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from the Alt-right-plot-to-rule-the-world-through-Windows-exploitables dept.
This was just too funny not to submit. Do you not have the latest keyboard-logging Windows 10 on your, um computer? Not your computer, you know. But now, it turns out, according to the formerly great tech journal ZDNet, you are at risk! "Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
But, wait for it, only if you run Windows.
Over half of applications installed on Windows PCs are out-of-date, potentially putting the security of users at risk through flaws in software that have already been patched by vendors.
Around 55 percent of software installed on PCs across the globe is in the form of an older version of the application, according to research by security company Avast — and that number has risen from 48 percent in their previous report.
Based upon anonyimized[sic] and aggregated data from 163 million devices around the world, Avast's PC trends report also suggests that almost one in six Windows 7 users and one in ten Windows 10 users are running out-of-date versions of their operating system, also leaving them open to exploitation of system-level security vulnerabilities.
Some of the programs most commonly left out-of-date include Adobe Shockwave, VLC Media Player, Skype, Java Runtime Environment, and 7-Zip Filemanager.
Putting off installing updates and running outdated applications can cause bugs and incompatibility problems for users, but more significantly, running out-of-date software can provide an open door for hackers to take advantage of holes left in programs that haven't had critical security updates applied.
Well, there it is. If you run Windows, you are running a security risk. Funny they would think how current your capitulation to the "Dark Side" is would make any difference. But on the other hand, the advice in general is good, just do not run anything out of Redmond, where the Dark Lord rules, and keep up to date on security patches. Except on my Android Phone. They ask me to do security upgrades, and I think, "Why?" I cannot remove the goddamned bloat-ware they put on goddamned thing, and they want me to approve upgrades? Hell no! I will rot in hell with my aging Android phone, with a version of Android nearly as old as I am, because the bastards will not allow me to upgrade to a more current version!
If Linux did shit like this, systemd aside, I would be BSD all the way. Sorry, too much commentary for a submission. But, really? Am I wrong?
P.S. When exactly did ZDNet take the tumble? Does anyone remember? Was it with the review of the new Microsoft Disk Compression Utility?
(Score: 3, Disagree) by driverless on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:30AM (10 children)
Sheesh. I think I just time-warped back into the 1990s from reading that. The ZDNet article is interesting enough in terms of the data it represents (although I think unpatched servers are a vastly bigger problem than an out-of-date copy of 7Zip on mom's email PC), but the 1990s-level anti-Microsoft whining kinda overshadows it all. And I'm saying that as a non-Windows user. The bash-Micro$oft-bandwagon was fashionable twenty years ago, but we've kinda moved on...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:40AM
As long as there is some vestige of the horse remaining, it is not without purpose that we beat it.
And the FUD, and the Fear, and the sole platform for games, all these will be gone, and Paul Atreides, . . . Lost my literary thread. We were beating Worms, to extract their Spice, no? Seventies? Do you refer to the film, or to the corpus?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:29AM (1 child)
Windows 10 is much more consumer-abusive than anything Microsoft did in the 90's.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:19PM
I hadn't thought of that before, but it's true. Microsofts' previous "evil" was mostly anti-competitive behavior that was bad for the industry and selling poor quality software. Their current "evil" aimed more at the consumer.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:58PM (1 child)
I paid £100 for an OS that *advertises* at me. Note Android, which is a free as in beer operating system run by the biggest advertising outfit in the world (well maybe), does not advertise at me.
£100!
It is the most expensive software license that I own bar none.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stretch611 on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:21PM
As much as I prefer Android to its competitors...
The OS may not overtly advertise to you... but like Win10, it does slurp your personal data.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:05PM (3 children)
While there is evil, it must be fought. Do you TRULY think Microsoft has turned over a new leaf? Do you really and honestly think they're any better morally now than they were in the mid 90s? Don't delude yourself; the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The leopard, as Nanny Ogg says, does not change his shorts. Indeed, the way corporations work, he cannot.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:30PM
Microsoft never turned over a new leaf, they just tried to cover up their true intentions until the DoJ let up on them. In the process they made a lot of relatively inexperienced developers and computer enthusiasts think they were a company with good intentions and was "with it" in regards to things like interoperability and open source software. The raw speed with which they made up for lost time with Windows 10 is disturbing, including the changes they made to the UEFI standard for secure boot for Windows 10 (which seems like it's an attempt to slowly progress towards disallowing you to boot "unapproved" operating systems, e.g. no longer requiring companies to let you bypass secure boot as it was in the days of Windows 8 and the DoJ's oversight).
