14 DAY TRIAL // It’s no secret that Microsoft wants to move all its Windows XP users to a newer operating system, be it Windows 7 or Windows 8, but as far as statistics go, only a few consumers are actually doing this.
Justin Schuh, information security engineer at Google, said in a post on Hacker News that Windows XP is an operating system that is “far past its security expiration date,” explaining that moving to a newer software, whatever that is, could be a very smart investment.
Sticking with Windows XP means taking a big risk, he said, while also revealing some technical information about the 11-year-old operating system.
“I’m one of the lead devs on the Chrome Windows sandbox, and I can assure you that what we do with Vista+ on the security front is leaps and bounds ahead of what we’re stuck with on XP. DEP is unreliable and pretty worthless anyway without ASLR. You also don’t have things like SEHOP or other memory mitigations that are the first line of defense between your system and the average stale pointer exploit against WebKit,” he said in the blog post.
According to the latest figures provided by Net Applications for the week of January 13, Windows XP remains the second most popular operating system out there, with a market share of 38.71 percent.
Windows 7 retains its top spot with a share of 45.35 percent, while Windows 8 is still far away with 2.25 percent.
Of course, Microsoft continues its efforts to convince Windows XP users to move to a newer Windows contraption, emphasizing, just like the Google engineer, that it’s no longer a secure working environment. The company will stop providing updates and patches for Windows XP in April, 2014.
“If Windows XP is still being run in your environment and you feel that migration will not be complete by April 8, 2014, or you haven't begun migration yet, Microsoft is eager to help,” Microsoft said.