Dark Reading: Microsoft may have officially retired its Windows XP operating system this week, but that doesn’t mean power plants and other critical infrastructure networks are dropping the now-unpatchable OS.
While there is no official public data on the number of XP systems running in ICS/SCADA environments, experts in that area say it’s well represented, as are even older versions of Windows. Running insecure OSs may seem counterintuitive in such sensitive environments as power, gas, and oil industry networks, but it’s a matter of priority: Patching remains rare in these networks for practical reasons, experts say.