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Ask HN: Is it dangerous to connect a PC that's been off for 10yrs to Internet?

19 points by theanonymousone ↗ HN
Suppose I find an old laptop of mine, from early 2010s, that has not been used since then. I turn it on and it boots Windows XP or 7. Is it dangerous at this point to connect right sway to the Internet? What precautions/steps do I have to do? What if it is from 2000s instead?

Thanks and sorry I had to compress the title

15 comments

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sacrosanct
XP has Internet Explorer and I tried this in a VM once, and 99% of sites didn't load because they used TLS 1.2/1.3 which IE doesn't have functionality for. But plaintext HTTP sites loaded fine.

I wouldn't use XP as a daily driver if that's what you intend. There's so many exploits that have piled up over the years that getting pwned is inevitable at some stage and the attack surface of XP is massive.

theanonymousone
Is it safe to just connect to the WiFi and download e.g. Firefox, or it's better to get it using a Flash memory while still offline?
l41n
I doubt anything would really happen. I connect old computers to the Internet and sometimes have a habit of forgetting to disconnect them for a bit too long. Nothing eventful has happened so far.

If you're paranoid, I'd just use your phone's hotspot.

tshirttime
I would feed it no more than a few gigabytes to start, then gradually increase by 10% each day.
injb
I can't shed any light on your question, but I can't help wondering - just out of curiosity - if it could be dangerous for the internet. Suppose there's some replicating worm from years ago on that machine that everyone has forgotten about. My guess is that it wouldn't get far though. Like how if you find some old disease in a cave somewhere, chances are we're all vaccinated against it already.
shipwright
We have a machine running Win7 that's just about that age at home, mostly for the sake of keeping old passion projects that rely on heap behavior being deterministic like some forensics plugins and a half baked try at application checkpointing for Windows- despite that meaning a wider attack surface for Win7 (like LFH buffer overflows or use-after-frees), there aren't that many major threats to be wary of especially if an eye is kept at ProcMon then and now, plus maybe a network packet analysis tool of choice with some rules on (anecdotally, said workstation still sees reckless unprotected use from relatives and it's just fine haha). XP on the other hand needs more precaution and it might be better off kept offline or replaced with a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu :)
ksherlock
Is there a router between you and the internet that's blocking all (unsolicited) incoming traffic? If you run "iloveyou.jpg.exe", that's on you.
lgkk
Use a hotspot so it doesn't affect your local network.

Or just wipe it by installing linux on it lol.

nickd2001
Installing Linux may indeed be the safest thing. If the OP's aim is to get at some old files, running Linux off a live CD (i:e without actually installing it) might be a good option. I've lost track of what's the best distro these days for old hardware - maybe someone else might comment to that.
toast0
If you have data on the device you want to retrieve, you should probably do that offline, before you connect it up. Then you need to know what your goals are.

Do you want to update it to the latest of that OS and go on from there? You should be aware that some of the older windows update databases got rather too big, and you may need to run some manual updates or the update system will churn and churn and not get anything done. I think this is for XP more than Windows 7, but honestly, I can't remember anymore. Probably best to ferry those enabling updates to your system via usb before you hook it up online too.

Other people can give you the speech about not using end of life Windows, if you want to hear that. :)

hulitu
No problem. The old viruses will not run due to missing libraries.
hayst4ck
Take out the hard drive, then connect it to a USB adapter (IDE/SATA to USB is like $10) and copy it.

If you actually want to use the computer, the key precaution to take is that your device does not have a public IP address. As long as the IP address is something like 192.168.x.x it's probably safe to plug it in.

Any viruses on that machine that were active back then are probably still active. Browsing the web at large would probably not be safe at all. Specific known urls like mozilla.org are probably fine. Any defunct software that is running could try to connect to URLs from businesses that have shutdown and had their domain names purchased by a nefarious entity. I would imagine that if you start the device in safe mode, programs won't auto start.

I would take out the hard drive, make a copy, delete everything on the hard drive (wouldn't want financial information, old passwords, old authentication tokens, etc. left on it), and then recycle the machine and destroy the hard drive.

lulznews
Ya man the AI will escape through your laptop and get ya