Security News

Windows 10 will soon let you different usage categories, such as Gaming and Business, that tell the operating system how you plan on using the device. In recent Windows 10 builds, Windows sleuth Albacore discovered a hidden Settings screen under the 'Personalization' section called 'Device Usage' that contains six different categories for how you "Plan to use your device."

Contestants hacked Microsoft's Windows 10 OS twice during the second day of the Pwn2Own 2021 competition, together with the Google Chrome web browser and the Zoom video communication platform. The first to demo a successful Windows 10 exploit on Wednesday and earn $40,000 was Palo Alto Networks' Tao Yan who used a Race Condition bug to escalate to SYSTEM privileges from a normal user on a fully patched Windows 10 machine.

During the first day of Pwn2Own 2021, contestants won $440,000 after successfully exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities to hack Microsoft's Windows 10 OS, the Exchange mail server, and the Teams communication platform. The first to fall was Microsoft Exchange in the Server category after the Devcore team achieved remote code execution on an Exchange server by chaining together an authentication bypass and a local privilege escalation.

Microsoft today announced that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, the enterprise version of its Defender antivirus, now comes with support for Windows 10 on Arm devices. Windows 10 on Arm, a full-featured version of Windows 10 designed explicitly for Arm devices, has run most apps since the first such devices were launched in late 2017.

The Windows 10 Spring 2021 Update will be rolled out on Windows 10 2004 and Windows 20H2 as an enablement package, which will install very quickly and with a single reboot. What's coming in Windows 10 21H1. Sadly, Windows 10 21H1, the Spring 2021 update, is not a very exciting release with a lot of new features.

Microsoft has released the KB5000842 non-security preview update for all editions of Windows 10, version 20H2, and Windows 10, version 2004, with fixes for system freezing and activation issues. After installing this cumulative update, you may experience issues with the system and user certificates getting lost if updating from Windows 10 1809 or later versions using outdated install media.

Microsoft is working to fix an issue causing a recently released Windows 10 21H1 build to fail to install for customers enrolled in the Windows Insider program. "Some Windows Insiders may experience an 0x800f081f error when attempting to install 21H1 Build 19043.906," Microsoft explained in an update added to the original KB5000842 announcement.

Microsoft is adding a dedicated OEMDRIVERS folder to Windows 10 that will be used to store third-party drivers. Since Windows Vista, the operating system has included a folder called %SystemRoot%System32DriverStore that is used to hold validated drivers for the operating system.

"Windows 10 comes with new settings that will allow advance users to gain greater control over how Windows Update installs new Windows 10 feature updates." Last year, Microsoft added the ability to set the specific Windows 10 feature update that you wish to keep using with the Group Policy editor.

Microsoft has updated the icons used in File Explorer to be the new Fluent icons, and while they look great, there is a tradeoff between design and functionality. Microsoft announced last year that they were beginning a process of migrating the existing Windows 10 icons to their Fluent design system, which is supported in Windows, iOS, Android, and web applications.