Are almost certainly very much easier to exploit than similar vulnerabilities in Windows Vista and later, and.One real problem with XP SP3 is that left-over vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows, whether in the OS itself or in third-party applications that are from “long gone” vendors: present a needlessly large attack surface to hackers). The problem with that sort of approach to what’s now known as the Security Development Life Cycle is that a lot of those apps often also still do what they *weren’t* designed to do (e.g. Things look slightly better when you look at OS market share measured by a different company, Stats Counter, but there’s still an alarming number of PCs running XP.Īccording to Stat Counter, Windows XP represents 7.4% of all desktops in April 2016, down from 10.9% in April 2015.īut when you consider that Microsoft puts the number of Windows devices at more than 1 billion, we are still talking about tens of millions of computers today running a very old, very outdated, and very insecure operating system. Net Applications’ stats show that just under 1% of all desktops are running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion), which are no longer receiving security updates from Apple. Desktop OS market share, March 2016 (source: ).īy the way, there are some Mac OS X users who are using out-of-support versions, too, meaning they are also vulnerable to never-going-to-be-fixed security holes. To put that in perspective, according to Net Applications’ figures, Windows XP is still the third-most popular desktop OS, trailing only Windows 7 (51.9%) and Windows 10 (14.2%).Īnd there are more PCs running XP than Windows 8.1 (9.6%), and all versions of Mac OS X combined (7.8%). Windows XP was still running on 10.9% of all desktops as of March 2016, according to stats compiled by Net Applications. (Here's how to update to Windows 10 for free.And yet there are still millions of XP computers connecting to the internet, where all manner of malware is waiting to pounce. (Old hardware can run very nice versions of Linux, which cost nothing.) And if you're one of those stick-in-the-muds still running Windows 7, you have eight months to update those machines to Windows 10. If you're still running Windows XP on one of your primary-use machines, please update it to something more current. Now that I have your attention, it is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible to prevent such a scenario from happening." "While we have observed no exploitation of this vulnerability," the post adds, "it is highly likely that malicious actors will write an exploit for this vulnerability and incorporate it into their malware. "In other words, the vulnerability is 'wormable,' meaning that any future malware that exploits this vulnerability could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017. "This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction," the MSRC blog post says. ![]() ![]() Even worse, malware exploiting the flaw could spread from one infected computer to another on its own. The flaw lets, well, anyone do that without authorization, and without tipping off another user of the same computer. The vulnerability causing all the fuss is a flaw in Remote Desktop Services, which as the name implies lets you remotely control a far-off PC from a second PC.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |