Security News
Microsoft announced that it will retire Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool troubleshooters in future versions of Windows, with MSDT ultimately being removed in 2025. Also known as legacy inbox troubleshooters, these Windows built-in tools are used to diagnose and fix issues affecting some Windows features automatically.
Microsoft says apps using DirectX are crashing on Windows systems after installing cumulative updates released in November 2022 because of an Intel graphics driver bug. Until an update addressing this issue is released, Microsoft says that affected customers can temporarily work around it by updating their Intel GPU driver to a newer version.
Microsoft and Adobe have partnered to integrate the Adobe Acrobat PDF rendering engine directly into the Edge browser, replacing the existing PDF engine. Starting in March 2023, new versions of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10 and Windows 11 will roll out that includes this new PDF engine.
A new QBot malware campaign dubbed "QakNote" has been observed in the wild since last week, using malicious Microsoft OneNote'. Qbot is a former banking trojan that evolved into malware that specializes in gaining initial access to devices, enabling threat actors to load additional malware on the compromised machines and perform data-stealing, ransomware, or other activities across an entire network.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday a new version of its Bing search engine powered by a next-generation OpenAI language model more powerful than ChatGPT and specially trained for web search. "Today, we're launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web."
Microsoft is investigating and working on addressing an ongoing outage affecting the company's Outlook webmail service. According to information shared via the company's Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account, Redmond is performing targeted restarts to portions of the infrastructure impacted by a recent change.
An Iranian nation-state group sanctioned by the U.S. government has been attributed to the hack of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in early January 2023. Two Iranian nationals have been accused for their role in the disinformation and threat campaign.
Microsoft believes the gang who boasted it had stolen and leaked more than 200,000 Charlie Hebdo subscribers' personal information is none other than a Tehran-backed gang. On January 4, a previously unknown cyber-crime group that called itself Holy Souls claimed to have stolen a Charlie Hebdo database containing 230,000 customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and financial information, and offered it for sale for about $340,000.
In a continuing sign that threat actors are adapting well to a post-macro world, it has emerged that the use of Microsoft OneNote documents to deliver malware via phishing attacks is on the rise. Enterprise firm Proofpoint said it detected over 50 campaigns leveraging OneNote attachments in the month of January 2023 alone.
Windows 10 users are reportedly being blocked from accessing their desktops by full-screen trial offers for the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. They are displayed during the Windows Out of Box Experience before loading the Windows desktop.