ID: IRCNE2013112005
Date: 2013-11-04
According to "computerworld", Microsoft yesterday again put the scare into Windows XP users, telling them that after April 8, 2014, the chance that malware will infect their PCs could jump by two-thirds.
"After end of support, attackers will have an advantage over defenders who continue to run Windows XP," Rains asserted in a Tuesday post to a company blog. "After April next year, when we release monthly security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will try and reverse engineer them to identify any vulnerabilities that also exist in Windows XP. If they succeed, attackers will have the capability to develop exploit code to take advantage of them."
"In the two years after Windows XP Service Pack 2 went out of support, its malware infection rate was 66% higher than Windows XP Service Pack 3 -- the last supported version of Windows XP."
Support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) ended in July 2010, a little over two years after the release of XP SP3.
"Anyone can understand why any OS manufacturer wants to dedicate resources for new versions of their OS," said Pingree in an email. "However, security patch availability should be based on market share and penetration rates, otherwise the manufacturer does a disservice to its customers.
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