As the clock winds down to the sun-setting of support of Microsoft’s 12-year-old XP operating system on April 8 of next year, Microsoft today released new data that demonstrates the dangers of sticking with the older OS, which accounts for about one-fifth of all operating systems in use today.
Case in point: While 17 percent of Windows machines worldwide running the latest versions of software and real-time security tools from Microsoft faced malware in the first half of this year, XP machines were exploited the most. Windows 8 and Windows XP actually encountered nearly the same volume of malware, but XP machines were six times more likely to get infected from those malware threats, according to new data in Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report Volume 15, which was published today. And XP is still prevalent out there, accounting for 21 percent of all OSes in use today, according to data from StatCounter, Microsoft said.
Meanwhile, the number of all operating system vulnerability disclosures increased for the first time in a while, by nearly 40 percent in the first half of 2013, surpassing the number of browser vuln disclosures, the report says. Some 22.2 percent of all vulnerability disclosures were in operating systems. Browser bug disclosures dropped by 18.3 percent during the period, accounting for some 14.3 percent of all vuln disclosures.