Very true, i did not thought about it in that way, because the first thing i do when i get a new windows install is to show extensions and hidden files.
Ditto.
Because of how I priotitize them, I figure if someone doesn't know one of them, they probably don't know of both of them.
There was this one virus, once it infects your computer it disables your anti-virus, but lets it look like it's still working. Then it mails itself to everyone on your contact list. Every time a file is accessed after that, it would add itself to the file, even if it had already infected that file. Seriously, Explorer.exe would potentially become a multi-gig file, and it would keep doing that until it completely filled, then killed your HD.
One day, aparrently, one of our customers got infected, and once the attachment was opened it propagated itself all across the entire network of my parent's business, and the system came almost to a grinding halt. It was a blaster named virus, and at the time, one of the hardest to remove at the time. Complicating matters futther you couldn't use the antivirus for it. No Def yet, and when they did update, it didn't make a difference if the pc was already infected. I was the one who got stuck having to fix it all, and it was a bitch.
In order to spare myself the effort of a round trip, I said, "Fuck it," and downloaded the kill file and delivery system on an already compromised system. Figured it wouldn't hut anything, and at worst I'd "lose" 5 minutes... but on the flip side, could save me an hour of driving time. On that day, I gambled and won, but it doesn't always work out that way.
To this day I consider it an intentional 'bug.' It's as if MS wants average users to have to pay someone hundreds of dollars per system to fix them when it all could have been prevented by defaulting systems to show extensions, and remove the toggle entirely.
