I get that there won’t be any security updates. So any problem found can be exploited. But how high is the chance for problems for an average user if you say, only browse some safe websites? If you have a pc you don’t really care much about, without any personal information? It feels like the danger is more theoretical than what will actually happen.
Or… are there any examples of people (not corpos) getting wrecked in the past by an eol OS?
The internet is cheap, like amazingly cheap. Connecting to every possible computer on the internet is something people do regularly, every minute.
Even if your computer was not directly accessible, the fact that it’s talking on the network is exploitable. There’ll be known payloads, known buffer overflows, known software packages, that can be targeted just by you browsing the web. Advertisement networks or a common delivery mechanism, websites get exploited, somebody send you a link, random messages going to your phone, going to your messenger, going to your email, anything that your computer processes can be a delivery payload mechanism.
There is no Safeway to run outdated software on the network at all in any capacity.
Thanks for the thorough explanation! Interesting stuff, the examples really helped me see the many different ways an attack could work.