Fergie's Tech Blog

Why such success with a worm targeted at specific vulnerabilities in Win2k?

I'll tell you why -- the answer is spelled out (correctly) in an article written by Ina Fried in a June 28th, 2005, C|Net News article entitled "Windows 2000 moves to the back burner", which discussed Microsoft's end-of-life support for the OS platform.

Here are a couple of key excerpts:

Microsoft on Tuesday issued what is expected to be its last significant revision of Windows 2000.

The software maker released what it calls an Update Rollup for the 5-year-old operating system, which is due to shift at the end of this month from receiving mainstream support to extended support. Microsoft does not generally add features to a product under extended support, and the Update Rollup is largely a collection of previously released patches as opposed to a batch of new features.

In addition to already released fixes, the collection "may contain fixes for non-public low- and moderate-level security issues that did not warrant individual security bulletins," a Microsoft representative said.

...and:

Although Windows 2000 has been followed by several other Windows versions, the software remains extremely popular in corporations and small businesses. It still accounts for nearly half of all Windows-based business desktops, according to a recent survey by AssetMetrix.

So there you have it -- there's still a LOT of Windows 2000 out there...

posted by Fergie @ 8/17/2005 06:27:00 AM