SANS ISC: More Thoughts on Legacy Systems

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SANS ISC InfoSec Forums

Adding to Swa's diary he wrote on November 5th, one of our readers passed along a couple of additional thoughts on legacy systems to us today:

1. It's not only "legacy" systems that require IE6.

A local post-secondary educational institution spent > $40 million to replace their legacy administrative systems with one of those out-of-the-box integrated systems (the only contenders in this category are BANNER and PEOPLESOFT), only to find that the system requires IE6 on each user's workstation. 

So, they have a large project (scheduled to complete next Spring) to take all their customizations forward into the latest version of the vendor's software.

The staff is not happy that management is blocking all vacation-requests, in order to meet the project's deadline -- in an academic environment, there are very few "windows" where a major software-upgrade can occur, because students work online 24/7, need their marks, and need to register for the next semester.

Until then, their local WSUS-server is not deploying IE7 to all the "managed" workstations.

So, until then, "IE6 rules".

2. If you know that your Windows XP system will not "pass" the Windows Genuine Advantage validation -- you know who you are, and you know from where you obtained your copy of Windows XP -- you cannot install IE7. So, you continue to use IE6, or you use Firefox.

Thanks, anonymous reader!

Marcus H. Sachs
Director, SANS Internet Storm Center