A fun experiment I’ve seen done a few times, is to run unpatched XP in a VM and open any and every file and page you find on the internet and see what happens.

Rather brave (or foolish) to check out the fake sites…

I’m pretty secure with the security of my PC and my network, so the occassional checking things out doesn’t bother me. It’s not like I’m running WinXP without any service packs. And I am using OpenDNS.

you should too

I used to do that every once in a while and stopped when my firewall and anti-virus whigged out because the site was trying to install some malware behind the scenes… A few of the most recent zero day attacks were spread by poisoned sites.

Out of concern that some of these sites may be poisoned I don’t even bother anymore…