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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30AM   Printer-friendly
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?"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:26PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:26PM (#11290)

    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.

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  • (Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:17PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:17PM (#11356) Journal

    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

    by ElderGeek (1387) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:59PM (#11372)

    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.