New Windows XP Zero-Day Under Attack 241
wiredmikey writes "A new Windows kernel zero-day vulnerability is being exploited in targeted attacks against Windows XP users. Microsoft confirmed the issue and published a security advisory to acknowledge the flaw after anti-malware vendor FireEye warned that the Windows bug is being used in conjunction with an Adobe Reader exploit to infect Windows machines with malware. Microsoft described the issue as an elevation of privilege vulnerability that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code in kernel mode. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full administrative rights."
Re:Upate to the most current (Score:4, Interesting)
Service Pack 2, a.k.a. when XP really became stable, was way back in 2004. SP3 was back in 2008, still 5 years ago. If you think about XP being NT2000 with a nicer GUI, then the design was set way back in 1997 or so, back when dialup was king and an AOL disk was not yet a running joke.
To those that say "well my computer works fine".. umm, no it doesn't. Your OS was designed in 1997-2001, in a relatively much safer Internet environment, and is not designed for always on persistent attacks with billions of dollars available by hacking. As much as I think Microsoft keeps people out to dry, at some point you need to update.
For good and bad (and Mavericks has some things that piss me off) the Apple model of forced upgrades has some reasoning to it.
Re:Too Bad (Score:2, Interesting)
Because your cellphone, tablet, or Macintosh enjoyed 13 years of support from initial release (and 7 years after being replaced by the next version).
Re:Upate to the most current (Score:5, Interesting)
For Web browsing in a VM, it is hard to beat XP for something that takes 512 MB of RAM, 16-24 gigs of disk space (partitioned into two disks, one for the system, one for scratch space for sandboxie's sandbox.) Its footprint is so light, the VM can stay resident on a box with 6-8 gigs of memory without issue, even with running fairly larger applications like Acrobat [1], Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash.
I use Acrobat for producing PDFs for long term storage, FoxIt for viewing. So far, so good.
Re:Upate to the most current (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like he might be running a PC based CNC system that uses a PC for control. You posted a DNC box that is for uploading programs via DNC which has always been serial. Some older PC based CNC controllers used the parallel port (especially common for stepper systems). Systems that used brushless servos typically used some type of dedicated hardware to close the servo loop and is commanded via the PC. Typically those were ISA cards with a DSP on board but also parallel based units were available.
I also support the PC based CNC systems at my place of work. The system is quite advanced and uses a real time subsystem which only supports Windows 2000/XP. One of the systems is XP and the others are Windows 2000. New software costs about 4k and depending on the drives used, may require new drives at a cost of $1700 per axis. We still have one DOS based CNC system left, an ISA/DSP card with proprietary vendor written software supported by one guy on planet earth. Since that system sees little use it is not worth to $30k+ to upgrade to a modern CNC system. And that price is just to keep the existing motors and stages, $60+k for a complete replacement.
Re:Upate to the most current (Score:1, Interesting)
Try installing XP brand new on a VM.
Hint ... it wont work. The cpu will hit 100% usage and updates wont work. MS knew about this since last July and a fix has yet to be seen. Hair pulling experience. That dinosaur takes more work than installing Solaris and FreeBSD and many many days and hours of patch after patch after fix and KB just to get it semi up to date to run IE 6 (oxymoron) to make my risk adverse customers afraid of change happy.
I wont install XP again. I am done and I had to pirate another VM with it. After April I will just upgrade my ram in my host. Adobe CS 6 products already cancelled support, IE is no longer updated, Chrome will end support soon, Games coming out no longer work on DirectX 9, and the list goes on and on. Even Windows 7 is showing its age as it takes forever with updates on a fresh install and workarounds if you need to test older IE browsers.
If it were not for Metro I would have taken the $40 upgrade as Windows 7 is 5 years old since the first RCs came out! In the old days people would laugh at you for running a 5 year old OS and many here wont even move to that yet?!
Re:Upate to the most current (Score:4, Interesting)
Minimum requirements for Windows 7 is 16GB. I forget how much it actually uses, but it will be less. Hard drive footprint of 7Starter through 7Ultimate is the same. You can do an "anytime upgrade" from starter to Ultimate if you want. Starter just disables features.
The actual story of why Starter exists is early in the Netbook era (with small 4GB SSDs, and non Aero compatible Intel 915 chipsets which themselves were part of a Vista capable lawsuit), machines like EeePC 701 physically could not run Vista, but could run XP well, and Asus was selling them with Xandros (which was a terrible distro). Acer was selling Linux Netbooks too. To keep from losing market share Microsoft had to embarrassingly extend the life of XP by selling cheap XP Home licenses for low cost PCs (with restrictions on the hardware). Eventually the Netbook market platform had standardized on Atom processors, Aero compatible i945 (or better), 160GB hard drive, but low cost XP licences drove prices down. These machines technically were more than capable of running Vista or better. So when Windows 7 came out, Microsoft wanted to kill off selling new XP licences, so to capture the low cost PC market they sold 7 Starter, again with limitations on hardware.
My father has an MSI Wind that sold with Windows XP, and I upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2GB, and the machine happily runs Windows 8. I have an EeePC 701 that shipped with Xandros that happily runs XP, though I have set up Windows 7 to run off of an external Hard drive if I wanted. I also have an AMD based MSI netbook that shipped with XP Home, that I upgraded to Windows 7 right away. It came with 200GB HDD and 2GB RAM, which technically exceeded the limitations for low cost versions of XP Home so I don't know how they managed that.