I’ve had a Win 7 running for 12 years as a media server, never once been hacked.
ISPs and even old school Win 7 to Win 10 OSs have the old ports blocked by default that prevent “drive-by malware”.
What you are talking about is the equivalent of a Boogeyman that only exists because people are stupid about what they open up or install or allow to control their firewalls. Your points even prove that.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
You can, but that doesn’t mean you will. Unless you’re raw dogging your pc fully exposed on the internet there’s no way for malware to go to you, you have to go to it.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
You can pick up malware from a website or an advert on a website. You can pick it up by a friend bringing an infected device and attaching it to your home network. You can pick it up from a phishing link or attachment. You can run an IoT device that downloads malware and propagates it to other machines on your network. You can install a dodgy app on your phone. You can run an application that has a chain of dependencies down to some obscure backdoored library (xz). You can run software that downloads automatic updates and whose update server was compromised (Notepad++) or whose signing certificate was compromised. You can pick it up because someone else in your family did any one of these things or many others.
Malware isn’t just for people who do obviously dangerous things like downloading cracks and keygens.