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Bob: Bob Coppedge, Crotchety Olde Geek here with Simplex-IT.
It's been a couple of months since I posted, so let's get right to it.
Key thing I want to talk to you about is Windows XP.
Now, most of you know Windows XP is reaching end of support
from Microsoft's standpoint on April 8th and
there was a recent announcement where they, sort of,
talked about extending support for it for a year.
Let's clear that up right out of the gate.
What they're gonna do is they're going to extend support
for their anti-virus and their security pieces,
so they'll continue to provide patches and updates to that,
but the core of the operating system, that's going away.
Does that matter?
Normally, for this sort of thing I sort of go,
"Well, yeah the program will still work."
"Don't worry about, you know, not that big of a deal."
Not in this case and here's why.
When we talk about security and by security I'm talking about
security from viruses, malware, all that good fun stuff.
There's really a triangle of support, if you will,
so there's three pieces that really have to work together
to maximize protection.
Now I want to be clear, nothing's 100% effective but
in this case, you first of all, we have our traditional
pieces or programs, anti-virus programs, firewalls,
malware protection, all of that kind of thing.
That forms the first part of the triangle.
The second part is user behavior. Don't go to that site,
don't click on that link, don't download, all that.
Even though the AV software and stuff can protect us,
nothing gets ... nothing protects 100% from users
who really, really want to look at the things
and that's assuming that we've given that user
administrative privileges which is usually the case with Windows XP.
The third is the operating system itself.
There are certain vulnerabilities that all operating systems have
and by that operating system I mean Windows XP, Windows 7,
Windows 8 (whispering) and Vista. I'm not forgetting Vista.
The problem is is that the software vendor, in this case Microsoft,
fixes those security holes.
The anti-virus programs can't protect against these security holes
that the operating system has or at least not against all of them.
So what'll happen is we have these security holes that are
in the operating system that the user won't protect against
because the user has administrative rights.
They may click on the wrong thing and the anti-virus program
can't protect against it because it's that third leg of the triangle, okay.
So that vulnerability is going to just simply get expanded
and so a vulnerability will be discovered
and no one will be there to patch it or protect it
and guess what'll happen?
The guys who write the an ... who write the viruses in the meantime,
they will see those opportunities 'cause that's what they are to them
and they will immediately see, so they're gonna be
very quickly out there taking advantage of these vulnerabilities.
and at the same time, the anti-virus authors,
the people who actually protect, they're gonna start saying,
"Why are we writing this software to protect against stuff"
"where there are these well-known, well documented holes?",
so they're gonna start dropping support.
And then you take a look at some of the programs,
some such as the ransomware where it essentially will
cripple your software, cripple your computer until you pay
this ransom and that has been very, very financially successful
for these guys, so there's gonna be a lot of financial incentive out there
for guys to develop breaches for these operating system security holes
that nobody is gonna be there to fix.
So in this particular case, Windows XP is going away
and if you were concerned about the security for your system,
you need to go away from XP.
This is the Crotchety Olde Geek, Bob Coppedge for Simplex-IT.
Catch ya later.