Security News

Microsoft announced that Windows Autopatch, a service designed to automatically keep Windows and Office software up to date, will be released in July 2022. Windows Autopatch is a new managed service offered for free to all Microsoft customers who already have a Windows 10/11 Enterprise E3 or above license.

The seizure is also part of a long-running legal and technical hunt by Microsoft to disrupt the work of Strontium - aka APT28 and FancyBear, among other names - via an expedited court process that enables the company to quickly get judicial approval for such actions, according to Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft. Before the latest seizures, Microsoft had used this process 15 times to take over more than 100 domains controlled by Strontium, which is thought to be run by the GRU, Russia's foreign military intelligence agency.

Microsoft has reminded customers today that multiple editions of Windows 10 20H2 and Windows 10 1909 are reaching the end of service on May 10, 2022. In a support document, Microsoft says that Windows 10 20H2 will reach EOS for Windows 10 Home, Pro, Pro Education, and Pro for Workstations users.

Microsoft has successfully disrupted attacks against Ukrainian targets coordinated by the Russian APT28 hacking group after taking down seven domains used as attack infrastructure. Strontium, linked to Russia's military intelligence service GRU, used these domains to target multiple Ukrainian institutions, including media organizations.

While there are some malicious drivers that are deliberately crafted to compromise PCs, the most problems come from a small number of legitimate drivers with accidental flaws in, said David Weston, VP of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft. "Think about some of the driver cases recently where a certificate leaked from a giant vendor. If we revoke that, everyone's devices may stop working. We need more of a precision mechanism to do blocking while we work towards the longer approach of revocation. The Vulnerable Driver Block List allows the user to do that with a very precise list that Microsoft has validated. We look at things like how many devices would stop working? Have we worked with a vendor to have a fix? We think the list is a good balance for folks who want security, but also want the confidence that Microsoft has done the telemetry and analysis."

NET Framework versions signed using the insecure Secure Hash Algorithm 1 will reach their end of life this month. NET. "On April 26, 2022, the.NET Framework 4.5.2, 4.6, and 4.6.1 will reach end of support, and after this date, Microsoft will no longer provide updates including security fixes and technical support for these versions," Microsoft said in a Windows message center update.

Bug hunters that discover and report high-impact security vulnerabilities in on-premises Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business may earn as much as $26,000 per eligible submission, Microsoft has announced. The highest awards will go to those who discover vulnerabilities that have the highest potential impact to customer security.

Microsoft said that it's currently tracking a "Low volume of exploit attempts" targeting the critical Spring4Shell remote code execution vulnerability across its cloud services. The Spring4Shell vulnerability impacts the Spring Framework, described as the "Most widely used lightweight open-source framework for Java.".

Microsoft has announced that Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business on-premises are now part of the Applications and On-Premises Servers Bounty Program starting today. With the expansion of this bug bounty program, security researchers who find and report vulnerabilities affecting on-premises servers are eligible for awards ranging from $500 up to $26,000.

"In a future release of Windows 11 you're going to see significant security updates that add even more protection from the chip to the cloud by combining modern hardware and software," said David Weston, VP for Enterprise & OS Security. One of the new security features Microsoft is adding in Windows 11 is enhanced phishing protection against targeted phishing attacks with the help of Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware service.