I bet that I forgot to blog about the support ending for Windows XP that will be happening in April 8 next year. Back then, the operating system was seriously infected with the worms, spywares and other virus attacks. They were quite strong back then that they had infected millions of computers and SP1 of the OS wasn’t quite enough. With SP2, the security might have improved but that was not enough as you can see in the chart below.
It appeared that Windows XP SP2 might have more infections than SP3 but it seemed that SP3 added even more technologies and securities. Unfortunately, starting next year, there will be the zero-day exploit like forever for Windows XP meaning to say that it will forever be flawed that your computer will likely to be affected unless you’re running the active Windows OSes. For Windows Vista and above, the security and technologies are quite better as seen in the chart above.
Today, with Windows 8’s Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials, there is the real-time malware protection that protects your computer in real-time but of course, speaking of real-time protection from viruses and malwares, you’re better off with the superior third-party software. Also, the UEFI Secure Boot is the new feature in Windows 8 that helps prevent unauthorized OSes or firmware from running at boot time by maintaining databases of software signers and software images that are pre-approved to run on the computer. Lastly, the Trusted Boot feature in Windows 8 includes an Early Launch AntiMalware that enables the antimalware software to start FIRST. Also, the Measured Boot feature allows the third-party software on a remote server to securely verify the security of every startup component in a way that will be very difficult for malware to forge. Anything being tampered with, Trusted Boot will repair the system by restoring original files.
Other features mentioned in http://blogs.technet.com/b/security/archive/2013/04/09/the-countdown-begins-support-for-windows-xp-ends-on-april-8-2014.aspx include UAC, Bitlocker, AppLocker, etc. but they may seem to be the existing security technologies that first came out for the previous OSes. Speaking of the link here, this is where the chart of Computers Cleaned Per Scan comes from. Lastly, after the support ends completely for Windows XP, there will be huge amount of vulnerabilities for that OS and it will have a high risk of infection for sure.
