“today, a timely update of the OS is exactly the same need as personal hygiene, and as having a PIN and password to log into the mail, – says Evgeny Lifshitz, a member of the Council of the State Duma on information policy, information technologies and communications. Every day computer to Windows 7 is becoming more and more vulnerable. And although Windows 10 is not perfect, it is an actual updated OS, which is supported by the developer, to quickly respond to any cyber threats that constantly arise, and which cannot even be foreseen. OS you one-on-one, and therefore exposed to comparable risk.”
In his opinion, to use the old OS dangerous because they are not corrected a critical vulnerability like BlueKeep, which at any moment can become the object of mass virus attack like the famous epidemics NotPetya and WannaCry.
“the Creators WannaCry used an exploit called EternalBlue – continues Nikita Durov, technical Director, Check Point Software Technologies in Russia and CIS. It used a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows could allow an attacker to gain remote access to the device and to install the program the Trojan. The security update has been released prior to the epidemic, but cryptographer managed to inflict a huge damage to the users in more than 150 countries, surprising, according to various estimates, from 200,000 to 500,000 computers.”
According to the company KnowBe4, the damage from the virus is estimated over $ 1 billion in the United States: “customers who have upgraded OS and installed released security patches, could protect your device and personal data from this cyber threats,” concludes the actor.
In response to the inquiry “RG” Microsoft said that Windows 7 was designed for threats of the two thousandth. “Cybersecurity was then an important topic but not as critical as it is now, when not a day goes by that we don’t hear about major stories related to leaks, attacks and compromise of the largest organizations worldwide, – said Artem Sinitsyn, head of information security programmes of Microsoft in Central and Eastern Europe. The new OS was developed taking into account realities of our time and is essentially a service.”
Sergei Nikitin, Deputy head of the laboratory of computer forensics, Group-IB believes that the lack of updates of “seven” critically dangerous in the first place is not for ordinary users and for financial institutions and corporations: “Ordinary people can quite easily migrate to the new OS, but the corporate sector, where old versions of OS are often used for compatibility of embedded devices such as ATMs, POS-terminals, offices, industrial computers, etc., will face serious problem. The need for them to update the OS critical, and it will lead to another update of iron.”
