IIRC Windows XP up to SP2 was vulnerable to this. Basically if you ran the install with the DSL modem attached, your PC was compromised even before the end of setup.
When W32/Blaster[0] came out I worked at a small ISP doing tech support and computer repair. A tech and I imaged an old box we had in the corner with a clean XP, assigned it a static IP in our /24, plugged it in and started a stopwatch. It didn’t even make it two minutes before it was infected.
I was working for a small ISP in that time frame and that's when we started blocking incoming windows ports. And yea, it was annoying for the few techie types that tried to run SMB and could actually protect their stuff.
For the other 99.9% percent of the users it protected them and us.
Yeah Blaster is one of the few worms I've ever (knowingly) been infected with. As you say, it was literally less than a minute or two between connecting an unpatched box and getting it.
that is really unpleasant.. engineers worked, companies worked and volunteers also worked to make the modern Internet, then selfish-clever, thieving, control-oriented militaristic jerks from WINDOWS filled the content with WINDOWS virus activity to play cheap stealing tricks on unsuspecting people. And you call it "the Internet" .. it has nothing to do with "the Internet" as much as the cheap and aggressive culture of BS from WINDOWS at that time
It would be more fair to criticize the corporate culture at Microsoft in the 90s that led to this situation.
They simply didn't really care. If another OS was dominant, it is easy to argue that fundamental security issues could have been addressed in a better fashion, if management wanted it to be so.
To wit, this is the same era of computing that spawned OpenBSD. You can't say with a straight face that OpenBSD would have been brought down by oversized ping packets or be allowed to accept traffic out of the box like Windows was.
