to the internet? How long does it take, on the average, until someone attacks you new beauty? Well, luckily there are people busy at calculating the survival time on the internet. But the sad end of the stick is that the survival time is just a few minutes. The graph above is the calculated survival time during 2009. And for 2009 the survival time is between less than 4 minutes and just above 5 minutes. And if your ISP does not block ports commonly used by worms your survival time is even less. Just make sure your vulnerable PC is secure before hooking it onto the internet.
The graph raises a few other questions: why is the survival time longer during summer, why the sudden drop at the end of August etc.? Is that due to hacker and worm vacation which is terminated by a very busy “return-to hacking”-weekend?
