London’s Met Police still stuck on unsafe Windows XP

More than half of the PCS used by London’s Metropolitan Police still run Windows XP, 16 years after the operating system launched, and over three years after Microsoft stopped supporting it.

The force runs 18,293 XP machines, and has upgraded 14,450 others to Windows 8.1. Only eight have been upgraded to Windows 10.

Around 19,000 computers were running XP in December 2016, meaning the Met has upgraded only 1,000 in the past seven months.

The figures were uncovered by London Assembly member Steve O’connell, who acts as the Greater London Authority Conservatives’ spokesman for policing and crime, through a written query to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

“The recent cyber attacks on Parliament and the NHS show what a serious matter this is,” O’connell said. “The Met is working towards upgrading its software but in its current state it’s like a fish swimming in a pool of sharks.”

Continued use of XP has been widely criticised by security experts and the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’S data watchdog, which warned that the Met’s failure to upgrade meant that the secure handling of personal data could be put at risk.

O’connell added: “It is vital the Met is given the resources to step up its upgrade timeline before we see another cyber attack with nationwide security implications”.

The force originally set itself a deadline of March 2016 to move its PCS on to Windows 8.1 (bypassing Windows 7), from which it planned to upgrade to 10. Microsoft will continue to offer security updates for 8.1 until 2023, when Extended support ends.

A spokesperson for Scotland Yard said upgrading computers is difficult “due to the amount of specialist legacy software upon which parts of the Met still rely”. Should we bomb cyberterrorists?