Security News
Microsoft has released the optional KB5001396 preview cumulative update for Windows 10 1909 with numerous fixes that increase performance in the operating system. This cumulative update is Microsoft's April 2021 monthly "C" update that allows users and admins to preview the upcoming fixes scheduled for release in the forthcoming May 2021 Patch Tuesday.
Update 4/24/21: Microsoft has begun pushing out a fix for the Windows 10 KB5001330 gaming issues. An NVIDIA staff member has suggested users roll back to an earlier version of Windows 10 to resolve gameplay issues on devices using NVIDIA GPUs.
The new Windows 10 News and Interests taskbar news feed feature is now rolling out to Windows 10 devices worldwide. Similar to Google Discover, News and Interests will build an interests profile for logged-in users based on their historically read content.
A recent update to Microsoft's Sysinternals Autoruns program is causing the program to crash as its scans for autostarts in Windows. For those not familiar with Autoruns, it is a free utility from Microsoft that enumerates all the programs that automatically start on a Windows machine.
Windows 10 now lets you run Linux GUI apps without using a virtual machine after Microsoft added GUI support to the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Microsoft designed the WSL compatibility layer to make it possible for Windows 10 customers to run Linux binaries in ELF format natively on their Windows computers, in a PowerShell or Windows 10 command prompt.
Microsoft has added a new experimental 'Eco mode' feature to the Windows 10 Task Manager in the latest Preview build available for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. Starting with Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21364, users will see a new option added to the process context menus in the Task Manager, which allows them to throttle process resources to release memory and CPU cycles for other tasks.
Microsoft has added a new experimental 'Eco mode' feature to the Windows 10 Task Manager in the latest Preview build available for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. Starting with Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21364, users will see a new option added to the process context menus in the Task Manager, which allows them to throttle process resources to release memory and CPU cycles for other tasks.
The login names and passwords for 1.3 million current and historically compromised Windows Remote Desktop servers have been leaked by UAS, the largest hacker marketplace for stolen RDP credentials. Due to its prevalent use in corporate networks, cybercriminals have built a thriving economy around selling the stolen credentials for RDP servers.
Microsoft has partially fixed a local privilege escalation vulnerability impacting all Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 devices. Security researcher Clément Labro discovered that insecure permissions on the registry keys of the RpcEptMapper and DnsCache services enable attackers to trick the RPC Endpoint Mapper service to load malicious DLLs on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2.
Microsoft is backporting their upcoming Windows 10 News and Interests taskbar feature to Windows 10 20H2 and Windows 10 21H1, allowing far more people to access the new feature. In January, Microsoft began testing a new taskbar news feed feature called 'News and Interests' that builds an interest profile for a user and displays stories based upon those interests.