XP services to end in a year, M'soft warns

Small and medium-sized enterprises and consumers are advised to migrate from XP, an 11-year-old operating system, to avoid vulnerabilities and risks that have the potential to cause business disruption and extra costs.
Starting on April 8, 2014, automatic fixes, updates or online technical assistance will no longer be provided. No more security updates will be issued to help protect personal computers from harmful viruses, spyware and other malicious software that can steal personal information.
Rachod Isarankura Na Ayuthaya, leader of the Windows client business group at Microsoft (Thailand), said yesterday that while XP was one of the most popular operating systems in Microsoft’s history, it was not designed to handle the challenges of today, such as the increased exposure to cyberattacks and demands for more data privacy, unlike the newer operating systems such as Windows 7 and 8.
According to StatCounter, XP still
 makes up 36.4 per cent of PCs in Thailand, with a steady rate of decline since Windows 7 was launched in October 2009. That equates to more than 7.2 million PCs. This is high, compared with an Asia average of 34 per cent.
StatCounter data also show that about half of PCs in Thailand are already on Windows 7 and in the past two months, there has been an uptake of Windows 8.
According to Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report released last June, XP with SP3 is three times as vulnerable as Windows 7 SP1. Malware has become a severe threat in the past decade, having increased from 1,000 in 1991 to millions last year. Computer threats include viruses, worms, trojans, exploits, backdoors, password stealers, spyware and other variations of potentially unwanted software.
As well, continued use of XP poses threats including compliance issues such as encryption, hashing and signing, while more than 60 per cent of independent software vendors and modern browsers no longer support XP.