Are You Ready for Microsoft Windows 7 End of Support on 14th January 2020?

From a security perspective, both the routine monthly security
patches as well as hotfixes for attacks in the wild will not be
available, effectively making any newly discovered vulnerability a
Windows 7 zero-day.

Cynet 360 autonomous breach protection is a good example of a
multilayered advanced protection solution that can enable
organizations who run Windows 7 to remain secure despite the end of
support (to learn more click
here^[1]).

Let’s dig a bit deeper to understand the risk. The reality is
that all software contains bugs. Ideally, these bugs are discovered
during the development process. In practice, many of them surface
only following the product release in the course of their
interactions with real users.

Bugs that can be exploited for malicious purposes are called
vulnerabilities. Microsoft conducts rigorous and ongoing research
to discover and fix such vulnerabilities.

Every second (or sometimes fourth) Tuesday of the calendar
month, Microsoft releases these fixes, also known as patches. Once
these patches are installed, the machine is 100% protected from the
exploitation of these vulnerabilities. However, this protection
will no longer apply to machines that run Windows 7, starting on
January 14, 2020.

“It’s a critical challenge for many organizations,” says Eyal
Gruner, founder, and CEO of Cynet, “The reality is that Windows 7
is alive and kicking in many organizations, even if Microsoft
chooses not to protect them anymore. It should be a wake-up call to
any CISO to ask himself or herself how to adjust to this new
reality.”

What indeed can be done to protect Windows 7 machines in the
post EOL era? Gruner explains that this is where multilayered
protection should step in.

“One of our main guidelines when building Cynet 360 was to be
able to operate in a fast-changing environment, meaning that every
type of attack is analyzed from multiple perspectives, each
resulting in a different protection mechanism. If we take exploits
targeting Windows 7 as an example, there is first the exploit
protection per-se. By closely monitoring process behavior in
memory, the detection engine can easily detect behavioral patterns
that are typical to exploits and would never occur in a legitimate
process.

“And we should remember that in most to all cases, the exploit
itself is not the end, but the mere means to open a network
connection and download the actual malware. Cynet 360 monitors that
connection as well. And if a process starts running, Cynet would
analyze it in real-time – regardless if there was an actual
download of the file to disk, or if the payload runs only in memory
– and use multiple behavioral analysis methods to detect if it’s
benign or malicious, terminating it in the case of the latter.”

So, is Windows 7 EOL a reason to be concerned? Probably yes. Can
organizations that run Windows 7 maintain the same level of
security as they did before? Certainly yes, as long as they have
the right type of protection in place.

Learn here how Cynet can
protect EOL Windows 7 machines^[2].