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Microsoft Corp. is sounding a new set of alarms about a product that could soon be vulnerable to attacks by hackers.

Less than a year after warning businesses and consumers about the end of support for its popular if dated Windows XP operating system, the company says it will drop support on July 14 for the Windows Server 2003 software that is in use on around 40 per cent of all Microsoft servers in Canada.

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In fact, according to Treasury Board Secretariat — the federal department responsible for computing equipment and infrastructure renewal — there are as many as 8,000 federal servers running the soon-to-be-decommissioned software.

The federal government admitted that it’s not in a position to move away from those servers before July and has had to hammer out a special support deal with Microsoft to continue receiving security patches for those machines.

It costs money to release security patches and other updates for operating systems and the software that allows servers to operate. As a result, companies establish cut-off dates to let users know when such updates will cease. Without them, glitches in the software remain unfixed and any vulnerabilities that may be discovered by hackers are left open for exploits.