Microsoft keeps insisting that users should upgrade to its latest operating system, Windows 10. It’s true that Windows 10 may keep users safe and protected against cyber attacks, but there is also a problem because Microsoft is neglecting its other OS's.
Microsoft putting Windows 7 and Windows 8.x users at riskBy focusing only on Windows 10 and not applying the same patches to Windows 7 and Windows 8.x, Microsoft is putting users of older operating systems in danger.
The issue was debated by Google Project Zero researcher Mateusz Jurczyk. He noticed while he was filing an issue in the Project Zero bug tracker and performing an analysis that the bug was only present in the previous versions of Windows, namely Windows 7 and Windows 8.x, not in Windows 10 as well. This happened because the company chose to patch only its latest OS and has neglected older versions of Windows.
More patches for Windows 10The researcher dug deeper into this issue and, by using a technique called binary diffing, was able to found out that while more patches have been sent to Windows 10, the same fixes were not applied to Windows 7 and Windows 8.x.
The binary diffing technique can be used to analyze the fixes in a modern operating systems and use them to uncover old weaknesses in unpatched versions of that operating system.
False sense of security for users of older versions of Windows
Microsoft keeps improving the safety for Windows 10, resulting in a false sense of security for users of older operating systems. This leaves them vulnerable to software flaws and exposed to cyber attacks. Microsoft should consider this and focus on users of older versions of Windows as well.
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