Support for operating system Windows XP has been officially stopped by Microsoft from today.
The final update has finally been released for archaic operating system Windows XP today, meaning that providing no critical security vulnerabilities come to light, XP has only 1 month of protected operation remaining.
Released in 2001, XP pre-dates Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, and news of this deadline has been public for many months, giving users time to upgrade.
Security patches are designed to cover an operating system for about a month, so providing no critical vulnerabilities come to light in the next 4 weeks that would usually require an immediate patch, Windows XP has only a month of operation left before security vulnerabilities begin to become a potentially serious problem.
Of course this also means that Windows XP users will no longer be able to get help from Microsoft technical support for XP specific problems.
Windows XP users are strongly advised to upgrade their operating systems. If paying the piper (and by piper we mean Microsoft) is a moral obstacle, then there are a range of free Linux based operating systems available to download.
It is likely that security vulnerabilities effecting XP will become more of a widespread problem in the near future, as scammers will be more than aware that support for the aging software has ended.
Future patches that are released for later versions of Windows can even be reverse engineered by scammers looking to see what vulnerability they are protecting against, and use that to target XP users.
Those who continue to use XP will be at an increased risk of malware infections, identity theft, having their social media accounts compromised (which also puts that accounts social media contacts at risk) as well as a host of other online threats. Even third party antivirus will be pushed to keep users safe on the Internet.
So if you haven’t gotten the message yet, listen up. It’s time to move on from XP. Seriously.
