Will using an older operating system lower your chances of Viruses?

[BenoitRen]

Server service isn't needed to get in over all protocols, just protocols like SMB and RPC.

Which basically are the protocols I'm talking about. SMB is not enabled by default on Win9x, and it doesn't have RPC.

due to the memory model alone I still think running a 9x system without antivirus or a firewall is a little crazy

That's only a problem if the malware gets in in the first place.

[98Guy]

Basically I am happy to use Windows 98 Second Edition on the internet without a firewall, but anything else newer you need a firewall.

Totally stupid to run without a firewall!!

Anyone can get in if you dont have one!! (Why chance it with something as good as 98/98se?)

Firewall software is completely useless and not necessary on Windows 98 unless you are really anal and want to control how various *trusted* apps or services connect (or not) to the internet by themselves.

If you have a NAT router between your PC and modem (or if your modem has more than 1 LAN port) then you have defacto in-bound firewalling (not that win-98 really needs inbound firewalling, unlike win 2K or XP).

A firewall will not prevent your system from being infected by a virus or trojan, and it's most likely that in the event of an infection, your precious firewall would be deactivated anyways.

Also, you're far more likely to encounter DNS poisoning, especially if you don't hard-code your DNS server settings (but this is more of a threat for laptop PC's that connect to public hot-spots, hotels lan's, etc).

[cluberti]

Which basically are the protocols I'm talking about. SMB is not enabled by default on Win9x, and it doesn't have RPC.

Are you saying Win9x doesn't have RPC? It doesn't have a service, per se, but Win9x does have RPC (otherwise OLE and COM would not function, for instance).

[Mijzelf]

OLE and COM run fine without RPC. You only need RPC for DCOM.

[Dude111]

What would happen in your DISABLED DCOM?? (by giving it a value of 0 in the reg) Would it not let you DL anything?

[Mijzelf]

According to Steve Gibson a typical Windows user never needs DCOM, so probably you won't even notice it's switched off

[Drugwash]

I've just wasted a few hours on a friend's XP-SP2 machine trying to get rid of the x.exe infection until I finally gave up.

He uses Sygate 5.6 firewall and NOD32 antivirus and the (useless) warnings pop up a few minutes after opening a browser window.

I use no firewall, no antivirus and have the browser open most of the time while being connected 24/7 and have had no idea what an infection is for years, with Win98SE. There really is nothing more to say on this topic.

[herbalist]

What would happen in your DISABLED DCOM?? (by giving it a value of 0 in the reg) Would it not let you DL anything?

Where would you do this?

[cluberti]

OLE and COM run fine without RPC. You only need RPC for DCOM.

Well, inter-process communication via OLE uses RPC. It's not just distributed COM - COM happens locally on the box as well, and anything that uses OLE will use Local RPC (lrpc), regardless of what Gibson thinks.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

What would happen in your DISABLED DCOM?? (by giving it a value of 0 in the reg) Would it not let you DL anything?

Where would you do this?

I did this myself 5 years ago (October 2003) by testing out Steve Gibson's Dcombobulator. It simply changed two values in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Ole]
;;;"EnableDCOM"="Y"
"EnableDCOM"="N"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Rpc]
;;;"DCOM Protocols"=hex(7):6e,63,61,63,6e,5f,69,70,5f,74,63,70,00,00
"DCOM Protocols"=hex(7):00

The commented values show what they were prior to the change. As usual Steve Gibson has a detailed description and history of the theory behind Dcombobulator here.

[beats]

Steve Gibson, do people still take that self proclaimed security 'expert' seriously? o_O

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Steve Gibson, do people still take that self proclaimed security 'expert' seriously? o_O

Sometimes he hits the nail right on the head. These tiny specific apps that enable/disable little features do what they are supposed to. And he was one of the early security sites that probed your IP to see what ports are open. Shields Up! At least he accomplished security awareness don't ya think? With the 24/7 threats and rampant spyware/adware/viruses we see now, it would be unfair to classify him as paranoid.

See if you can find his pages on the Real Networks crapware calling home. He really took them apart.

I'm sill not sold on SpinRite though.

P.S. Sorry about the thread hijack! Back to your regularly scheduled debate.

[Aloha]

I'm running Win98 in my secondary gig (with a 8-year old brother playing arround with it the whole day), Vista in my primary one and XP in another primary one. None of them EVER got infected just like that, specially because I'm behind a router.

Alexanrs, does it mean that if I use a router, my computer will hardly get infected? Actually, my sister and I use a router so that we can both surf the net and share files with each other. But I don't know anything about the advantage of a router as you mentioned above. Can you explain or give a little more information about this? Thanks if you have time for a reply, Alexanrs.

Also, there may be 7-8 years or more since I completely disabled Recycle Bin and removed it from the desktop; this brings a great deal of responsability with it but so far I managed to avoid heart-attacks.

