Some crackpot researchers at StillSecure have conducted a “honey pot” experiment, no doubt to get some media coverage. This is what they found:
Over the course of a week, the machines were scanned a total of 46,255 times by computers around the world that crawl the Web looking for vulnerabilities in operating systems.
Once the vulnerabilities were identified, the remote computers launched 4,892 direct attacks with a staggering variety of worms, Trojan Horses, viruses, spyware and other forms of malware.
They also found that up-to-date patches meant that no attacks were succesful, and actually, that the number of attacks dropped considerably. Anyway, that’s not the problem with this article. How many people have a single computer connected directly to the Internet? My guess is almost zero. Most people have multiple computers, so they have a router. Or they have wireless, which also requires a router. Your router blocks the vast majority of these “attacks”. I am not saying their research is wrong, but it’s definitely misleading.
On the other hand, I suppose many routers could be misconfigured, in which case they wouldn’t matter. Ah who cares, just make sure your computer is patched regularly 🙂
Read: DenverPost.com
MasterMaq's Blog 
Actually I think there are a large proportion of regular home users, especially of the ‘lite’ broadband services, who will connect directly. Plus all the dial-up users. XP SP2 FW and ISA works for me though 😉 ah my 2nd dissenting comment in a row…