So Redmond pulled off a friendly little surprise when they rolled out another update for computers running Windows XP. This despite the fact that the OS had reached end of support on April 8.
The patch fixes a recently discovered critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer.
Obviously, some have criticized the decision to patch Windows XP after retirement, while many applauded the release. And now the company has talked about why they released an update for the retired operating system in a blog post.
Adrienne Hall, the general manager of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft explains that the security of their products is something that the software titan takes very seriously.
This, along with the fact that several companies and organizations encouraged users to abandon Internet Explorer in favor of a supported web browser is probably the reason why the company decide to fix this flaw at light speed.
Throw in the fact that this flaw was unearthed so close to the retirement, and you get the drift:
“We made this exception based on the proximity to the end of support for Windows XP. The reality is there have been a very small number of attacks based on this particular vulnerability and concerns were, frankly, overblown. Unfortunately this is a sign of the times and this is not to say we don’t take these reports seriously. We absolutely do.”
At the same time, Hall makes it clear that even though Microsoft have fixed Windows XP this time around, everyone should still make moving to a newer version of the OS a priority.
This, truly, is something that will not happen over and over again.