Daily Tech Briefing: May 2, 2014

While Microsoft officials said that they would no longer support Windows XP, the company has released an emergency out-of-band update for a zero-day vulnerability, identified as CVE-2014-1776, which has been affecting Internet Explorer. The flaw impacts versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of the Web browser with a remote code execution vulnerability.

Dustin Childs, group manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, explained in a blog post that while the company has released a security update for Windows XP users, it has not made plans to extend support of the operating system.

T-Mobile recently announced that the company added 2.4 million customers during the first quarter of 2014, which is more than AT&T’s and Verizon’s combined. More than 1.3 million of these customers were branded, postpaid subscribers, while 1.2 million were phone customers.

T-Mobile sold 6.9 million smartphones during the quarter to both new and existing customers. A great deal of this growth is likely, thanks to T-Mobile’s offer to pay the early termination fees of anyone wanting to switch from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint to T-Mobile.

IBM has announced the expansion of its MobileFirst Application Development portfolio, which comes complete with industry-specific IBM Ready Apps. The company also announced the opening of 18 IBM MobileFirst studios. The IBM MobileFirst Application Development portfolio offers tools for developers to create, deploy and manage mobile apps both on-premise and in the cloud. The announcement was made at the IBM Impact 2014 conference.

Finally, since Target experienced a massive security breach five months ago, the company has been struggling to recover and prevent such an event from happening again. Recently, Target announced it has hired a new CIO and is taking strides to reinforce its security. One step the company is taking is accelerating its own timeline for adopting chip-and-PIN credit cards, which may be more secure than magnetic-stripe credit cards.