If the idea of someone running Windows XP in 2019 makes you laugh, I urge you to maintain that blissful naïveté. Just leave now.
If the idea of someone running Windows XP in 2019 makes you laugh, I urge you to maintain that blissful naïveté. Just leave now.
Are they gone? Okay, so, Windows XP, Vista, and the rest of those old and unsupported operating systems are still extremely real—and they’re everywhere.
The ancient software is still active in important places, like the U. S. Defense Department and inside the nation’s critical infrastructure. For those of you still handling old Windows machines, Microsoft has a serious message: Update as soon as possible.
Microsoft is warning that a recently patched vulnerability known as BlueKeep could have consequences as bad as WannaCry, the 2017 ransomware worm allegedly developed by North Korea that infected hundreds of thousands of computers.
Here’s Microsoft’s Simon Pope:
BlueKeep and WannaCry are similar in that they’re vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services, so they allow an attacker execute code remotely on a target computer. The BlueKeep vulnerability, rated a 9.8 out of 10 in severity, is so serious that Windows took the rare step of issues patches for old and normally unsupported Windows versions including XP, 2003, and Vista.
