Governments buy time from Microsoft
Aavika
Author
April 17, 2014
Microsoft announced six years ago that 8th April 2014 onwards the Windows XP Operating System is going to be off the market. Which means there will be no more official security alerts and no bug remedies and shall be a favorite of hackers and other forms of cyber crimes.
"Effectively, every vulnerability discovered after 8 April will become a zero-day vulnerability - that is, one for which there is not and never will be, a patch," said Mr Emm, a senior research analyst at security firm in Kaspersky. Since March users have seen multiple threats to their OS security.
Although there are 20-25% of all users are who are too attached to Windows XP version, whereas others have started switching to the newer Windows 8 out in the market since some time. The next version, 8.1 has also appeared now.
But more than local population, its countries’ government that seem to be too emotionally involved with Windows XP, striking deals worth millions of bucks with Microsoft for extending deadlines for them and buying a way out of it. UK government signed a £5.5m deal and buying some more time. Dutch government has signed a deal for 40,000 PCs with XP used by civil servants. Many of the world’s ATMs are still working on XP OS. The Internal Revenue System, USA has paid millions of dollars to keep their more-than-half of the agency secured and fully functional going by Windows’ rate of $200 per computer as custom support. Windows XP shall support the systems till 2020 and finally ask them to convert into Windows 8.
Moral of the story- You can buy time and this is where government ends up spending money!
"Effectively, every vulnerability discovered after 8 April will become a zero-day vulnerability - that is, one for which there is not and never will be, a patch," said Mr Emm, a senior research analyst at security firm in Kaspersky. Since March users have seen multiple threats to their OS security.
Although there are 20-25% of all users are who are too attached to Windows XP version, whereas others have started switching to the newer Windows 8 out in the market since some time. The next version, 8.1 has also appeared now.
But more than local population, its countries’ government that seem to be too emotionally involved with Windows XP, striking deals worth millions of bucks with Microsoft for extending deadlines for them and buying a way out of it. UK government signed a £5.5m deal and buying some more time. Dutch government has signed a deal for 40,000 PCs with XP used by civil servants. Many of the world’s ATMs are still working on XP OS. The Internal Revenue System, USA has paid millions of dollars to keep their more-than-half of the agency secured and fully functional going by Windows’ rate of $200 per computer as custom support. Windows XP shall support the systems till 2020 and finally ask them to convert into Windows 8.
Moral of the story- You can buy time and this is where government ends up spending money!