The risk is your computer reaching out to something on the internet (either by you browsing, or some automatic background activity) and whatever it finds infects it.
This could be something like an ad on an otherwise trustworthy website.
Comment on Is it safe to connect a Windows XP machine to my wi-fi network?
daggermoon@piefed.world 3 weeks agoWouldn’t any attackers need to penetrate the firewall first though?
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 3 weeks ago
Yeah but why risk it?
This is like asking “Is it alright if I leave my garage door open while I’m at work today? It’s detached from the rest of the house and I just store junk in there I don’t care to lose.” Yeah, I mean it’s detached from the house and let’s even say for argument’s sake, you live in a gated community. The risk is very low of someone actually breaking in and getting your valuable stuff inside your home. But by doing this, you’ve kind of invited people to come take a closer look at your house too. Someone decided to see what’s in your garage and didn’t see anything, but hey, looks like a bathroom window on the side of the house is cracked a bit. Could easily slide into the main house and take a peak in there. I would’ve never seen this from the sidewalk/city street until I got into the open garage.
Best case of a bad situation is that something gets into your XP computer and infects it. You don’t do much with it, so trashing it isn’t the worst possible thing to fix this issue. Worst case of a bad situation is you’ve infected that computer and now an infection is checking out the rest of your network and other devices on it including stuff you didn’t think of or stuff you thought couldn’t reach the web. You blocked your smart TV from accessing the web but left it connected to the router so it is still discoverable on the private network. Or you have a cheap Temu camera you got a while back and forget is still active and it’s sitting on your network with really poor security, easily vulnerable to attack.
I guess if you have that much faith in your network and devices, go for it, but probably not a good idea if you want the best possible defense.
If you really need something off the web to that XP machine, better to find a way to get it there by a patched, up to date machine and share it that way instead or on a separate VLAN.
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Thank you for saying much better what I couldn’t figure out how to phrase
CameronDev@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Yeah, its pretty safe. XP on the open internet is bad, but behind a NAT is mostly fine. Just be very careful not to port forward or UPnP any ports to the XP box. The other concern would be ie6 reaching out to the internet, ideally you’d want to restrict that, as there are probably ie6 exploits around, but even this is fairly low risk.
What do plan on doing with the box? That may increase your risk level.
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com 3 weeks ago
Ehhhh, bots are constantly crawling for vulns these days. I wouldn’t trust in security through obscurity anymore.
CameronDev@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
A NAT/Firewall isn’t obscurity, its actual protection. Any scanning bot would need to breach the firewall/NAT first before it could ever see the XP box. And if the bot can do that, it doesn’t need the XP box.
Making sure the XP box doesn’t poke holes in the NAT is important, so depends what OP is planning on doing.
black0ut@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
XP has background services that automatically connect to the outside for stuff. Most of those remain inside your network, but not all. It only takes a hardcoded expired domain to get instant infection without any user action.
I would never consider connecting a winXP machine to the internet safe.