The article isn't very explicit about what it means by it's claim. Does it mean just plugging an unpatched windows machine into the internet and walking away o

The article isn't very explicit about what it means by it's claim. Does it mean just plugging an unpatched windows machine into the internet and walking away or does it mean somebody actively using it to surf websites which may have malicious applets etc? Also doesn't specify whether it's naked on the internet or behind some kind of NAT/firewall. If we're just talking about random bots port scanning netblocks and looking for daemon banners that indicate vulnerable services old linux distros could be quite bad in this regard. I had my desktop pwned back in ~1999 because it came with a vulnerable version of telnetd enabled by default.