Pour one out for Windows 7, the decade-old operating system that today reached the end of the security line. Some three years after Microsoft called time on mainstream support of Windows 7, the technology giant will no longer provide security updates, leaving the remaining users the option to upgrade to a newer operating system or remain vulnerable to ongoing security threats.
Windows 7 was sunset in January 2020 after more than a decade in service, but Microsoft allowed customers to pay for extended security support to help maintain legacy or older equipment that isn’t easy to upgrade, like hospital scanning equipment and production line systems.
Those extended security updates came to an end today. It’s not known exactly how many Windows 7 machines are still running (or connected to the internet, which increases their risk), but some market share data puts the number as high as about one in 10 desktop computers.
Without extended security updates, Windows 7 will continue to run, but will no longer receive patches for new and existing security vulnerabilities.
Windows 8.1, the operating system version that succeeded Windows 7, also hit its end-of-support milestone on Tuesday, almost 10 years after it was released. Microsoft said it’s not offering extended security updates for Windows 8.1, which may be because of its historical low usage, given that many skipped the operating system and updated directly to Windows 10.
Meanwhile, the latest version of Microsoft Edge (version 109), scheduled for release on Thursday, is the latest version to support the no-longer-supported Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
https://techcrunch.com/
AS RUSSIA’S INVASION of Ukraine drags on, navigation system monitors reported this week that they’ve detected a rise in GPS disruptions in Russian cities, ever since Ukraine began mounting long-range drone attacks. Elsewhere, a lawsuit against Meta alleges that a lack of adequate hate-speech moderation on Facebook led to violence that exacerbated Ethiopia’s civil war. […]
British newspaper The Guardian has confirmed that cybercriminals accessed the personal details of U.K. staff members during a ransomware attack last month. The Guardian confirmed the data breach in an update emailed to staff on Wednesday, which the newspaper reported shortly after. The email, signed by the news outlet’s chief executive Anna Bateson and editor-in-chief […]
In a financial filing on Thursday, T-Mobile revealed that a hacker accessed a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers. The telecom giant said that the “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of […]
Leave a Reply