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:00AM (1 child)
I'm not saying Microsoft is good or bad, I'm saying that the point of a news site like this is to report the news, not engage in a bunch of juvenile whining. That's what the comments section is for. Compare the presentation here with the one on that other site [slashdot.org]. No whining, just a statement of what was found, and people can decide for themselves.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:58AM
And if only all those trade unionists, Jews, and other undesireables had just been POLITE with the Nazis, the Holocaust would never have happened. Tone trolling has replaced patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel. If facts are delivered in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried on a combination of cocaine and helium, they are still just as factual even if you want to rip your ears off from how annoying the voice delivering them is.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @07:04PM
The reason Windows bashing was always so popular was the requirement to reinstall every day, and the constant BSOD as has been mentioned by other posters.
At that time Windows was bashed on terms of performance, stability, security. The one and only thing that's improved is the BSODs and stability, they finally managed to do this.
But what happened from my perspective is people stopped bashing windows because this one problem was solved, and so they were let off the hook.
My argument is that fixing just one of these problems whilst enhancing the problems they already have (plus adding a privacy nightmare, and alienating all desktop users) is not a valid reason to let them off the hook, and they should never have been. The trend should never have stopped. Long live Windows bashing ;-)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:32AM (10 children)
Frost Pist: As a general rule, I try not to comment, at least under my own username, on my own submissions. Second, I have not run Windows since Win95, when I was Blue Screened to Death. So have fun, Soylentils! On Piste!
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:45AM (8 children)
Yau foiled on this part.
You failed on this part, too.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:00AM (1 child)
Yao [wikipedia.org] foiled, but did Shun [wikipedia.org]? If I were the alleged aristarchus [wikipedia.org], posting as an AC [slashdot.org], in what sense would warning others be a foil [youtube.com]?
(Score: 3, Touché) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:49AM
Generally . . .
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:32AM (5 children)
Give artichokes a break. He isn't very good posting or submitting. Maybe he should try the "not posting" thing on all posts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:12PM (2 children)
It's a Windows aggravation thingy. Kind of like when you forget to close a window in your house and Ethanolfueled crawls in and drinks your stash of baileys.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:15PM (1 child)
What? Ethanol-fueled does that shit? That's another reason to lock my windows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @02:52PM
Naaah leave a bottle on the bench put a bear trap on the floor and let the problem take care of itself
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:20PM
I didn't even notice it was Arti, where is all the alt-right conspiracies and Nazis? The post is clearly lacking in content for it being a proper post.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:07PM
He's one king hell mountain of a lot better than at least 1/3 of the commentariat here, especially when he's not trolling. I'd rather read a threadfull of Aristarchus replies than more of VLM's "scientific" racism or Runaway's delusional paranoid ranting or jmorris's...jmorris-ing.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 23 2019, @06:33PM
I try not to comment, at least under my own username, on my own submissions.
Why?
If you saved the editorializing for the comments you'd probably get more stories accepted....
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:43AM (1 child)
Windoze software is packaged with local copies of required libraries, you can bet most of the libraries will be very outdated.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:11PM
Yes, but blame it on "DLL hell".
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:51AM (4 children)
run it in a VM guest with a Host-Only Adapter (VBox) or equiv, and pipe all guest networking through proxies running on the Linux VM host. Keep the host and proxy software updated.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:34AM (2 children)
So, the host of my host is my proxie?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:12PM
Yes, but a magical proxie from a VM land far away, sprinkling magical proxie dust everywhere.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:14PM
If you hold your hand to to your ear and listen carefully . . .
. . . in the background you can hear the blue scream of death!
