SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
LaminatorX
on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30AM
from the unplugging-the-network-cable dept.
from the unplugging-the-network-cable dept.
Appalbarry writes:
"Microsoft is about to abandon Windows XP to the wolves. Fair enough it's ancient. However, there are still going to be a lot of XP boxes out there, and a fair number of them are unlikely to ever get upgraded until the hardware dies.
My question is: what's available to help make this old OS stay reasonably secure and safe for the people who can't or won't abandon it?
Over the years I've been through Central Point Antivirus, Norton, McAfee, AVG, stuff like Zone Alarm, and of course the various Microsoft anti-malware offerings. But since moving over to Linux I really haven't kept up on the wild and wonderful world of Windows security tools.
Suggestions?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Bokononist on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:33AM
No amount of antivirus is going to stop an unpatched windows box being successfully attacked, I think it's been mentioned a few times that the vulnerabilities that are going to be used by attackers are the ones that are reverse engineered from the patches handed out to supported windows machines. These vulnerabilities will remain there forever, and as such the best advice is use it for an offline machine. The problem is that most people that are still on xp use it for web surfing and itunes(and whatever dodgy filesharing site they can find Bearshare usually.). Now I know some are using it for legacy software etc. but these people are generally geeks and will heed the advice doled out here. Most users will not even be aware of what's happening, and this is a large majority imo, especially developing nations and the poorer parts of 1st world countries (facts pulled from my arse), these are the targets and they will be rinsed until their machine breaks and they have to buy a new one.
The best advice, that is the advice that I think is the most likely to be listened to and therefore effective is to use an pirate copy of windows 7 and save up for a genuine one in their own time, not that they'll follow the second bit. The only way you could get these people to use a VM is if you put a script on there to boot into it automatically, but we're talking about people who eill likely not be aware this is happening so why would they come to you in the first place?
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:26PM
You could remove the word "unpatched" from the first line and still be correct.
Most people stuck on XP in my experience are not surfing the web, they're running a $500K FTIR spectrometer, personally I run an old eprom programmer, or they running a CNC machine tool, or a video generator / automation system in the broadcast industry, or something similar.
If my eprom programmer lives behind a stateful firewall, never runs a web browser, never runs anything but the eprom programmer software which autostarts on boot, well, all that really matters is Samba continuing to support XP to make it easy to burn images. And if that goes away I'd use the web browser to download from an intranet site.
I have two XP installs, one runs steam and nothing else for the games that don't run on linux steam, and one runs an eprom burner and nothing else. Fairly safe.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:17PM
We have an NT4 install at work that runs a sonic welder. It has NEVER been connected to any net, and you have to physically open the electrical cabinet, then access the little mini-tower in order to plug anything into it. It's perfectly secure - or so it seems. It's welded many millions of parts now, and it seems to still be doing the same job it has always done.
I don't know how we got that Windows machine - we have several other welders produced by the same company, all of which run Linux.
(Score: 1) by ElderGeek on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:59PM
I wish our CNC machine ran on XP, it only speaks NETBEUI and not the version packaged in Windows XP. I have run it in a Windows 98 VM. It seemed like a good idea back in '06, and it seems even a better idea now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:59PM
If people were concerned about security, they wouldn't use Windows. Windows 7 and 8 are vulnerable so why change?