XP still Continues though "eXPired"

1.    XP has now got the authorized prefix and suffix to get renamed as "eXPired" since it has been now officially announced by Microsoft as discontinued and has advised XP and Office 2003 users to migrate to Windows 7 and Office 2010 and thus systems are left vulnerable to new forms of malware. No further support to XP...no patches to update...no updates by Microsoft.....but certainly it will take time for XP to get disowned by more then a decade old loyal user population most of whom made their first PC experience with a XP machine...for a home guy who surfs net...it will be difficult to make him/her understand about how vulnerable he/she is now....actually very difficult.

2.    But what about the corporates and govt sector offices? I am sure private sector will make a fast change since it may adversely effect their business model in case of a undesired info leakage or a hack!!!Only recently I made a visit to a post office in Delhi for doing a speed post...wherein the dedicated  loyal postmaster was using a xp machine connected to Internet.I informally asked him about any upgrades in OS planned in their department to which he replied confidently that it's not required since it is working fine.Today the Indian postal department is slowly getting online.Today thanks to vision implementation of the government(though late) that we are able to locate the movement of a speed post letter...what time it was opened..whats the location and when it got delivered...etc etc..but all this can go waste and get a setback if the backbone nodes are not updated and monitored....more so if the staff handling all the machines are low on security aspect.

3.   Well...this postal department is one of the examples cited here since I just interacted with one of them today...but the risk stakes are high when we see this at national level...all the online-governance machines located in remote areas...have they been ensured removed of XP?....if it has not been done....this can be just on the lines of zero day exploits...in this case there must be millions of machines thrown open to hacking....and invasion to classified information.

E-Governance and Security Challenges

Copy of the presentation that I gave at the Mini Seminar held under the aegis of IETE at AVCC,NOIDA on the subject : E-Governance and Security Challenges.

  E-Governance and Security