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @06:02PM
Heh heh heh. Windows (as in XP, maybe 7) are still fine to run. Install and isolate (zero network, zero updates). Not 100% guaranteed secure, but better than allowing Microsoft 2.0 to "update" your system to ex-your system.
IF you need to (still) run Windows...
Over in Linuxland, we have systemd. :(
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:56AM (4 children)
I needed to test something on windows so booted up that partition and started installing/running it. I left the room thinking I'd come back to see it complete in an hour or so, but instead saw the computer had rebooted. I can only assume this was an "update". How do people use this for real work?
(Score: 4, Funny) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:25AM (2 children)
With much embarrassment, when you get a 5-minute restart warning part-way through an important presentation..
Savvy users spend the day before these sot of meetings forcing updates, just in case they get lucky, and make it through half a day without those pop ups. Note, they only appear during imptant meetings and prsentations. Normally, you can go a whole week without your computer restarting itself.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:10AM (1 child)
Savvy users...don't use Windows! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:27AM
I use whatever the company paying me allocates to me, That way corporate email, share drives and 'special' software all work*, and nothing I have "done" on my own machine can be blamed for any "issues" - using their machine, with their IT support, means you are not going to get blamed when email borks, or your share drives disappear. As few corp IT people can diagnose much (reboot, reinstall, maybe force BIOS update) and even fewer know anything about networking, putting a *nix box on their network is just asking to be blamed for, well, *everything* that goes wrong on any device attached to the network, even after you've left.
Best just to use their box, with whatever OS (usually WIn7 or Win10, these days) and just make sure you include an allowance for pain and suffering when you negotiate your day rate.
* as well as any of it works, no better or worse than any other person working at the company
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Touché) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:14AM
I used to wonder that: Does the richest man in the world (back then a bit) REALLY put up with this blue screen shit? Then watched the video of his presentation where Windows blue screened on him and thought, Wow...what a luser.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by ewk on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:25AM
From the article: "If you run Windows, you are running a security risk."
"If you run Windows, you are a running security risk." might cover it better :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:32AM (4 children)
Wouldn't it be nice if you could trust that your computer would be functionally intact after accepting security updates? Perhaps Microsoft and other vendors should work on their consumer trust before complaining that people don't want to update.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:54AM (3 children)
Since the dirty trick that Microsoft played "updating" users' Windows 7/8 to WIndows 10, I have turned off updates on all Windows machines around here. (Mrs Nuke's, and the dual bootable/ VM copies that I have).
I have made the judgment that I can cope with viruses, encryption, data theft, or any other type of malware better than I can cope with WIndows updates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:07PM (2 children)
I made that call when XP service pack 2 or 3 capped the number of outgoing network connections, supposedly to fight SPAM-generating malware, hat just so happened to murder torrent speeds as well. A few years later I made the permanent GNU+Linux jump.
I still consider grabbing on of those SD card to SATA adapters, installing XP and then switching on the write-protect switch so that a rebbot would wipe out anything that may infect it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:53PM
Unfortunately, full blown Windows requires RW access to the disk it boots from for various things to work.
Someone here, I think, in a previous discussion pointed in the direction of this software http://www.toolwiz.com/lead/toolwiz_time_freeze/ [toolwiz.com]
I've not really much use for Windows these days, but I'm still running Win7 on two laptops for occasional access to commercial graphics software the company paid for, I installed this not really because of the Microsoft BS (though it helps there) more like I was getting rather pissed off with one of these graphics packages installing updates on the fly which 'break' the system as far as my 'workflow' (urgh!) is concerned..even though these updates are supposedly switched off, it still fscking does it, so now, when it does, one reboot later, they're gone and the machine is back to a known usable state...yes, I do need to configure the firewall on Win7 to block the fscker from talking to the network etc, but as I said, occasional use..so low priority.
