[vox] [OT] Length of time to infect a Windows computer?

[Richard Crawford]

Last night I got a call from someone at our church.  Her brand new
Windows XP computer, which she had just purchased a couple of months ago
in pristine condition, was running really slow and returning strange
error messages.  I spoke to her son, who read to me the error message; I
entered the error message into Google, and found that it's typical for a
particular class of trojans.  Investigating a little further, I
determined that her computer was infected with a particularly nasty
piece of spyware that would resist all attempts at removal by preventing
Norton from installing, and would act as a dial-up hijacker and force
her to dial up to one of those international numbers and force porn on
her computer (since she has DSL this is less of an issue, but there are
still major problems with the computer).  If I wasn't so busy I'd go
over to her house and re-install Windows for her and install AdAware,
ZoneAlarm, Spybot S&D, and Firefox (and if I had more time I'd wipe
Windows and slap SuSE on it); as it is, I simply recommended that she
take the computer to CompUSA for a clean sweep.

It led me to wonder: how long does is the average Windows PC on-line
before it's compromised?  I'm sure that it has to do with the user's
browsing habits and all that and the tightness of the original
installation, but surely there are numbers on this somewhere?

-- 
Richard S. Crawford / http://www.mossroot.com
AIM: Buffalo2K / ICQ: 11646404 / Y!: rscrawford
""We live as though the world were how it should be,
to show it what it can be." --"Angel", Season 4 ep. 1