Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid...

[Foxbat]

I was watching the "60 Minutes" feature showing scenes inside the NSA. In the background of several interviews were LCD monitors with the default Windows XP Pro screensaver. On the screens that were active, the green "START" button was sitting there in the lower-left hand corner of the screen.

How much faith should we put in the NSA if they are running an OS that is End-of-Support in four months?

There was also the "we saved the Banking System from a bogus BIOS virus" interview that I should have gone back and re-watched. If the BIOS on your PC is telling you it needs to be updated when you are rebooting, chances are your PC is already powned.

 

[riffjim4069]

It could be a specially hardened version from Microsoft; anyone can purchase end-of-life-support assuming they have the $$; could be a deceptive counter-measure to hide the OSs true identity from politicians and government officials (e.g., the untrusted types who run their yaps and don't feel that laws pertaining to protecting classified information apply to them). Or they could just be running some outdated trash. We'll have to read what Snowden says about it.

 

[Foxbat]

Specially hardened version of Windows XP; that's rich...

I thought it was for show. Most businesses are on-track to replace all of their XP machines before the deadline. Showing NSA PCs running XP could throw off the Black hats by making them think the NSA is behind the times.

 

[mike123abc]

Specially hardened version of Windows XP; that's rich...

I thought it was for show. Most businesses are on-track to replace all of their XP machines before the deadline. Showing NSA PCs running XP could throw off the Black hats by making them think the NSA is behind the times.

Actually Microsoft did develop a special hardened version of XP for the government. http://usgcb.nist.gov/usgcb/microsoft/download_winxp.html

 

[Kraven]

I doubt the NSA would allow 60 minutes, or any other news agency, to film their actual equipement.

 

[jayn_j]

I am assuming that the NSA is like most places I work. The PC is for access to the real machines that do the heavy lifting. The build servers, database engines, configuration managers, etc are not running windows.

The window machines are terminals, mail readers and web browsers. In other words access points.