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Can your cab connect to the internet?
Sjaak:
True. You don't have to do anything to get infected. And if another pc behind your router/firewall gets infected with a worm, you're screwed as well...
I do have network cards in my cabs, but I used them for configuration only. And I have virusscanners for all other pc's in the same network.
scofthe7seas:
--- Quote from: leapinlew on July 07, 2011, 07:40:26 am ---Do me a favor, don't put words in my mouth.
--- End quote ---
Quite right. Out of line and I apologize.
Like I said though, I don't declare it impossible. I just feel its very very unlikely. I will hook up the laptop tomorrow and leave it overnight. I'll run a scan sometime this weekend and report. I'm not saying the findings will be definitive proof, but it'll just put to rest some questions about timeframe at least, and perhaps chance.
Mind you, I absolutely have virus scan software on my personal computer. So, I'm not against the idea of viruses (virii?) existing and being a problem. I've been a computer tech for 15 years, and in all my time I've never seen anything to suggest a virus attack that came from nothing. Even when xp was new. Even when those damned worms came out that would shut down your pc in 10...9....8....7... :D
A question though; The pc you experienced the virus attack from doing nothing. Did you literally do nothing for the entire time it was fresh and virus free, until you were infected? No browsing, no anything?
severdhed:
both of my cabinets are on wifi, mainly just for ease of administration over vnc. I'm one of those people that no matter how well it is working, i am always tweaking my cabinets and doing different things to them. they are both older PCs, (p4 3ghz, 2gb ram) running windows xp sp3 and Panda cloud antivirus. Automatic updates are turned off. I dont have weird people bringing infected pcs to my house and plugging them into my network, and my wifi is encrypted. i keep all of my other computers up to date with security patches and run full virus scans nightly (AVG, MSE, Panda). I periodically run scans on my mame cabinets with Panda and Malwarebytes. I also periodically mirror my mame cabinets to another spare hard drive, just in case there would be a problem.
i don't get viruses on my systems, it just doesn't happen to me. I am an IT Consultant, i fix dozens of infected computers every week, and it amazes me how many people get infected....i just can't figure out how they do it. It isn't that difficult to keep your computers clean...just a little common sense and some free software. ( and staying away from limewire and crap like that).
Smeghead:
Dont do it! networking causes SO MUCH overhead plus with NO networking, you dont need the other number one resource hogging thing - antivirus
Haze:
--- Quote from: leapinlew on July 07, 2011, 07:40:26 am ---
--- Quote from: scofthe7seas on July 06, 2011, 10:08:17 pm ---
--- Quote from: leapinlew on July 06, 2011, 09:17:59 pm ---If you want to see it in action. Put an unpatched Windows XP system straight on the internet with no firewall, service packs, antivirus and a real IP.
--- End quote ---
How long should I keep it on for? At what time could I turn it off and say this test is done? I have a spare laptop. I can install Windows Xp (Not even SP1!), nothing else, and plug it directly into the cable modem.
Given an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of monkeys can write Shakespeare, apparently, but what if they had a timeframe? The test is impossible, because if I leave it for a day, or a week, You'll say I didn't leave it on long enough.
--- End quote ---
Do me a favor, don't put words in my mouth.
Just give it a night, but before you do this, you should lookup how long the average infection time is for an unprotected system on the internet. You should have conficker or MSBlast in no time.
Honestly, I don't care if you think a virus can infect you or not, just because you are an individual. I know they can infect your machine without you doing anything to get them. It's happened to me. Just because something doesn't happen to you, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
--- End quote ---
At peak it was something like 20-30 seconds! (you didn't even have time to do online patching of the machine) Spread was IIRC pretty much exponential, every infected machine would try to infect other machines with similar IP addresses etc., nasty, nasty stuff if you weren't behind a proper firewall. Probably less these days because XP share is much reduced, and most people actually have the service packs etc. installed. Still a few idiots do hold out, connect their machines to the internet and act completely oblivious to the problems they're causing. You didn't have to do anything to get infected, just connect the machine to the internet and leave it, in many cases you wouldn't even know you were infected unless you monitored your outgoing traffic.
Anyway, no, if you're not going to be actively patching a machine then you shouldn't have it connected to the internet, period.
Actively patching something like a MAME cab could introduce other problems if some of the patches break functionality that certain frontends rely on, or even in some cases MAME (see the number of people having problems with that crappy hacked up shooter build based on 0.99 and full patched Win7 64-bit boxes)
Therefore I conclude, cabs are best kept offline.
I wonder how many commercial games with internet connections, running Windows based OS's are actually infected with this type of crap (I'd hope the embedded versions don't have the exploited services enabled, but you never know)