Windows XP SP2 Support Expires July 2010
From the logs on my web server, where Savemybutt.com lives, I am able to tell that about 53% of all visitors to my site are still using Windows XP.
What I can’t tell is what service pack you have installed. The only way I can do that is from my experience servicing customer computers.
From that experience I can tell you that about 20% of my customers who are still using Windows XP have not installed Service Pack 3. If for nothing more, the installation of SP3 is needed for security reasons.
Now, there is another reason. In July of 2010 Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP installations that only have Service Pack 2 on them.
What does this mean to you if you are still running SP2? It means that starting in July 2010 you will no longer get Windows updates.
Again, this is important for security reasons. These updates is how Microsoft installs security patches to Windows and Office.
My advice? Make sure that you have installed Service Pack 3 on your Windows XP computers. Support for SP3 is scheduled to stop in April of 2014.
You can read more about it here.
Safari/MacBook falls in seconds, 2 years in a row
Got your attention didn’t I.
Well, it is true. Security researcher, Charlie Miller, hacked into a MacBook computer that had all of the latest patches installed by using a vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser. Within seconds of the start of the contest, Charlie launched his drive-by attack. He won the $10,000 prize and also got to keep the MacBook.
This all happened at CanSecWest’s Pwn2Own contest in Vancouver Canada recently.
This is the second year in a row that Charlie Miller fully hacked an Apple MacBook very early in the contest and was prepared to make the hack work the first time he ran it.
The details of the vulnerability are not being disclose to the public and are being shared with Apple.
Well, what about Windows and other browsers, you might be asking.
Another security researcher who declined to provide his full name, going by the name Nils, was able to comprise Internet Explorer 8 running on a Windows 7 machine shortly after Charlie Miller hacked the Mac.
Nils also won a cash prize and got to keep the computer. He went on to exploite Firefox with a zero-day flaw later in the afternoon, too.
What does this mean to you and me? My opinion is that none of the browsers are truly safe on either OS/X or Windows.
This contest is a headline grabber, but it does not mean much more than we already knew.
These failures were not operating system breaches, but a browser breaches. XP is pretty safe now. Vista/Windows7 and OS/X are rock solid (I can see the emails now…).
This contest only shows that the bad guys are using the browser, as well as other software that you use, vehicle into your system, by passing the operating system. That means is you should keep you browser up to date and apply all security patches when they are offered.
It’s one of simplest things we can do to protect our computers.
Here is an interesting link to a ZDnet story talking about browser security, http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=15006&tag=nl.e550.
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