Bugs flooding Windows XP

http://www.srpressgazette.com/news/business/bugs-flooding-windows-xp-1.332046?page=0

Exploitation of the unprotected computer operating system, Windows XP, is happening, said Brian Wilkey, senior vice president of Digital Boardwalk, Inc., a Pensacola based information technology (IT) company. It was predicted to happen after the April 8 termination of support by Microsoft, a standard practice called a program's end of life (EOL), computer problems would come for dedicated XP users. Microsoft will no longer publish updates for the 12-year-old system; CNN Money reported 29 percent of the world's computers were still utilizing XP. Because of this issue, two major effects are one, new hardware, like printers and monitors, won't be able to communicate with the outdated system, and two, Microsoft will no longer offer patches to newly discovered vulnerabilities.

Wilkey discussed three results his company as seen since XP's EOL.

The first result, Wilkey said he’s seen a wave of malicious software, known as malware, attacking machines still running XP. Wilkey said, "We've seen an 80 percent increase in malware toward XP machines for the clients we manage." He said they could not trace it back to the source, but did track it down to the second week of May. According to Wilkey, this malware has become more insidious. Originally, he said, malware would masquerade as protection software and declare there was a threat on the system. Unaware users would pay a sum to the fake anti-virus company to remove it. Wilkey said the focus of cyber attacks has changed. "Identities are worth a lot of money," Wilkey said, as evidenced by the Target and eBay cyber attacks. "Identity protection is a wise investment," he said.

Wilky identified seniors as the most vulnerable to identity attacks. “I’m willing to bet the older demographic is still using XP,” he said. Wilky said it takes only one time of putting sensitive personal information online, like making purchases via the internet or entering a social security number, to become vulnerable to attack.

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This is contrary to another article I read.