I think it was more people clicking on links being sent to them in IM, emails or other personal messaging.
I used to for fun 2001 to 2006 or so, run a fresh install of 98se which I had burned to CD, recovery was about 20 mins perhaps a bit less, (read however long it took to copy a 600 meg image to hard drive) and cruised the net. No security as such, just seeing what was out there, what ports being probed etc. I rarely had any issues. Yes of course when I was tormenting some large wannabe hacker forum (read script kiddies) where one or more had decided to prove themselves by attacking a couple of harmless looking forums, yes I think they managed to get in pretty quickly iirc about five minutes. For giggles after a couple of times (they got quicker) I switched over to a live linux cd ... but since one of their members had outdone themselves and annoyed people who unlike myself quite happy with my new chew toys, ... I figured just a matter of time before my fun would end ... their forum strangely packed it at end of week :) In all of it, my only issue albeit a very serious one, was contaminated backups, which occurred when was when I was "tagged" in 2003 with something, which was so unique that last time I scanned a copy of the infected system in 2009-10, it still didn't raise any flags with the latest anti malware or root kit detection available at the time.
