Posted on 04/08/2015 5:05:37 PM PDT by Utilizer
Even though the deadline for any type of support for Windows XP was up last April, many organisations are still using the venerable operating system to power their PCs and the applications that run on them.
But XP was never a truly secure OS to begin with and despite numerous patches over the years, new vulnerabilities have been found. Of course, since April 2014, no more updates have been provided by Microsoft on general release and this has left anyone still running XP very much exposed to hacking and security breaches.
According to figures from IT security firm Secunia taken from scans by its Personal Software Inspector, around 15.17% of computers around the world are still using Windows XP. Nearly 18% of users are still running with an old version of Internet Explorer.
(Excerpt) Read more at techradar.com ...
Yes. If your OS matters when it comes to hackers it’s because your corporate firewall stinks, at which point your OS once again doesn’t matter.
I’ve read about cases where firewalls were bypassed by USB sticks left in bathrooms, or just left on the ground outside of entry doors or in the parking lot.
If they’re using a USB stick they have physical access, so you’re already hosed. Best case scenario there your security is so good they take the whole computer to hack it at their leisure.
They didn't have physical access. They just left the USB sticks laying around where someone who did have physical access would pick it up, carry it in, and plug it in to see what was on it.
For a business that sees no need to upgrade some perfectly good software that runs great on XP...... Keep those XP machines
But I would keep them off the internet due to security problems and prolly only old browser versions can be used due to the new far superior and secure versions of Firefox etc being too burdensome on XP
These small businesses could run XP (and their old reliable software) virtually on brand spankin new computers that would then be fine (secure) on the internet with Windows 7-8-10 etc. New desktops-laptops are cheap these days
An interesting suggestion, but I feel I must point out that you are overlooking the ‘driver’ problem. If the machine is fairly new, the manufacturers most assuredly did not bother to include any drivers for XP so it will have a hard time properly displaying on the monitor, not to mention the system bridge chips which control things like internal drives, sound, and networking to name just a few. Then there is the USB 3.0 standard which was not around when XP was first released. Add in SSDs and flash drives and one can only imagine some of the difficulties that would be encountered. :(
Come on. When XP is used in a virtualized fashion then windows 7-8-10 takes care of the rest. XP is treated like just another piece of software within windows 7-8-10
Oh, I see the difficulty. You are discussing running XP in a “virtual” environment, not running it as the default OS on a newer machine.
You need to make these distinctions much clearer at the outset, mate.
I have not had the opportunity to run XP or earlier versions in a Virtual Environment, so I cannot comment as to how well that works out. Considering the fact that you must register win7 and above after a certain time to continue using it, My comment that using it as the default boot OS appears to still be relevant.
In a Virtual Environment is quite different and I am not familiar with how the windows-drivers issue will affect things, so I will leave it to more experienced users than I to comment upon how well this might work out in the real world.
Cheers!
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