Windows XP security vulnerabilities?

Dymo

I have a computer it's about 8 years old now and running XP Professional with service packs installed. But lately I'm finding it a lot more vulnerable to malware, trogens and I even found a rootkit on it last month. It has all the anti virus installed, Superantispyare, Spybot, Malwarebytes and Microsoft Security Essentials but they just seem to be getting through. Are microsoft still patching problems or are they just concentrating on Vista and 7. I have both those installed on other computers and they never get infected by anything.

Is it now time to upgrade before it gets as bad as Windows ME? I have upgraded some of the hardware on the computer from time to time so it should be able to run Vista or 7.

Capt'n Midnight

change your browser or stop going to dodgy sites


firefox with noscript is pretty good add adblock too you can use extensions so that you can right click on links in IE and open them in FF and set links like microsoft.com to open in IE if you browse in FF

Fysh

Dymo wrote: »

I have a computer it's about 8 years old now and running XP Professional with service packs installed. But lately I'm finding it a lot more vulnerable to malware, trogens and I even found a rootkit on it last month. It has all the anti virus installed, Superantispyare, Spybot, Malwarebytes and Microsoft Security Essentials but they just seem to be getting through. Are microsoft still patching problems or are they just concentrating on Vista and 7. I have both those installed on other computers and they never get infected by anything.

Is it now time to upgrade before it gets as bad as Windows ME? I have upgraded some of the hardware on the computer from time to time so it should be able to run Vista or 7.

Why are you running 4 different anti-malware packages concurrently? That just rings alarm bells in terms of knackering the system performance and TBH also compromising the ability of any one tool doing its job correctly.

Things I'd suggest checking:

• Are you fully patched according to Microsoft Update? (ie the version of Windows Update that allows you to include patches for other MS products in your automatic updates?
• Are you running IE8?
• Is everyone using the computer using a standard/limited user account instead of an Administrator account?
• Do you have plugins enabled on your browser for malware protection?
• Does the system have any installed software from dodgy sources (eg warez)?

XP Pro is in the extended support phase, and should have another 3 years of vulnerabilities being fixed IIRC. But it is also the n-2th version of Windows, and will be 10 years old later this year, so Microsoft will provide it with a degree of focus and attention that's proportional to that status.

Lazarus2.0

Fysh wrote: »

Are you running IE9?

IE9 wont instal on XP - IE8 is as far as you can go .

Fysh

nessyguin wrote: »

IE9 wont instal on XP - IE8 is as far as you can go .

D'oh! Had been meaning to double-check this for a while but having moved all my home computers away from XP about 6 months ago I hadn't had the choice foisted on me, and most of our XP-based machines at work are non-networked.

Kinetic^

Dymo wrote: »

But lately I'm finding it a lot more vulnerable to malware, trogens and I even found a rootkit on it last month. It has all the anti virus installed, Superantispyare, Spybot, Malwarebytes and Microsoft Security Essentials but they just seem to be getting through.

I don't want you to take this the wrong way but XP is fine, it's how you're using it that is the problem. Viruses have a number of different ways of getting in to your computer/laptop whether it's via external drives, peer to peer sharing or comprimised websites. Even with the best anti-virus software installed, if you click on something you shouldn't have you're most likely going to get infected.

Dymo

Thanks for the reply's, but as I said this computer is about 8 years old and this has only happen in the last 2 months. But I think I'm after tracking down how the problem was getting onto my computer. I save my websites from my server once a week, and one of my websites had become comprised server side so when I downloaded them they infected my machine. Then I also back up my machine once a day and once a week to an external hardrive. So what I was doing was cleaning my machine then reinstalling the virus and then backing up the virus and I'm sure some of it worked like a worm that infected other files.

I think now I have everything clean,formatted and reinstalled and everything seems fine again. As was said XP is still supported I'll stick with it on this machine for another while.