It’s notable that the long flagged end of Microsoft’s support for Windows XP happened the day before the Heartbleed bug, one of the most worrying security flaws we’ve seen was publicly revealed.
One of the questions that has bugged many of us in the industry – pardon the pun – is whether Microsoft would back down on its insistence they would not issue security patches for Windows XP when a major exploit became public.
With between 15 and 30% of the world’s desktop computers still running XP and 6,000 websites reportedly running on the superseded system, it’s hard not to see how Microsoft could justify not sending out an update should an exploit the size of the Heartbleed bug become apparent.
As it is, there may be some argument for updating some of the security certificates in the Windows XP and the older versions of Internet Explorer in the light of the Heartbleed bug, we’ll wait to see on that.
While Heartbleed doesn’t directly affect Windows XP computers, it’s still a reminder that life is going to get tough for those running an unpatchable operating system.