It has now been more than two years past the date when Microsoft ended support for Windows XP, the popular operating system that’s been around since 2001 and which many users simply don’t seem willing to let go.
Microsoft did a lot to drag XP users into the news operating systems with pop-ups urging them that they need to upgrade, and even a free migration tool to help people transfer their files and settings to Windows 7 or Windows 8.
It’s not simply that Microsoft wants to get everybody onto the latest version of Windows, although it has definitely gone to some great lengths recently to get people to upgrade to Windows 10.
The most compelling reason to upgrade is that since the end of support, this now means “zero-days forever,” because those vulnerabilities in the operating system will never be patched – and that means that Windows XP computers are sitting ducks for cybercriminals to attack.
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As you can see by the graph on the right, there are at least 7.40% of users still using Windows XP – and given that many XP users are still running them ‘air-gapped’ – ie, they’re trying NOT to access websites, so their statistics would not be included in an online statistics gathering exercise, we think the percentage of machines running Windows XP might be as high as 10% of all PCs.
Please be aware though – that Apple users also have the same type of problem – with MacOS-X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion), which are no longer receiving security updates from Apple at this time.
When you consider the large number of PC users (Microsoft puts the number of Windows devices at more than 1 billion), this puts the number of insecure PC users at tens of millions of computers today running an extremely old, very outdated, and very insecure operating system.
For more information on XP End Of Life – listen to the Sophos PodCast:
Article Inspired by: Sophos Blog Entry – Millions of people are still running Windows XP