On July 13, Microsoft will officially retire Windows XP Service Pack 2. Although it will continue to provide security updates for XP Service Pack 3, it will stop providing patches for the older SP2. Microsoft offers support for its products for five years and extended support for another five years. For XP SP2, that journey comes to an end on July 13. Windows XP 3 will be supported until April 2014.
Microsoft issues security updates and other core operating system patches every second Tuesday of the month, known as Patch Tuesday. Whereas most home users typically install these patches automatically, corporate users usually install service packs and security updates manually and only after extensive testing. For large corporate environments, operating system upgrades are often a very perilous and expensive exercise.
According to security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, 50 percent of the several hundred thousand PCs it monitors for its clients are still running Windows XP SP2. Most of these are probably user desktops, but some may also be applications and appliances that use Windows XP 2 as the base platform. Upgrading such systems may make them inoperable.
According to Sajed Naseem, principal at Washington DC based security firm, Secure Intervention,
" The longer these systems linger after the July 13 deadline, the more vulnerable they become. There will undoubtedly be many Windows XP 2 systems still out there and hackers know that. Only there will no longer be security patches coming from Microsoft as new holes are discovered and publicized."
About William McBorrough William McBorrough is President and Information Security Subject Matter Expert at Washington, DC based Information Security and Technology Services Firm Secure Intervention, where he specializes in Security Assessments, Compliance Readiness, IT and Security Management and Cloud Computing Security for both public and private sector enterprises. He is also an Adjunct College Professor teaching Systems Architecture, Networking, Network Attacks and Defense, and Security Program Development courses. He holds CISSP, CISA, and CEH certifications and is pursuing a Phd in Information Security with a concentration in Information Security and Assurance.
SYS-CON's International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, held each year in California, New York and Prague is the leading event covering the fast-emerging Cloud Computing market for Enterprise IT professionals. Co-located with the International Virtualization Conference & Expo, the combined event will surely deliver the #1 i-Technology educational and networking opportunity of the year for those seeking to establish a market lead anywhere in the multiple layers of the Cloud Computing ecosystem.
Senior Technologists including CIOs, CTOs, VPs of technology, IT directors and managers, network and storage managers, network engineers, enterprise architects, communications and networking specialists, directors of infrastructure Business Executives including CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, presidents, VPs, directors, business development; product and purchasing managers.
Cloud Computing Journal aims to help open the eyes of Enterprise IT professionals to the economics and strategies that utility/cloud computing provides. Cloud computing - the provision of scalable IT resources as a service, using Internet technologies - potentially impacts every aspect of how IT deploys and operates software.
Government IT Conference & Expo 2009 Allstar Conference Faculty Lineup Will Include...
In other words, VMware’s server density is higher. Boles suggests this means that customers should be “assessing virtualisation on a ‘cost per application’ basis. VM density has a sign
Traditionally, the way people have implemented high availability is by using a high-availability management package like Linux-HA[1], then configure it in detail for each application, file system moun
About Newsfeeds / Video Feeds
.gif)
