IT News

Following Apple’s lead, makers of Android phones, Google and Microsoft announced they will introduce a “kill switch” to the next versions of phones. No specifics were provided on when new devices with kill-switch will be available.

Well folks in less than 24 hours support for Windows XP officially bids its au revoir, auf weidersehen, adios to the world. Keep in mind what this means is Microsoft will cease to develop new security updates and hotfixes.

Microsoft is working overtime to address a vulnerbiltiy in Internet Explorer. The following versions are affected: IE 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11. The vulnerabiltiy was discovered by the security software publisher FireEye. It has also been reported that a hacker group has already exploited the vulnerability in IE, however no specifcs were provided on the name of the group other than it has been targeting financial entities and defense organizations. There is also no detail on the numbers of IE users that have already been compromsed.

In just two short months support for Windows XP comes to a final conclusion on April 8th, 2014.  Windows XP will stand as Microsoft’s longest running operating system at *12.5 years and most commercially successful. It is estimated that just under a quarter of all computers in the United States still operate Windows XP. According to figures from Gartner at the end of 2013 the global install base of XP was approximately 1.6 billion units and installed on approximately half a billion computers. Businesses that choose to remain on Windows XP may be putting themselves at more risk than they realize. The benefits are obvious in that companies save on capital expenditures, however, the potential risks may result in more costs.

This week it was revealed that passwords and other sensitive data across the web could be compromised by a security bug labled as "Heartbleed". As news spread during the week, companies affected by the bug have been scrambling to deploy Fixed OpenSSL.

On January 3rd, Adobe Systems announced it will be retiring Workspaces effective January 6, 2015. This includes all services associated with Workspaces including Buzzword, Presentation, and Tables. Adobe made a corporate decision to move out of the document authoring business for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation files. Cloud storage and document services through Adobe will still be available through other Acrobat.com services such as Adobe PDF Pack and Adobe ExportPDF.