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It's 2019, and One Third of Businesses Still Have Active Windows XP Deployments on the Net

posted by martyb on Tuesday July 30 2019, @09:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the Any-WfWG-FTW? dept.

jas writes:

There is a relatively old—though still fundamentally true—adage about Windows: Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft, as a specific subset of users (and businesses) only upgrade to the latest version of Windows kicking and screaming. According to SpiceWorks' Future of Network and Endpoint Security report, published Tuesday, 32% of organizations still have at least one Windows XP device connected to their network, despite extended support for XP ending in 2014. (Notably, the last variant of XP, Windows POSReady 2009, reached end of life in April 2019.)

With the looming end of free support for Windows 7, this reticence of users and enterprises to upgrade to newer versions of Windows is likely to create significant security issues. Presently, 79% of organizations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network, according to SpiceWorks, which also found that two thirds of businesses plan to migrate all of their machines off Windows 7 prior to the end of support on January 14, 2020, while a quarter will only migrate after that deadline.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-2019-and-one-third-of-businesses-still-have-active-windows-xp-deployments/

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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:08AM (2 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:08AM (#873425)

    As to the dangers from being hacked, XP can be hardened considerably. Firs thing to do is shut off all those services that weren't being used anyway.

    That's one good point about XP, you can shut down pretty much everything that makes an XP machine vulnerable with close to zero loss in functionality. There's a direct correspondence between unnecessary services and open ports, and once you've shut them down your vulnerability is dramatically decreased. With Windows 7 this was still somewhat possible, but with 8 and even more so 10 it's more or less impossible, every service depends on every other service so you need to keep the whole mass of crap running whether you need it or not, and there's so many hidden services and whatnot lurking in the background waiting to accept unchecked external data into their bug-riddled innards that you can never make it really secure.

    I bet I can make an XP machine safer to put on a network than a Windows 10 machine for precisely this reason.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:53AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:53AM (#873431)

    XP in a VM? Maybe. XP on a machine? Hell No. Quite a lot of networking hardware has vulnerabilities that won't get fixed...

    • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:56AM

      by toddestan (4982) on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:56AM (#873837)

      XP in a VM? Maybe. XP on a machine? Hell No. Quite a lot of networking hardware has vulnerabilities that won't get fixed...

      On the other hand, Windows XP will run on hardware that predates all the nonsense that makes that kind of thing possible.

      Have fun trying to hack my old K6 and 3Com 3C509B.