Wanacry Ransomware Appears Contained
I have been feeling badly about giving my Mom some rather pointed advice concerning her continued use of Windows XP. It is a 15 year old operating system which went EOL in 2014 whereby Microsoft stopped general support and the exploit list keeps growing in the absence of actual real time updates. |
A story in businessinsider.com is saying that a part of the recent success of the WannaCry exploit cyberattack is due to the 7% of existing PCs still using Windows XP.
Citing those timeframes and percentages above they have said that Microsoft did release a patch for the WannaCry exploit for XP and this causes me to think that the thing is quite a bit worse than I originally estimated ...
The mean spirited nature and cold environment of the internet is all the more reason to maintain as up to date a distro as possible and it is crucial get off of obsolete master control programs (operating systems) like Windows XP unless you have an extended service contract like they say the Navy bought for the product.
Given the fact that this particular exploit operated through a security hole in Windows XP and there is more of this to come can we really afford to lag behind crucial updates in the presence of an ever widening landscape of threats to cyberspace at the hands of the multitude of cybercriminals out there ?
You might not do much more than play games but you may lose a lot of personal documents like pictures and videos if you maintain this posture of operating computers in the past.
The point that drives the moral of the story home is the very title of the businessinsider.com article:
A huge number of PCs still use ancient Windows software that puts them at risk