Microsoft Finishes Life of Windows Server 2003

Infosecurity-magazine.com reported on 22nd June, 2015 stating that Microsoft stopped supporting its 12-year old Windows Server 2003 on 14th July (2015) which means that any company still using it will not be updated and kept secured anymore nor will receive any fixes. Despite this, a major chunk of businesses are still using Windows Server 2003 and have not migrated to an alternative.

What does this switching off of support really mean for your business?

The number of attacks on businesses using Windows Server 2003 will surely increase because Microsoft is no longer providing security updates to this server OS. Malware will be widespread because attackers use the end of life support as an 'in' to get hold of sensitive data of business.

One should think that security updates are not common and hence these are essentials. 37 critical updates were released for Windows Server 2003/R2 during 2013. Hackers are always trying to find vulnerabilities in software and when they find one, these weaknesses need to be patched up quickly to evade any serious damage.

Around 11 million machines are still using Windows Server 2003 all over the world and 400,000 businesses in UK are still using this outdated Server 2003 operating system (OS) and which is now being categorized as the biggest risk of 2015 according to Camwood, a leading application migration specialist of UK.

Computerweekly.com published news on 14th July, 2015 quoting Ken Westin, Senior Security Analyst of Tripwire as saying "practical actions can be taken to harden these systems and reduce their attack surface."

In spite of these warnings, IT professionals who continue to use Windows Server 2003 have some opinions. They see Windows XP's (as Microsoft stopped providing anti-malware definitions for Windows XP also on 14th July) loss of extended support as being more of crisis than that of the server. Users of Windows XP connect to Internet resulting a vector for malware. In contrast Windows Server 2003 normally sits behind a firewall and generally it is not used to connect to Internet and hence it is less exposed. According to these IT professionals, the end of product support of Windows Server 2003 is seen as an artificial crisis rather.

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