Vulnerability management expert Secunia has revealed that 17 per cent of its UK users are still using Windows XP.
A month after Microsoft officially withdrew support for the operating system, Secunia said that 17 per cent of its installed user base was still running XP as of last week, a decrease from 18 per cent when the final patches were released.
Kasper Lindgaard, director of research and security at Secunia, said: “Generally speaking, newly discovered vulnerabilities in XP will be unpatchable for private users, and therefore we will see a rise in attacks. 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.”
In an email to IT Security Guru, Brian Honan, CEO of BH Consulting, said that those users who are still on XP are fully aware of the issues and have been for quite a while. “The problem is in many cases a lack of funding to pay to upgrade the hardware, software and provide the training for their user base,” he said.
“In a number of other cases, they cannot upgrade from Windows XP due to dependencies on internal legacy systems and the time and costs associated with a complete overhaul of these systems. Also the associated business risks of migration issues impacting productivity means many are tied into the platform for some time yet. Until these issues can be resolved we will see many organisations remain with XP.”
Honan said that home users will only migrate from Windows XP once they buy a new computer to replace their existing machines, and said that there is no major driver for these users to replace Windows XP. “It works for what they need and for many that is all they care about.”
The Secunia statistics also showed that in January 2013-December 2014, 19 per cent of the user base was running XP. “This could be an indicator of users getting new PCs for Christmas and replacing their old XP systems. We may see similar large drops at the end of this year for that market,” he said.
Dustin Childs, group manager, response communications at Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, said: “For those wondering, Windows XP will not be receiving any security updates today. For some time we have been recommending customers move to a modern operating system like Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to help stay safe, and now is a great time to make that move.”
