Windows 10 is significantly more secure against exploitation by hackers than Windows 7 ever was, and retrofitting those new security features into Windows 7 is just not practicable.įor example, there are numerous “breaking changes” in Windows 10 that deliberately alter the way things worked in Windows 7 (or remove components entirely) because they’re no longer considered secure enough.įor that reason, going forwards by upgrading can be considered both a necessary and a desirable step.Īt the same time, not going forwards will leave you more and more exposed to security holes – because any vulnerabilities that get uncovered will be publicly known, yet unpatched forever.įor better or for worse, the modern process of bug hunting and disclosure generally involves responsibly reporting flaws, ideally including a “proof of concept” that shows the vendor how the bug works in real life as a way of confirming its importance. OpenSSH patched a bug in 2018 that had sat undiscovered in the code since about 2000. In 2012, the Unix security utility sudo fixed a privilege escalation bug that had been introduced in 2007. The infamous Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL was there for about two years before it became front-page news. Those latent bugs may eventually be discovered, “weaponised” (to use one of the security industry’s less appealing jargon terms) and exploited by crooks, to everyone’s unfortunate surprise. The problem is that “new” malware samples, together with new vulnerabilities and exploits, are likely to work on old Windows 7 systems in much the same way, back in 2009, that most “old” malware worked just fine on new Windows 7 systems.Įven if the crooks stop looking for new vulnerabilities in Windows 7 and focus only on Windows 10, there’s a fair chance that any bugs they find won’t be truly new, and will have been inherited in code that was originally written for older versions of Windows.īugs aren’t always found quickly, and may lie low for years without being spotted – even in open source software that anyone can download and inspect at their leisure. There won’t be any more routine Windows 7 updates, as there haven’t been for Windows XP since Tuesday, 08 April 2014.
#Download sophos antivirus windows 7 Patch#
It’s the first Patch Tuesday of 2020 and once today’s Windows 7 updates are shipped…
Today marks the other end of the Windows 7 story – the very end of the other end, in fact. That was a decade ago – 10 years and nearly 3 months, to be precise.
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