Speaking to Bleeping Computer, Microsoft's Ned Pyle, principle programme manager for the company's Windows Server High Availability and Storage division, announced that a decision to deprecate SMBv1 made five years ago and announced in 2014 now has a deadline: the release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, also known as Windows 10 Redstone 3, and scheduled for October or November this year.
While Microsoft has since issued a patch for all affected Windows releases, including the long-out-of-official-support Windows XP, the company has confirmed it is looking to go still further by officially disabling SMBv1 support across most Windows releases. Launched in early May, the WannaCry ransomware used a vulnerability in the SMBv1 file-sharing protocol discovered and exploited by the US National Security Agency to attack hundreds of thousands of systems around the globe - including systems in several NHS facilities in the UK. Microsoft has confirmed that it is to begin disabling the original Server Message Blocks (SMB) protocol in ' most' variants of Windows, as a means of protecting users against the security issues that brought us the WannaCry ransomware.
