Microsoft may have kept its promise to drop support of Windows NT Workstation 4, but that’s one the Redmond, Wash.-based developer should break, Gartner analysts urged Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Among the more than 20 patches that Microsoft released Tuesday, none were for the aged operating system, which saw its security fix support end June 30, 2004.<\/p>\n
Microsoft will only release free fixes for OSes like NTW4 when a vulnerability is actively exploited on the Internet.<\/p>\n
“Microsoft is being shortsighted in not publicly releasing fixes for critical holes in NTW4,” wrote Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald in an advisory published. “[It] risks a public-relations nightmare if an attack based on the unpatched vulnerability shuts down a major corporation or government agency.”<\/p>\n
The pair urged that Microsoft “set a higher standard for the security support of older products” by extending fixes to NTW4. That’s doable, they added, since such fixes are already available.<\/p>\n
Companies that have signed $200,000 custom support contracts with Microsoft receive security patches on older, non-supported operating systems. “Microsoft has already developed NTW4 patches for customers that have paid for custom support,” Silver and MacDonald wrote.<\/p>\n
“But [it] says it does not want to give users a false sense of security by breaking its policy and releasing these fixes publicly.”<\/p>\n
Microsoft should rethink that policy, the pair concluded.<\/p>\n
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