Microsoft Office 2003 will reach its end-of-life on April 8, 2014. Following this date, hackers are expected to focus on attacking this widely popular office suite since Microsoft will no longer patch up vulnerabilities.
April 8, 2014 is the end-of-life for Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003. While the case of Windows XP is well known, the drop of support for Office 2003 is less spoken of.
Similar to the case for Windows XP, once Office 2003 reaches its end-of-life, no new patches will be released for the public. This means that the hackers can exploit a vulnerability in the software suite indefinitely, without worrying about their vulnerability being patched up by Microsoft.
This is a big issue, primarily for companies who often upgrade very slowly as they see very little productivity gain by upgrading. Therefore, even after the end-of-life, there will still be many users who are running Office 2003 which may become a problem.
It is expected that Custom Support will be used by those requiring support and patches. But as described, Custom Support is very expensive and not something a normal consumer could afford.
No comments:
Post a Comment