InfoSec Links April 16, 2014

Xbox password flaw exposed by five-year-old boy - BBC

This five-year-old boy is now on Microsoft's page thanking people for finding problems in their software. The boy found that if you hit spacebar multiple times in a password field he could get access to his dad's Xbox live account. Not surprising, his dad works in security.

XPocalypse: Experts Warn of Attackers Hoarding Windows XP 'Forever Days' - Fahmida Y. Rashid - Security Week

Just another reason to upgrade your Windows XP computers to a newer operating system. Attackers are saving their exploits for after support so that they are not discovered and patched.

IRS another Windows XP laggard, will pay Microsoft for patches - Peter Bright - ars technica

That is unless you're the IRS and you procrastinated on upgrading your computers to a newer operating system. It's going to cost $30 million dollars to finish the upgrade. Before they do that though they're going to give Microsoft anywhere from $500K to $11M (actual number to be published later) to continue to support their old XP boxes. Oh, and the IRS made it very clear that this won't be an excuse for you to miss the April 15 tax filing deadline. Hooray government.

This post first appeared on Exploring Information Security.