Depends on the scale of “going down”. Many mines are in the mountains and the material has to be brought down to lower elevations. The mine entry may be lower than the nearest pass but still a lot higher than the destination of the ore.
It actually takes a few trillion years but its fine because we just stop considering the “failed” universes because they will be gone soon™ anyway.
That is the “low tech”; works 100% of the time; will make your live easier in the future solution.
It takes longer than remounting but getting rid of a NTFS drive in a Linux only environment is a good move.
No, why would it? It will run code in the context of the current user which is absolutely enough to start a new process that will run in the background, download more code from a attacker server and allow remote access. The attacker will only have as much permissions as the user executing the code but that is enough to steal their files, run a keyloggers, steal their sessions for other websites etc.
They can try to escalate to the admin user, but when targeting private victims, all the data that is worth stealing is available to the user and does not require admin privs.
An open pit at an elevation of 1.5km still means the bottom of the pit could be 1km higher than the place the ore is processed at