USATODAY.com - Unprotected PCs can be hijacked in minutes

The time it takes for an unprotected PC to be attacked on the net has decreased to essentially zero according to a new study reported in USA Today.

Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.

While most break-in tries fail, an unprotected PC can get hijacked within minutes of accessing the Internet. Once hijacked, it is likely to get grouped with other compromised PCs to dispense spam, conduct denial-of-service attacks or carry out identity-theft scams.

Those are key findings of a test conducted by USA TODAY and Avantgarde, a San Francisco tech marketing and design firm. The experiment involved monitoring six "honeypot" computers for two weeks — set up to see what kind of malicious traffic they would attract. Once breached, the test computers were shut down before they could be used to attack other PCs.

The test did not measure Web attacks that require user participation, namely spyware, which gets spread by visiting contagious Web sites, or e-mail viruses, which proliferate via e-mail attachments.