Microsoft do a third of PC’s a favour. Sort of.
As we and all other sensible security outfits have been banging on about for the last year, Microsoft XP goes end of support in April THIS YEAR.
In a display of genuine goodwill, or an attempt to stop the fall out of mass infection (XP is still run on a third of PC’s worldwide), Microsoft has announced that ‘to help organisations complete their migrations’, it will continue to develop the antimalware signatures and engine for Windows XP until July 14 2015.
Before you all dance a little jig and reallocate your Microsoft XP migration budget into something of value like, for instance, an ITC NetSure360° managed security deployment, be aware that vulnerabilities to XP discovered after April 2014 will not be patched and will present rich pickings for hackers who may even be able to reverse engineer the patches for the supported Vista platform in order to exploit the vulnerable pensioner XP as easily as selling her a new drive (hard or tarmac).
So as the OSX, Android and Linux camps buy ringside seats for the forthcoming hackathon, we still urge you to migrate any XP machines you have as soon as possible.
Deploying an ITC NetSure360° managed security solution built on our five steps to infrastructure security, will enable you to discover attacks against systems old and new, automatically prioritising them in line with your vulnerability posture, enabling you to react to threats appropriately and in a timely fashion.
If you would like to discuss these issues, or anything about secure performance networking, please contact us at: [email protected] or call 020 7517 3900
