Today marks a significant date for a couple of reasons. The primary reason, of course, is that Windows Server 2003 has now reached its end of life. Many organizations have been scrambling to upgrade servers over the past year or so, and not all will make it. This is a similar situation to what has been experienced with Windows XP over the past year – that old, archaic Windows operating system that expired on April 8, 2014.
Not surprisingly, Windows XP is still in use. Whether it's due to brash individuals who love to operate in adversity, or because organizations are still running older apps that won't work with modern operating systems, Windows XP still shows breath of life. Even recently, the U.S. Navy shelled-out over $9 million to Microsoft to continue to get support for Windows XP for the next couple years.
But, for those individuals and companies tight on support budget and not able to pull together millions of tax payer dollars for payment, today marks yet another deadline for the zombie operating system.
To help keep Windows XP users moderately safe while they planned their upgrades Microsoft promised to continue to supply anti-malware protection for 1 year. Today, the jig is up. Today, Microsoft will stop providing anti-malware signature files for Windows XP users.
For enterprise customers, this applies to System Center Endpoint Protection, Forefront Client Security, Forefront Endpoint Protection and Windows Intune running on Windows XP. For consumers, this applies to Microsoft Security Essentials.
So, unless the governor calls in a stay order, your Windows XP instance just got a lot more unsecure with very little in options available.
