Tuesday 8th of April 2014,
a page of the computer industry has been turned! Windows XP is dead! Of course,
I had to write a blog post about this event. For months now, Microsoft warned
its customers that XP won’t be supported starting from today. Do you remember:
Windows XP was available on floppies and had – in the beginning – no
native USB support! What does it mean today? From a end-users’ point of
view, their computer will not collapse! No need to repeat some voodoo formulas,
it will boot again and work like yesterday… Except if something bad happens. In
this case, Microsoft won’t help you (instead they will be very happy to propose
you an upgrade to
Windows 8.1). Well, this is not 100% true: Microsoft is still ready to “offer”
you some support if you subscribe to their Premium Service program! (Business
is business)
Things are more nasty from a security point of view! Your
computer will still run but will be vulnerable to new attacks. By “new” I
mean the ones that will be discovered (because XP will be a very nice target
seeing its installed base – see the graph below). But I’m also pretty sure that
some vulnerability have been discovered for a while and kept below the radar
ready to be used in the wild. And this may occur very soon tomorrow. People are still
migrating to a newer operating system and the surface attacks will reduce
itself with time. For an attacker perspective, this is the right time!
But, is this old Windows XP still a problem? People are having
quite a long time to switch to alternative OS .
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