Many of my customers with computers running Windows XP have been asking me, “What’s the risk if I keep running my Windows XP computer?”. The answer is that the risk grows over time as security problems are identified and patched by Microsoft for its other operating systems. The writers of Malware use the announcement of patches as a blueprint for writing malicious software since they know half of the computers on the internet never run updates and another 25% are behind on updates. It takes the bad guys about a month to write and test code to exploit a known vulnerability, so the risk of something bad happening to a Windows XP computer grows every month. This risk is even higher when you add in “zero day” exploits that patches haven’t been written for. With this reality in mind, the risk of a successful malware attack on a Windows XP computer would be “low” for the first three months (until July), “medium” for up to six months (until October), and “high” after that (November, 2014 and beyond).
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