I have Microsoft Security Essentials. That seems to update regularly. Also have and use C Cleaner, Maleware Bytes, etc.
If you believe that running these tools are the antidote to an unsupported OS, then I am afraid your general understanding is too far removed from "functional" to have a rational conversation.
I don't mean any disrespect in that. Not everyone should take the time and effort to develop an understanding of operating systems; they're boring and ridiculously complex. So we tend to offload the responsibilities for handling this stuff to the people who make and administer operating systems, which they do; and they support those OS's with security patches for some period of time, usually years. And then they don't. Microsoft, Apple and every halfway competent Linux distribution out there are
EXTREMELY clear that your systems are rendered vulnerable when they no longer receive security patches.
Users can be as dumb as they want with their own computing; but there are a couple of ways that impacts THE REST OF US.
*****THE REST OF US*****, for heaven's sake.
I cannot tell you all how many times I type those same words in that same order; yet there remains those who are convinced they Know Everything, or worse yet Know Enough, or worse than that
Know More Than The Professionals Who Are Pleading With Them To Update. There's just no fixing that, and those people play a small-but-substantial role in buggering it up for everyone else.
1) When
knuckleheads users insist on running their unsupported OS and malicious parties can use those systems to conduct DDOS, phishing and other scams, spam and the distribution of contraband data it harms the people and organizations and businesses at whom these nefarious activities are directed. Using YOUR computer. And you'll never know it.
2) It burdens everyone else with having to try to support obsolete garbage.
It burdens people who have to try to support legacy OS's in their applications.
It burdens those who are still foolish enough to try to help out Those Who Think They Know Everything when their systems slow to a crawl and misbehave "mysteriously".
In networked environments, it burdens everyone else whose data is now vulnerable as well. I cannot tell you how many organizational disasters start with Linda in Accounting clicking on an attachment, which installs an executable, which then... Well, you get it.
And for the hundreth millionth billionth time: This is NOT about malware or viruses. Those only really affect you for the most part and they can actually teach you quite a bit about the value of security and data redundancy like backups. Heck, you know how many genius hackers are working on viruses that compromise Windows 98? NONE. This is about kernel and userland vulnerabilities. It's about outdated cryptography. It's about 0-day privilege escalations.
Malicious parties want to USE your computer, not destroy it. By using an unsupported OS you are greatly increasing the opportunities for these ne'er-do-wells to get what they want.
This is all much more important for those of us with our grubby little hands on servers than it is for the home desktop user. The fact(s) that we HAVE the knowledge about how these vulnerabilities manifest and that we HAVE to be vigilant constantly to stave off malicious parties can lead us to be especially vocal when people are doing something that is very, very, very unwise.
I want to help the people running unsupported OS's understand why it is important to upgrade, and I want to help minimize the impact that malicious parties' efforts have on all of us. There are those of us on this forum who have knowledge about many, many things and it is generous of them to give of that knowledge to the rest of us. Everyone has the freedom to disregard quality advice and make whatever decisions they want. But in an ever-increasingly interconnected world we are seeing small groups of people with the power to just mess everything up for everyone else.
With that said, the human who operates the operating system is far, far, far more likely to be the weak link in the security armour than an unpatched OS. Grandmas every day are losing their life savings because of email scams. One "grandparent scam" was stopped in my area very recently. The people responsible for these scams were using compromised cloud email (read: Gmail, Outlook) accounts for which they'd obtained the passwords fraudulently. These things have nothing to do with OS's; it's just relentless deceit. The world is not going to end because someone is still using Windows 7.
But at some point the frustration comes with the endless stream of arguments and rationalizations from people who are challenging the validity of the advice; arguments that make it unambiguously clear that the arguer's understanding is woefully shy of "adequate".
But please, guys, please just use a supported OS. And if you really want to develop an understanding about what goes into keeping an OS safe, read some of the changelogs and CVE's for patches that come in. Windows usually has KB******* unique identifiers for issues and are easy to look up. Usually, in reasonably plain English, the patch's contributor will provide a description of what issue they're addressing.
