What happens if you expose Windows 98 to the Internet in 2024?

next video: what happens if you expose yourself to a Microsoft employee

"the operational system is older than I am" I feel so old. I got the physical version upon launch

Microsoft: We've got problems. They hate windows 11 so much they're trying to downgrade to 98.

Up next: Exposing an abacus to the internet in 2024.

"This operating system is older than I am"... and suddenly I just felt a whole lot older than I already felt

I have a dedicated Windows 98 PC that I use for retro games, software, and I connect it to the internet from time to time, mostly to do retro web browsing via the internet archive. Never had any problems. It can't even connect to most modern sites (and probably vise-versa) because it's so outdated. It's probably like you said, security by obscurity. Anyone looking to hack computers doesn't really have a reason to target Win9x anymore.

Bro is running windows 98 inside of windows 7 inside of... W H A T

Maybe the hackers were the friends we made along the way

I get the message, we should all switch to windows 98 to stay safe on the internet.

I'm actually quite interested in how 2000 SP4 vs XP RTM vs fully updated XP would end up, if there were any patches that actually made a difference in the long run

I assume you mean by Expose as in connect directly to the internet without a router firewall. Because router firewalls pretty much stop everything unless you're visiting websites with that Windows 98 browser.

9x is safer than NT these days

I remember in college connecting unpatched version of xp to the internet for the first time and got what felt like hundreds of malware in minutes. This was in the 00’s.

You forgot to imitate those dial up modem beeps verbally

I'm often amazed when people get up in arms over connecting your ancient machines to the internet. After a certain point, malware developers cease targeting those old platforms. You don't see anything targeting Win9x because nobody builds malware for the 9x kernel anymore, if you installed something like KernelEx (an NT compatibility layer for 9x) you might get some issues, because malware IS built for the NT kernel, but that's likely the only instance where you may see issues. The same can likely be said for MacOS 7-9, nobody targets those systems because NOT ONLY are they outdated operating systems that nobody runs anymore, but they also run on a vastly different architecture than most current computers on the market. Connecting NT-based systems to the internet with no firewall is suicide, though.

SE = Second Edition and not Server Edition ;)

On windows 98, SMB is not turned on by default. You need to turn it on via the control panel networking applet. One thing to try is to install Microsoft PWS. Could the content you serve affect whether or not you get "hacked"?

Takes me back to the good old days. For a while with Windows 2000/XP there was the sasser worm, like you would expose any PC running Windows 2000 to the internet and it was a matter of minutes until lsass.exe was exploited.

Really like your content, unique and educational, no bloat in your videos either which is common nowadays

98 was still vulnerable to certain DoS which was patched in 98SE (which to my recollection had NO ports open upon install). I remember back in the day working on 98SE and it was more secure than anything else - however - I had hacked the kernal, removed fiolog.vxd and enabled NTFS and other things, and bundled it into the installation. Quite sure the vanilla 98SE was the more "secure out of the box" of all windows to date.