For those who still haven’t retired Windows XP, doomsday may be fast approaching.

Microsoft has recently announced that it plans to cease patching one of their most successful operating systems, Windows XP. The date is set to April 8, 2014 and hackers across the world have marked their calendars. Once Microsoft stops patching XP, the black market price for any new zero-day vulnerability will rise dramatically.

The last operating system retired by Microsoft was Windows 2000 and that was in 2010. Windows 2000 was not nearly as widely used at the time of its retirement as Windows XP currently is. It is predicted that approximately one third of the world’s PCs will still be run by Windows XP by the end of April 2014.

Now is the time to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8. Experts are expecting a full-on assault by hacker zero-day exploits the moment Microsoft turns its back on Windows XP.

Original article by Gregg Keizer.
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