End of Security Support for Windows XP SP2

2010-07-14

John Leyden, The Register, writes that many organizations are ill-prepared for the end of security support for Windows XP SP2, potentially leaving a huge population of vulnerable machines for hackers to exploit.

The article states that July's Patch Tuesday marked the closure of patching support for both Win 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2. From now on there'll be no security updates, hotfixes and other updates for Windows XP Service Pack 2 - regardless of how serious a threat any newly discovered vulnerability may pose to users stuck on the OS.

Leyden writes that upgrading to Windows 7 may not be an option for sys admins supporting older PCs. Moving to XP SP3 is simpler but still poses application capability problems that means many corporates have been slow to move on, especially in the previous absence of any compelling reason to upgrade.

Dave Marcus, research and communications director for McAfee Labs, stated that "Many enterprises and consumer users still deploy and depend heavily on applications that run on this Windows build. It is unclear how much risk and expense the end of support will cause users worldwide but we expect cybercriminals to capitalize on this opportunity."