Microsoft issues security updates on the second Tuesday of each month, known as Patch Tuesday. Ollmann, a leading expert on the activities of botnet gangs, says he expects the major gangs to be “unaffected or simply not care about this recent news.” The primary reason, he says, is because “their malware agents are more than capable of operating upon newer operating systems and have already been proven to be backwardly compatible with XP SP2.” “Unfortunately they’re also prime candidates for compromise via worm-based malware – in particular botnets and other persistent threats,” says Ollmann. He says many solenoid devices, such as those used in the petrochemical and water and gas industries, are still shipped with these old operating systems. However, Gunter Ollmann, VP of research at Damballa, notes that Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 are deployed extensively in computing devices as embedded operating systems that are difficult to update. consumers enable Windows auto update, the online service Microsoft uses to automatically push out security fixes to consumer PCs. homes are running with the more recent Service Pack 3. “The overall effect will be that the machine becomes increasingly susceptible to attacks from malicious software.”
“No new security patches for Windows XP SP2 means that users will not get updates to the core operating system and its components,” says Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek.
Qualys manages computer upgrades for over four thousand corporations, government agencies and large organizations worldwide, as well as small- and medium-sized businesses. Qualys estimates 50% of Windows XP machines used by businesses are SP2 machines. Service packs contain major security and reliability upgrades. The software giant announced Tuesday that it will stop supporting computers using those older operating systems as of July 13th. Botnets are used to spread spam, steal data, hijack online bank accounts, commit click fraud and conduct denial-of- service attacks for extortion or political reasons. Such desktop PCs and servers are still widely used in corporate networks globally.Īnd as anyone paying attention knows, infected PCs in corporate settings are in high demand by cyber gangs controlling the botnets driving all forms of cybercrime. In a move that raises the risk profile of millions of computing devices globally, Microsoft says it will no longer shore up security weaknesses in computers using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows 2000 operating systems.
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