DosFreak wrote:If you are allowing ads and/or javascript, java, flash etc and you are not keeping your perimeter firewall up to date and your software firewall up to date then you are vulnerable no matter how l33t you are.
You're not supposed to allow ads, that's for sure (you may want to whitelist some specific sites in your adblocker, but that's by choice). As for scripting and flash - it's a tougher call, because a lot of sites rely on that for their normal functionality. A whitelist of trusted sites is also possible here, but harder to manage.
DosFreak wrote:Also you may think you are unimportant and to a botnet you are but the botnet doesn't care and you'll be infected as part of the swarm and your info silently collected or sold for a potential ransomware victim.
That's definitely true. Ransomware will happily hit anyone it can, hoping that a large enough percentage of people will pay to release their files. Typically it doesn't collect the files, though, just encrypts them in place. Still, once infected, you can never be sure what leaked and where. Better to avoid that. 😀
bfcastello wrote:Except that it's kinda difficult to keep your browsers up to date when you are using retro OSes.
That's definitely true, but in the case of Win7 it will hopefully be possible for longer, because of the OS's popularity and the fact that it supports pretty much every Win32 API that Win10 does. So as long as the browser is a Win32 app and not a Modern app, it shouldn't be to difficult to extend support to Win7, unless the browser vendor just decides to blacklist it.
bfcastello wrote:Like it was mentioned to me before and somewhere in this forum, the most "updated" option for Win 9x would be roytam1's retrozilla browser and I believe it is nowhere near 99% safe yet. Or is it?
Well, Win9x in itself is 99% safe, because it shares very little code with modern NT-based Windows, and so a lot of the exploits simply won't apply. Plus it is not targeted due to the negligible user base. It gets safer every day without you having to do anything. XP is another matter.
schmatzler wrote:Regarding Windows 7: I don't use it on at all on my systems anymore. There's just no need for it. Everything that runs on 7 will also run on 10. I have a few XP and 98SE machines because some software depends on these specific versions. That's not the case for 7.
That's true about software, but not about hardware. Older hardware may not have proper support in Win10 or have only limited functionality. Hardware works best with contemporary OSes where the driver support is optimal.
SirNickity wrote:I did something similar back when Win 2K was current. Built a test box with Win 2000 Pro, left it online overnight, was infected with Code Red the next morning.
Lesson: Don't do that. Firewalls exist.
Firewalls exist, NAT routers exist (virtually no one connects directly to the cable/DSL line), security updates exist. Every version of Windows going out of support has been receiving security updates for more than 10 years, by definition.
bfcastello wrote:Where can I get Winaero tweaker?
A simple web search brings it up. It seems a very convenient tool that has many useful settings in the same place, although as far as I can see, everything it does can be configured separately through the OS UI.
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