Security News

Microsoft faces bipartisan criticism for alleged censorship on Bing in China
2024-03-21 21:25

Microsoft is the subject of growing criticism in the US over allegations that its Bing search engine censors results for users in China that relate to sensitive subjects the state wants blocked. Republican Senator Marco Rubio has added his voice to criticism of the Redmond software giant for reportedly removing search results from Bing on human rights, democracy, climate change, and other sticky issues within China.

Microsoft confirms Windows Server issue behind domain controller crashes
2024-03-21 12:27

Microsoft confirmed that a memory leak introduced with the March 2024 Windows Server security updates is behind a widespread issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash. The known issue impacts all domain controller servers with the latest Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022 updates.

It's tax season, and scammers are a step ahead of filers, Microsoft says
2024-03-20 19:30

As the digital wolves dress in sheep's tax forms, Microsoft has thrown a spotlight on a crafty 2024 phishing expedition, unraveled in January, that preys on the unsuspecting herd of early tax filers. The malicious email campaign, purporting to be employees' tax returns, contained an attachment that, when clicked, directs the user to a phony website that looks like a blurred spreadsheet, with a download documents button marked "Confidentials to users[dot]name[at] contoso[dot]com."

New Phishing Attack Uses Clever Microsoft Office Trick to Deploy NetSupport RAT
2024-03-19 05:28

A new phishing campaign is targeting U.S. organizations with the intent to deploy a remote access trojan called NetSupport RAT. Israeli cybersecurity company Perception Point is tracking the...

Microsoft announces deprecation of 1024-bit RSA keys in Windows
2024-03-18 19:51

Microsoft has announced that RSA keys shorter than 2048 bits will soon be deprecated in Windows Transport Layer Security to provide increased security. 1024-bit RSA keys have approximately 80 bits of strength, while the 2048-bit key has approximately 112 bits, making the latter four billion times longer to factor.

Microsoft again bothers Chrome users with Bing popup ads in Windows
2024-03-17 17:08

Microsoft is once again harassing Google Chrome users on Windows 10 and Windows 11 with popup desktop advertisements promoting Bing and its GPT-4 Bing Chat platform. The unsolicited ads are believed to be shown when users have Google Chrome open and configured to use Google as the default search engine.

Microsoft announces Office LTSC 2024 preview starting next month
2024-03-15 16:57

Microsoft announced that Office LTSC 2024, the next Office LTSC release, will enter a commercial preview phase starting next month and will be generally available later this year. The company will also release Office 2024 later this year, a new version of on-premises Office for consumers, which comes with five years of support and the traditional "One-time purchase" model.

DarkGate Malware Exploited Recently Patched Microsoft Flaw in Zero-Day Attack
2024-03-14 04:57

A DarkGate malware campaign observed in mid-January 2024 leveraged a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day using bogus software installers. “During this campaign, users...

Microsoft’s Security Copilot Enters General Availability
2024-03-13 16:00

Microsoft Security Copilot, also referred to as Copilot for Security, will be in general availability starting April 1, the company announced today.At a press briefing on March 7 at the Microsoft Experience Center in New York, we saw how Microsoft positions Security Copilot as a way for security personnel to get real-time assistance with their work and pull data from across Microsoft's suite of security services.

Microsoft Copilot for Security prepares for April liftoff
2024-03-13 16:00

Microsoft Copilot for Security, a subscription AI security service, will be generally available on April 1, 2024, the company announced on Wednesday. Based on GPT-4 and a Microsoft security-specific model, Copilot for Security takes input from people or scripts, passes the text through an orchestrator layer, a context layer, and possibly application plugins, then returns a response from the underlying AI model.