Microsoft security research paints bleak picture for XP users
The 15th and latest of Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report (SIRv15) has been released. We spoke with Tim Rains, Director, Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft about the results.
There are a lot of periodic threat reports from companies in the security business, but Microsoft's report is based on an probably the broadest set of data in the industry: they gather information from over 100 countries; more than 1 billion systems which use Windows Update, the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) and Microsoft's free Security Essentials program; more than 400 million Outlook.com accounts and millions of Office 365 accounts; and from the billions of web pages scanned every day by Bing.
Though there is other data in the report, Rains chose to focus this month on the situation as it relates to Windows XP users. Citing third party data, he said that 21% of users are still running Windows XP, which will reach end of life in April 2014, after which no security updates will be issued for it.