I've not done the extreme test yet of deliberately infecting the thing with a virus and seeing how well it really does protect the system, all I can say is that it works for me for what I need it to do (so much so, I'll be buying a license even though the free version works fine), but, as always, YMMV.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 23 2019, @04:18PM
Still risky. Malware could theoretically flash your BIOS, inflect device firmware or microcode.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:44AM (6 children)
I admit that I rarely upgrade things unless I have to. If things work and does what I want I usually don't bother. New versions are not necessarily better versions, yes they might fix bug but more of then not they seem to add "features" that I do not want that only seem to bloat the software in question. That said there is also the case of newer things quite often breaking things. There is a reason you don't allow mission critical or just generally important things to auto-update, Windows comes to mind. Just this autumn there have been how many almost horribly system breaking patches and updates that have deleted user content or just broken the system? At least two I seem to recall from the top of my head.
Then there is also that question of why would these programs need internet access? Why does 7-zip need internet access to compress (or decompress) files? VLC doesn't need it either to play audio and video, you might need it if you want it to grab and play stuff from online but beyond that. As a stand alone media player it sure as hell doesn't. They, just as more or less every application, shouldn't have permission to communicate with the internet, there really is no reason for them to have that when it comes to their primary function. There are way to many applications these days that do seem to phone home under the guise of checking for updates. As long as they do that I'll keep blocking them since it's not a needed function of the software to perform the primary function.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:02AM (3 children)
I have a feeling it is because quantum ethnoscientists are at the verge of revealing humans are quad-dimensional primates, who gain consensus via holographic mammalian belief systems. Good luck making sense of that without connecting 7zip to the internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:18PM (2 children)
Dude, really? Let me tell you how I know your idea is bogus: you didn't mention the lizard people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:27PM (1 child)
You mean the reptilians?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwb888dVYAAaFX8?format=jpg&name=small [twimg.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @07:59PM
Those are Red Dresses, technically speaking anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:40PM
Direct Internet access by an outdated application isn't the only vector for exploit. If they process files which you've _downloaded_ from the Internet, then there is still a risk.
For example for 7-zip, you might unknowingly download a malicously malformed archive, which when decompressed _locally_ with a vulnerable 7-zip version, can exploit the vulnerability and possibly run arbitrary code depending on the severity of exploit and may be able to chain further exploits in e.g. the underlying OS. I'd expect a patched version of 7-zip would fail to process such maliciously malformed archive, either noisily, or silently discarding the bad bits.
Similar for media players like VLC. There may be vulnerabilities in various codec implementations (and there have been), with which a malicious media file can exploit when played _locally_ on the machine.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 25 2019, @05:20PM
VLC embeds into Firefox. You click a link and a movie is embedded into the page. Embedded VLC launches to render it. Your vulnerable version is now exploited.
You download a .zip from a place you trust implicitly. The hotspot you are connecting to is compromised and that non-https downloaded zip is replaced transparently by version that exploits your vulnerable version of 7-zip.
In either of these cases malicious code is now running on your machine. If they then chain in an elevation of privilege vulnerability you are pwned... and if you are on a network where you use those same creds on another machine, that machine is an easy lateral traversal move away from being pwned too.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:36AM (2 children)
I think my Flash player is at version 23, and my 7za is dated 2006. Sometimes I use PKZip instead. No need to worry about JRE though since I don't use it.
Considering that my personal info was already leaked in multiple high-profile breaches of organizations which are not run by me, (and there have been a few fraud attempts) I see no reason to prioritize securing my personal machines against unlikely threats. That goes double for software updates which cause a performance/usability hit because of developers making dumb tradeoffs.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 25 2019, @05:23PM (1 child)
The problem with your approach isn't for you. You're right, your PC and info is already firmly in someone else pocket. The problem with doing this is that now your PC is going to be part of a botnet army to attack others.
You ignore not only your own safety; you imperil others.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday January 25 2019, @09:08PM
It's been a while since I've heard this bit of FUD. Probably because botnets have moved on to IoT. Compared to IoT, mobile users, or the ones with always-on telemetry, phone-home DRM, and automatic-this automatic-that, I'd be more likely to notice mysterious traffic/processes that shouldn't exist on my gear.
Although I'm not sure why I should even care about such things. Considering the shameless, relentless quest by website operators, software vendors, and everyone else to track, control, and shove ads in the face of users these days, any standard of conduct on the internet that may have existed has sunk into the mud by now. It's every man for himself.