How interesting! Almost all the desktop screenshots I've seen here and on other forums have the Recycle Bin on them. Then what is the great purpose of not having the Recycle Bin on your Desktop, Drugwash? How can this help you avoid heart attacks? I am always interested in what is strange and special! Do you mind sharing your knowledge? And thanks for your coming reply, too.

Edit: Atmosphere XG, also "sorry about the thread hijack!"

Edited December 9, 2008 by Aloha

[zydon]

I used to enjoy my computing activities with Win95B (OSR2) since 1998 to 2007 before being forced to migrate using WinXP in 2008. I appreciated more the security level did I had in Win95 than the WinXP had now.

With Win95B, I just need 2 small security tools which is an anti-virus called Armour and a Personal Firewall. The anti-virus was good to take care old legacy DOS viruses and the firewall is to track who was trying to send unauthorized access and attack through the back door. Todays viruses is mostly worms types and less lethal than old DOS viruses that could shutdown the system permanently. The rest, the MS-DOS layer and registry is very useful to track and clean latest viruses and worms trace manually.

With a little change in registry and editing shell resource, my Win95B can't be recognized as Windows OS while surfing the Net. So, the changes to get Windows viruses is less and some attacks normally send a file that can't be executed in Windows environment or sometime just a script that only works in Internet environment. Thats make it easy to clean the system and exclude the site that mostly send some attacks thru other popular sites.

Another thing that great about Win95B is very fast on P3 CPU than Win98 and over 90% applications compile with Win32 based compiler will run without a problem. It is different case with WinXP. It's only good for multimedia and latest games. Some anti-virus made for WinXP always had hiccup to alarm false positive to an application generated by old compilers. They seem to look for viruses pattern through PE header and not the code contents. So, less productivity for software and personal utility developments.

The leaner system architecture that integrate DOS and Windows in Win95 based OS, give a lots advantages to user to have the same chances to protect themselves from the attacker from World wide web. The attacker always get exposed when Win95 users go to MS-DOS mode to track their traces.

Live long MS-DOS...

[herbalist]

I forgot all about Steve's little utilities. Ran that a long time ago, 2004 I think, the date of the download CD I found it on. As for Steve Gibson, he's made some mistakes and definitely has a paranoid streak, just as I do. Other security oriented groups have made mistakes too, especially about 98 security. I don't see them being slammed like he has been. I keep evaluating the things he finds on an individual basis instead of labeling him.

I find it difficult to understand why a 9x user would not want to control the outbound traffic from their PC. Admittedly, 9X systems don't have all the open ports that are found on an NT system, but applications also open ports. A lot of software tries to update without asking the user. Those updates can be big problems for 9X users. Many such problems have been described in the Last Versions of Software for Windows 98SE thread. I would think that a 9X user would want to be in control of that activity. As light as some of the older firewalls are, resource usage is not much of a reason not to have one. I'm running a 366MHZ Celeron and my security package doesn't slow it down. With all the time and effort the users here put into keeping their 9X systems running smooth, often better than when they were new, I can't understand not wanting to protect that investment and their data in real time.

Aloha,

Regarding the recycle bin, it's nothing more than another folder that serves no purpose other than making it possible to recover something that's deleted by accident. Items sent to the recycle bin are often forgotten, but they're not deleted and can be recovered and read by anyone. If the user forgets to empty it regularly, it consumes disk space, sometimes a lot of it. That slows a system down. I've seen hundreds of megabytes of forgotten items in recycle bins. Those forgotten items can be a big privacy concern. The "heart attack" he's referring to is accidentally deleting something important and not being able to recover it.

If you right click on the recycle bin, you'll see an option to delete files directly and not send them to the bin. TweakUI gives the user the option to remove the bin from the desktop. I stopped using it a long time ago. Instead of deleting files, I overwrite them with Eraser which makes recovery impossible. Version 5.7 is the best for 9X systems.

The scheduler that's built into Eraser deserves mention when the security of 9X systems is important. It can be set to overwrite temp folders, the browser cache, "recent" folders, log files, free space, index.dat files on reboot, etc as often as desired. That helps keep down the wasted disk space and cleans many of the locations used by malicious files. The memory usage of the scheduler is under 1MB. The launcher component can be used to make one click shortcuts for cleaning locations on demand, like the browser cache. It also has a component that runs in pure DOS, which I've found very useful.

9X system might not be targeted that much anymore but they're not being completely ignored either. Attacks on specific applications are on the rise, including those that run on 9X systems. When 9X was designed, most of these methods of attack didn't exist. 9X systems have no built in defenses against most of them but they can be easily added with available security-ware, most of which will not hurt it's performance. When the monetary cost is zero and the performance impact is almost nothing, I can't understand not doing using it, unless your system and data are of no value to you.

Rick