MS Windows XP is now officially declared 'less secure'

Windows XP is considerably more prone to malware infection than newer operating systems, Microsoft has said. The company has warned on the dangers of running an unsupported operating system, ahead of its April deadline for ending extended support for Windows XP SP3 next year. Microsoft found that while PCs running newer versions of Windows were just as likely as XP to come across malware, XP's chances of actually being infected were higher. Compared with Windows 8, XP's infection rate was almost six times higher. Microsoft added that XP's infection rate was 1.5 times worse than Vista and three times worse than Windows 7. The company compared PCs running Windows XP SP3, various versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and Windows 8 during the second quarter of this year. <more>

Firefox 25 comes with 10 security fixes

Mozilla released 10 patches for three versions of its Firefox browser on Tuesday, five of which are considered critical and could be used to remotely install malicious code. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned that the problems "could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code, bypass intended access restrictions, cause a denial-of-service condition or obtain sensitive information." The Mozilla products affected are Firefox 25, Firefox ESR 24.1, Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 17.0.10, Thunderbird 24.1, Thunderbird ESR 17.0.10, and Seamonkey 2.22. Among the flaws fixed were several memory safety bugs in the browser engine, which is also in Mozilla's Thunderbird email client and Seamonkey, a suite of applications and web development tools. <more>