5 minutes until worm infection

A report by the SANS institute claims that PCs now take just 4 to 5 minutes on the Internet before they are infected with a worm if it is not previously brought up to date with all its security patching.

On the positive front though, the previous exponential rise of worms has waned according to McAfee labs, with just a steady growth in them being reported - which makes the problem more manageable.

Most worms still look to open ports on PCs, so the best advice is to have a firewall installed or configured on a new PC before undertaking the rest of the patches needed to have a new machine ready for the Internet.