Reading an interestingly-titled article on InformIT, I’ve stumbled across the following text:

The survival time is an estimate of how long an un-patched computer will remain uncompromised once it’s connected to the Internet. While the actual time varies, historically it tends to run between 4 and 20 minutes.

This is such an obvious nonsense that I had to check the source, which is also full of alarming messages, but admits at the end that the problems described largely disappeared with XP SP2. Just to put things in perspective: XP SP2 was released in August 2004 and the graph in the alarming blog post displays data from 2008.

Next step: investigate the source of the graph. The »average survival time« is defined as the time between probes on numerous TCP or UDP ports, regardless of whether the port was actually enabled in the workstation and whether the probe was successful or not.

My personal conclusion: as most workstations include some sort of rudimentary firewall these days, the whole approach is bogus. More precisely, it measures an important parameter (average time between probes), but claims it represents something completely different (average survival time). Would you agree with my conclusion?

Lesson learned: Never trust alarming over-simplifying statements based on misunderstood data.