Not necessarily
"... presenting opportunities galore for criminals to take advantage of poorly secured systems..." security professional Graham Cluley told The Register.
There are many legitimate reasons for using an "out of support" OS (i.e. one for which the vendor has stopped fixing its innumerable silly mistakes), such as retention of expensive hardware for which later drivers aren't available. A classic case was a jobbing engineer with about £2M locked up in CNC tooling for which drivers stopped being released after Win XP (on which it performed perfectly well).
But using one does not necessarily render you more vulnerable, if for no other reason that the new OS contains bugs we don't know about yet. And to equate "not supported" with "poorly secured systems" is to suggest that Windows security is the totality of security, which is just silly. Too many organisations rely on Windows to "secure" unsegregated flat networks, and they pay the penalty in data breaches.
Apart from which, why would I trust any vendor that has never stopped issuing security patches for the entire life of every product (and that's pretty much every vendor) to instruct me about or control my security? They can't even get their products secure.
Unfortunately the entire IT industry is party to an emergent conspiracy of obsolescence in order to keep the revenue stream going. When we remember that there are mainframe computer installed in the '70s still in operation, the micro IT market shows up as driven not by user need but by enforced consumerism, primarily for the benefit of vendors.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
