Many banks paying Microsoft big bucks to support Windows XP-based ATMs

[A Guy]

Thanks to the fact that the vast majority of ATMs are still using Windows XP, many banks in the US and UK have already extended, or plan to extend, their service contracts with Microsoft beyond April 8th, when the company officially stops supporting the 12 year old operating system.

Source

A Guy

 

[user31]

XP is a great OS. It's probably one of the most used OS by businesses.

 

[senseless1707]

Going to be very interesting to see what happens with the ATM's and the end of the XP era.

 

[techtitan100]

i have been counting down to the next patch Tuesday to see what happens and the old OS now has 12 days 20 hours and 21 minutes until it is taken off support

 

[alphanumeric]

ATM's are running XP Embedded by the way. That's not your normal XP that you run on a PC. They are also isolated form the attacks your daily user PC would face. That being said I still think its time they updated them and moved on to a more current OS.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there.

Can't see what all the Hoo Ha is about -- these Banks should just "Virtualize" the XP machines - then these could run until the END of the lifetime of the universe -- the ATM is a dedicated application which doesn't change or need any updates (with perhaps some firmware updates -- for example better interface / more options / Braille or spoken options for Blind customers etc.)

To check the customers balance the XP machine simply makes a query to another app where all the security is installed that runs the DB query to verify customers balance etc.

My experience with most BANK and Government I.T systems is that these are over complicated and badly written - probably due to the fact that these have been off shored so many times - each company paying LESS than the previous one - so you get what "you pay for" - or actually "Don't Pay for".

Examples -- UK National Health service - Billion GBP contract abandoned, Banks ATM's not working for several days at a time, even the British Home Office (equiv to US Homeland / Immigration etc service) not knowing how many prisoners were in Jail at any one time (an 11 year old could write a simple spreadsheet to compute that info !! etc etc.)

The OS is surely IRRELEVANT --if the business analysts were properly paid and designed their systems so they were fit for purpose in the first place then the process could be done on any OS.

IMO the whole I.T off shoring - while probably removing a few people in Bangalore out of poverty has been a TOTAL and UNMITIGATED disaster for the customers of these services --but what business these days CARES about customer service any more.

However these as the previous poster said do run with "embedded XP" so there shouldn't be any problem. However there's no reason why these can't run on decent hardware - running a Virtualized XP would certainly be easy and would work.

Cheers
jimbo