Owned in 4 minutes, Zombie in less than 10 hours

[SuperSparks]

This illustrates just how vulnerable unpatched PC's are. With no user intervention whatsover, an insufficiently protected machine was hacked in just a few minutes.

Own3d in 200 seconds, (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/honeypot_test/)

Unprotected PC's can be hijacked in minutes (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-11-29-honeypot_x.htm)

For those of you with Windows XP, upgrade to Service Pack 2 - you will be a lot better protected. And if you don't have a firewall installed, now is the time to get one.

[SuperSparks]

And here is another frightening article along the same lines (thanks to D4\/!d for finding it):

Jaques' Hack Attack (http://www.bbcworld.com/content/clickonline_archive_14_2005.asp?pageid=665&co_pageid=3)