Research company Net Applications says that over one quarter of PCs in the world rely on Windows XP. The report states that China is to blame for the fact that the 12-year-old operating system remained functional this long. It has been reported that April 9, 2014 is the last day Microsoft will monitor new holes that appear in XP and release updates in order to fix them.
Some people might not know that 95 percent of ATMs still run on XP, but cash machines are not extremely vulnerable to hackers as the figure implies. On the other hand, the real digital disaster is likely to happen in the biggest internet market in the world and the effects would most probably be felt everywhere. Chinese news agency Xinhua News Agency said that in China, about 200 million computers or 70 percent of PCs in the country are running on Windows XP.
The Chinese are still using out-of-date hardware with insecure systems. The XP computers will continue to work after April 9, 2014, but they will become vulnerable to hackers. Many of the XP versions in China are not legal. The software piracy is rampant so much that Microsoft had to ask government-owned companies in 2012 to stop the use of illegal versions of Office.
Photo Credits: ITproportal