(Score: 2) by deimios on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:58AM
Well I don't know why people don't update their MS programs. Maybe because they tend to break things? When did the October update roll out again?
Recently they updated Microsoft office and broke word wrapping in excel cells that contain unicode characters in the string. A feature that worked fine since Office 97.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:14PM
and I might upgrade more often. A year or two back LibreOffice Draw moved things around, things I rely on. Took a couple hours dorking with it to figure out where stuff went, and preferred the older way once I figured it out.
Haven't updated LibreOffice since, and probably won't until I get a new laptop.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:50PM (1 child)
Most desktop applications are simply not designed with "security" in mind. But you don't usually feed them constant streams of untrusted data, so they usually don't need to be.
A web browser needs to be updated as it is constantly exposed to untrusted data. Browser plugs in such as PDF readers either need to be updated or isolated (what idiot thought it was a good idea to open PDFs and other non-web shit inside a web browser anyway!)
But your various games and productivity applications usually don't matter one bit if you are using something "oooooolllllddd". Heck, that is why Windows still exists at all. Because people need to run that 1997 productivity application that makes their business go even though the company that wrote it went out of business in 2001. There is still a Windows 32-bit version of Windows 10 that can run Windows 3.1 and DOS applications!
And more often than not the latest and greatest:
- Still has piles of "security" problems, even if they fix one that happened to be exploited. Soory, your latest up to date stuff is STILL NOT "SECURE"! Whaaah!
- The latest and greatest made changes that make the current version unusable. Happens all the damn time. Vendor removes a key feature that you NEED. Or they re-arrange the UI to make it harder to use or the new version is slower. Soorry, the only solution is to stick with the ooooold version!
- The latest and greatest now includes spyware, malware, and/or adware. I can't even count the applications that have gone down this drain. Hey, asshole software vendors: Fuck you. I'll stick with the older version. It is usually these same assholes who are crying "your old stuff is not secure!!"
- Or as mentioned, the vendor is long gone. The "oooold" version I have is all that there is. Oh, sure, some other scummy asshole software vendor still wants to cry about security because they want you to switch to their own new, different, unusable, malware ridden implementation of the software. Oh, look, and the new version is in "teh clowds" so you have to pay a monthly subscription now too!
Honestly, these days anyone who cries about something being out of date sounds like a retarded 2-year old just parroting marketing drivel.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday January 24 2019, @05:11AM
I would rather open a PDF in my browser than a local app. Given all of the shit that is possible in a PDF file, I would rather use something that a lot of people have their eyes on where potential problems will be quickly discovered and patched than a five year old PDF reader in maintenance mode that probably has a gazillion buffer overflow and RCE exploits just waiting to be violated, or will otherwise fail to display a significant proportion of PDF files.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:53PM
Do you refer to DoubleSpace, or to DriveSpace? Either way, they ripped it from Stac.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:19PM
Even many "up to date" Windows applications are ancient cruft from the 1990s, or 2000s. Look like they were written in VB or worse.
The ENTIRE value proposition of Windows is the legacy software -- which is the security problem of Windows.
Microsoft efforts to have a "windows" without the legacy apps all flopped. Windows 8 Metro interface. ARM versions of Windows that can't run legacy apps. If it doesn't run legacy apps, then what value does it have over competitors? It has negative value even because of the abusive advertising and preloaded crapware.
If you took away the legacy app compatibility, then all of a sudden other OS alternative start to look pretty good: Mac. Chrome OS. Even desktop Linux looks pretty good.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:56AM
I'm not helping to increase the click count of such shite articles leading them to make more.
Then again I rarely read anything on ZDnet. They're the shallow trashy goss mag of the tech world.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 25 2019, @05:14PM
This is why Microsoft made it so hard to disable or break updates in Win10.
They don't want 1-in-10 machines to be unpatched any more than you do. Every one of those machines runs the risk of being another zombie in someone's botnet. We're not talking about script kiddies either, we're talking about botnets owned and wielded by state actors and dedicated persistent criminal groups where black hat work is a business that pays the bills and keeps the lights on.