Internet access blocked at schools

The municipal data protection and IT security officer of the City of Stuttgart has blocked internet access at around 140 of the 167 Stuttgart schools under municipal authority. The schools are still operating on the Windows XP operating system, for which Microsoft ended support on 8 April.

According to a report by the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the data protection and IT security department had comprehensively informed the Stuttgart schools about the problems with Windows XP. However, only when internet access was blocked for the administrative computers (not the computers that students use for learning) did the schools come forward.

The background to the blocking is the security risk associated with the loss of regular updates following the end of support for XP, which makes systems more vulnerable to malicious programmes.

Upon application, the school administration office was able to obtain a postponement of the blocking until 30 June. However, compliance with this deadline also appeared impossible. The schools themselves had no influence on the changeover. The school administration office has now engaged an external IT service provider to accelerate the changeover to Windows 7. A challenge is to find a replacement for the legacy applications used, which are not compatible with newer Windows versions at all.

In the meantime, the data protection and IT security department has decided to keep the administrative computers on the network despite the associated data protection risks, in order to ensure the operational capability of the school administrations.

Paid support as a solution?

The changeover from Windows XP has also not been completed in other places. According to a report by heise online, authorities in Lower Saxony and Berlin, but also the German Armed Forces, receive paid security updates from Microsoft beyond the official end of support under so-called Custom Support Agreements. According to a report by PC-Welt, the US tax authority IRS is also said to still use more than 50,000 computers with Windows XP. The costs for this continuation of security updates are estimated at up to 10 million US dollars. And according to a report on golem.de, the British government pays Microsoft more than 6.5 million euros for a one-year extension of security updates.

Conclusion

The experiences made with the termination of support for Windows XP will leave their mark. In future, so one may hope for data protection, the necessary measures for a successful changeover will be taken earlier.