Support for Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system ended on January 14th this year, however a large number of the world’s computers, most in corporate environments, are still running the nine-year-old system. Some organisations want to persevere with out of support operating systems for reasons of cost or reluctance to change, however researchers and hackers also persevere with vulnerability research. As an example, Windows server 2003 has been out of support for a decade, but new vulnerabilities were reported in 2019. Another example is the UK National Health Service (NHS) persevered with Windows XP after support ended in 2014, and in May 2017 WannaCry ransomware effectively shut down all their machines by exploiting a vulnerability that had been fixed in later version of Windows.
Agilient strongly advises against using any unsupported product in business, and highly recommend that companies using Windows 7 should upgrade to Windows 10 as a priority.
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Author: David Steele, Agilient Consultant