Secunia says that only a few users actually upgraded to a different OS version

May 13, 2014 09:24 GMT  ·  By

Windows XP remains one of the most popular OS worldwide, even in Microsoft's home market and despite Redmond's efforts to emphasize that staying on an unsupported platform is a very risky decision.

In some statistics sent to us by Secunia, the security company says that in January and February 2014 no less than 18 percent of the users in the United States were still running Windows XP, while the percentage dropped to 17 percent in the first week after end of support was officially announced.

A 1 percent drop was also recorded one week after that, while the drop to 15 percent was completed in week four after XP end of life, Secunia says.

This means that millions of users are still running XP right now and today Microsoft is releasing the first Patch Tuesday rollout that does not contain any fixes for this particular OS version.

Secunia warns that this Patch Tuesday is particularly dangerous for Windows XP users because some of the flaws that might exist in the other Windows versions could also be included in the unsupported OS version, so hackers might reverse some of the released fixes to find a way to break into computers.

“Generally speaking, newly discovered vulnerabilities in XP will be unpatchable for private users, and therefore we will see a rise in attacks,” Kasper Lindgaard, director of Research and Security at Secunia, said. “XP users will in future basically be 'free-for-all' to hackers, who can create and use exploits at will.”

“Additionally, future patches to the other Windows operating systems will be reverse engineered by hackers, seeking to discover which vulnerabilities were fixed by Microsoft, and subsequently – if applicable – modified to work against Windows XP,” he added.

According to third-party statistics, Windows XP remains the second most-used operating system worldwide after Windows 7, which continues to lead the charts basically all over the world. The problem for Windows XP users is that Microsoft is pushing them to update to Windows 8, but such a process would also involve hardware upgrades that would make it more expensive.

As a result, Microsoft itself is trying to deal with the pricing issue by bringing more affordable devices to the market with the help of partners across the globe, but it remains to be seen how many users are actually convinced by the software giant to abandon the good old Windows XP for a new device running Windows 8.