Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 05:17:00 -0800
Late last year, landave, a self-described “Computer Science student enjoying cryptography, reverse engineering, and other information security topics,” discovered two startling security holes in 7-Zip, a free zip program I’ve recommended for years.
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2018 12:23:00 -0800
Microsoft on Saturday issued an out-of-band Windows security update that disabled a patch the company released earlier this month to protect personal computers from possible attacks leveraging one of the “Spectre” vulnerabilities.
The weekend release was Microsoft’s response to an announcement seven days ago by Intel, which told customers of all stripes – from computer makers to end users – to stop deploying the firmware updates it had offered after disclosures of the Spectre and Meltdown flaws. According to Intel, the new firmware “may introduce [a] higher-than-expected [number of] reboots and other unpredictable system behavior” on Broadwell and Haswell processors. Those silicon families were introduced in 2015 and 2013, respectively.
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2018 06:45:00 -0800
If you’ve been playing the cat-and-mouse Microsoft patching game for a while, you know that Microsoft changes its Knowledge Base articles from time to time, without warning and at times without documentation. Now there’s a resource for those who need to know who moved their cheese — and when.
Several times in the past month, the eagle-eyed crew at AskWoody, led by @MrBrian, have found out about new Windows patches before they were announced. They’ve also looked at the raw data showing which KB articles have been changed — even if Microsoft doesn’t document the changes. The secret? A new monitoring program called KBNew.
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2018 05:49:00 -0800
As we crawl deeper down the Meltdown/Spectre bunny hole, Microsoft released on Friday night a weird, download-only patch that disables the “fix” that’s supposed to protect you against one of the Spectre variants. It’s the same patch, that works the same way, on every version of Windows, from Win7 to the latest Win10 beta builds.
I’m tempted to call it an out-of-band patch, but truth is that all of this month’s patches have been out of band.
You’ve no doubt been inundated by the news about Meltdown and Spectre, the two (actually, three) highly publicized security vulnerabilities in essentially all modern computer chips that, at this point, has never been seen on a real, live, in-the-wild computer.
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 10:00:00 -0800
On the heels of a relatively benevolent December Patch Tuesday, the stream of patches pouring out of Microsoft (and Intel!) in January reached epic proportions. To be fair, it looks as if Microsoft got drawn into releasing its Meltdown/Spectre barrage early – on Jan. 3 – but they were so buggy they were withdrawn for AMD processors on Jan. 8, and gradually re-released in phases over the next two weeks.
Credit to Author: Windows Defender ATP| Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 14:00:21 +0000
Attackers are determined to circumvent security defenses using increasingly sophisticated techniques. Fileless malware boosts the stealth and effectiveness of an attack, and two of last years major ransomware outbreaks (Petya and WannaCry) used fileless techniques as part of their kill chains. The idea behind fileless malware is simple: If tools already exist on a device
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Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 03:52:00 -0800
Windows 10 will power to its third anniversary this summer, but one branch, identified by the initials L-T-S-B, remains an enigma to most corporate users.
LTSB, which stands for “Long-term Servicing Branch,” was among the pillars of Windows 10 in the months leading up to, and for months after, the mid-2015 roll-out of the operating system. For a time, it seemed that it had a shot at becoming the Windows 10 for enterprise because it was seen as a calm port in a storm of radical change.
That hasn’t happened, in part because Microsoft has steered customers away from LTSB.
Just what is LTSB? And what has Microsoft done to make it an afterthought?
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2018 09:28:00 -0800
On the heels of the Jan. 17 release of 14 Windows and .NET patches, we now have a huge crop of new patches, revised older patches, warnings about bugs, and a bewildered ecosystem of Microsoft customers who can’t figure out what in the blue blazes is going on.
Let’s step through the, uh, offerings on Jan. 18.
Win10 Fall Creators Update version 1709 — Cumulative update KB 4073291 brings the Meltdown/Spectre patches to 32-bit machines. What, you thought 32-bit machines already had Meltdown/Spectre patches? Silly mortal. Microsoft’s Security Advisory ADV180002 has the dirty details in the fine print, point 7: