On Tuesday (Aug. 13), Microsoft released a global warning to all Windows 10 users—update your operating systems immediately to avoid two “critical” vulnerabilities that can spread viruses and malware.
Simon Pope, Microsoft’s director of Incident Response and the author of the blog post, said that there are “potentially hundreds of millions of vulnerable computers”.
Windows 10 is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, according to Net Marketshare. Microsoft approximated that more than 800 million devices all over the globe use Windows 10.
“It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible because of the elevated risks associated with wormable vulnerabilities like these, and downloads for these can be found in the Microsoft Security Update Guide,” said Pope.
The affected versions of Windows are Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and all supported versions of Windows 10, including server versions.
Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 are not affected.
These vulnerabilities were discovered by Microsoft during hardening of Remote Desktop Services, which is a part of the tech company’s continual focus on strengthening the security of our products.
At this time, Microsoft has no evidence that these vulnerabilities are known to any third party.