I’ve seen videos of people doing this for fun to see what happens.
Sadly now it’s not even fun “for teh lulz” kinda compromise, either. Everything is just a million varieties of crypto miner or ransomware now.
Removed by mod
I wonder how many people still directly connect to the internet without a gateway. It seems sensational to say “INSTANTLY INFECTED” and then tiny print (in a way that nobody connects to the internet since 1999). But maybe I’m just ignorant to how large a market still use direct connection.
I doubt many people would do that. You would have to intentionally set it up that way. Residential ISPs almost always supply a modem with a built in router which will have a firewall. You would have to set it to bridge mode, enable the DMZ, or use your own modem.
I haven’t connected a computer directly to the internet since I used dial-up.
I remember back in the days of broadband being brand new. Comcast insisted that you had to pay for each device that connected to the Internet. Using a router was considered against the TOS.
I do not miss those days.
We had a router hooked up to our first RCA cable modem on Comcast, but then we were only comcast customers because they bought the company that originally hooked us up.
cable Companies though. Don’t miss cable internet at all. Fuck Comcast any decade.
The takeaway I think they were trying to give was that the same experiments done on a more modern OS does not have these same “instant” infections (they reference having windows 7 under the same conditions without any issue)
What are they going to write about next, the dangers of unsigned drivers and how easily they infect Windows 98? lol
I saw someone suggest they connect their switch dock directly to the internet elsewhere on Lemmy. Granted the attack surface for a switch is basically non existent but if people are suggesting that then certainly people are still connecting their other machines directly to their modems/CPEs as well
That would be Nintendo themselves. The fools recommend port forwarding everything to the Switch.
How to Set Up a Router’s Port Forwarding for a Nintendo Switch Console
It’s not a DMZ, at Nintendo we say your Switch is now in Donkey Kong Country
It’s nothing new. I remember doing this for fun about 16 years ago, putting a WinXP machine on the internet with no firewall and waiting. Even back then, it was immediately hammered by traffic and quickly started doing dubious things.
