Security News
Microsoft says Windows admins can now opt into automatic updates for. NET 6.0 to the Automatic Updates channel as a third option on top of Windows Server Update Services and Microsoft Update Catalog.
Microsoft has released patches for 128 security vulnerabilities for its April 2022 monthly scheduled update - ten of them rated critical. It's listed as a "Windows Common Log File System Driver Execution Vulnerability," and was reported to Microsoft by the National Security Agency.
On this April 2022 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released patches for 128 CVE-numbered vulnerabilities, including one zero-day exploited in the wild and another for which there's already a PoC and a Metasploit module. CVE-2022-24521 is a vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System Driver that was reported to Microsoft by the National Security Agency and Adam Podlosky and Amir Bazine of Crowdstrike.
Today is Microsoft's April 2022 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for two zero-day vulnerabilities and a total of 119 flaws. [...]
Microsoft has discovered a new malware used by the Chinese-backed Hafnium hacking group to maintain persistence on compromised Windows systems by creating and hiding scheduled tasks. "Further investigation reveals forensic artifacts of the usage of Impacket tooling for lateral movement and execution and the discovery of a defense evasion malware called Tarrask that creates 'hidden' scheduled tasks, and subsequent actions to remove the task attributes, to conceal the scheduled tasks from traditional means of identification."
In a blog post outlining the actions, Microsoft reported attackers used the domains to target Ukrainian media organizations, government institutions and foreign policy think tanks based in the U.S. and Europe. "We obtained a court order authorizing us to take control of seven internet domains Strontium was using to conduct these attacks," said Tom Burt, corporate vice president of Customer Security and Trust at Microsoft.
If you are waiting for Windows 11 side-taskbar support before upgrading to the latest operating system, you may be waiting for a long time, according to a recent Microsoft Ask Me Anything session. When Windows was first released, the most controversial changes were the new centered Start Menu and the reduced functionality of the Windows taskbar.
Microsoft last week announced that it intends to make generally available a feature called Autopatch as part of Windows Enterprise E3 in July 2022."This service will keep Windows and Office software on enrolled endpoints up-to-date automatically, at no additional cost," said Lior Bela, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, in a post last week.
Microsoft has tweaked the Microsoft Edge sleeping tabs feature to improve the web browser's overall responsiveness and performance. "Beginning in Microsoft Edge 100, we've updated sleeping tabs to enable pages that are sharing a browsing instance with another page to now go to sleep," the Microsoft Edge Team said earlier this week.
Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that it obtained a court order to take control of seven domains used by APT28, a state-sponsored group operated by Russia's military intelligence service, with the goal of neutralizing its attacks on Ukraine. "We have since re-directed these domains to a sinkhole controlled by Microsoft, enabling us to mitigate Strontium's current use of these domains and enable victim notifications," Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice president of customer security and trust, said.