My router has a pretty descent firewall so i feel like it should be safe? Maybe. Obviously I won’t be signing into any online accounts or anything like that on the XP machine. Is this a bad ideas? Obviously using Windows in general is a bad idea but I’m sort of limited by the hardware here.
There is a lot of wisdom here, but be cautious…
“Back in the day” (when xp was still relevant), I installed a VM with xp on the cooperate LAN. …as it took eons to install all the patches and updates, this turned into a multi-day task. I didn’t browse the internet or do anything (because the patches were still installing/rebooting/ect).
When I came back to the office, the next day, the networking on the VM was disabled and I got a message from the local IT guy saying that my VM was part of a botnet and was spreading worms, so they had to quarantine it (by disabling the networking).
I literally did nothing with it, other than install updates. I assume someone in the office had a worm and it infected my VM during the night.
…so if you’re playing with xp (or any unsupported version of windows) - be careful.
My guess was that it was the updates that did the thing. I think I remember there being an issue up to Win 7 where malicious parties could advertise malware as available updates (under win7 this was only a problem if you didn’t let it select and download manually).
.…classic Microsoft :facepalm: