Chinese security vendor Qihoo 360 is rolling out protection software to hundreds of millions of users in the nation. The company already has 470 million users.

XP Shield was launched in late February and over 90 percent of the company’s Windows XP users have downloaded the software. In China, XP is still quite popular and has a 70 percent share of the local market.

Sun Xiaojun, a security engineer with the company, said: “We did a preliminary study and found that about two-thirds of Chinese users may not decide to upgrade their OS after Microsoft cuts support to Windows XP.”

The company held a challenge with other Chinese security vendors. Hackers were invited to find vulnerabilities in the XP security software from Qihoo 360, and two other Chinese companies, Tencent and Kingsoft. Only Qihoo 360’s software came out unscathed.

The company will face an increasing challenge when MS starts issuing patches for Windows 7 and 8.
Hackers will be able to analyze the updates to find weaknesses in the no-longer supported Windows XP OS.