Something that I find incredible, but have seen no one contradicting yet, is how when ISPs have started to roll residential IPv6 by default some years ago, they first had no firewall on IPv6 and/or later it was disabled by default (so only few % of users would enable it at best). (Not sure if the situation has changed ?)
Now, IPv6 (when properly implemented, which is another failure mode) comes with much better safety out of the box (like not being able to scan all the suffixes in a reasonable amount of time to find computers on the local network to target), but I'm still impressed that now we seemingly have hundreds of millions of personal computers "directly" connected to the Internet with at best only the OS firewall as protection (when one exists), and it hasn't resulted in major hacking issues ! (yet.)
The difference is a direct IPv6 conmected Windows 7-11 is actually prepared to be on the internet in a way that Windows 95 never was.
There never really was any such thing as a safe network, but it used to be acceptable to assume LAN traffic was safe. Now we know you might be on airport wifi or a large corporate network with compromised systems and the OS and systems software needs to handle that.
Right - and pre-Windows Vista, you would have to install IPv6 support yourself ?
I guess the hackpocalypse will have to wait for when low-end computers (like those in tvs, cameras, personal assistants, connected doorbells, home automation, refrigerators) - you know, "Internet of Shit" that you can't really expect to feature its own firewall (?) finally get upgraded to IPv6 ? (How does it look like today ?)
Now, IPv6 (when properly implemented, which is another failure mode) comes with much better safety out of the box (like not being able to scan all the suffixes in a reasonable amount of time to find computers on the local network to target), but I'm still impressed that now we seemingly have hundreds of millions of personal computers "directly" connected to the Internet with at best only the OS firewall as protection (when one exists), and it hasn't resulted in major hacking issues ! (yet.)