Microsoft: update, or suffer from Zero day attack

Microsoft has been always convincing users to update from the old Windows XP to its latest operating system Windows 8. The date of Windows XP’s deadline is April 8, 2014. After the date, Microsoft will terminate technical support for the most popular PC OS.

But now Microsoft warns users that they may suffer from “zero-day” threats if they still stick to the system. What is a “zero-day” threat? Director of Trustworthy Computing for Microsoft, Tim Rains says: “The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities, and test Windows XP to see if it shares those vulnerabilities. If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP. Since a security update will never become available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will essentially have a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability forever.”

Here “zero-day” vulnerability is that a hacker carries out an attack before operating system or other code patches are released. When the supporting date of Windows XP expires, eventually some vulnerability will be found

Between July 2012 and July 2013, Windows XP became an easily affected OS in 45 Microsoft security bulletins. Thirty of those security bulletins also affected Windows 7 and Windows 8.

A third-party anti-malware software will help mitigate attacks.

“The challenge here is that you’ll never know, with any confidence, if the trusted computing base of the system can actually be trusted because attackers will be armed with public knowledge of zero day exploits in Windows XP that could enable them to compromise the system and possibly run the code of their choice,” Rains wrote.

Microsoft: update, or suffer from Zero day attack