Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team works to track down and identify hacking groups that perpetrate attacks. The focus is on the groups that are the most selective about their targets and that work the hardest to stay undetected. The company wrote about one particular group that it has named PLATINUM.
The unknown group has been attacking targets in South East Asia since at least 2009, with Malaysia being its biggest victim, with just over half the attacks, and Indonesia in second place. Almost half of the attacks were aimed at government organizations of some kind and a further quarter of the attacks were aimed at ISPs.
Read moreSecurity researchers have discovered a nasty security vulnerability that is said to affect almost every version of Windows and Samba, the Samba development team announced Tuesday.
So, Save the Date if you are a Windows or Samba file server administrator. Samba is a free, open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS network file sharing protocol that runs on the majority of operating systems available today, including Windows, UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, and OpenVMS. Dubbed Badlock, the vulnerability has been discovered by Stefan Metzmacher, a developer of Samba Core Team.
Read moreOne of a heaping collection of critical bug fixes pushed out by Microsoft was an update to the Microsoft Office suite designed to close a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to sneak past Outlook's security features.
While the patch addressed multiple vulnerabilities in the way Office manages objects in memory, the most severe of them allows for remote code execution through a "specially crafted Microsoft Office file," Microsoft reported. The vulnerability allows a crafted attachment to an e-mail to bypass Outlook's layers of security by exploiting Office's Object Linking and Embedding capabilities and Outlook's Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format.
Read moreYou should be very careful while visiting websites on the Internet because you could be hit by a new upgrade to the World's worst Exploit Kit – Angler, which lets hackers develop and conduct their own drive-by attacks on visitors' computers with relative ease.
Many poorly-secured websites are targeting Windows users with a new "Cocktail" of malware that steals users' passwords before locking them out from their machines for ransom. Yes, stealing Windows users' passwords before encrypting their data and locking their PCs for ransom makes this upgrade to the Angler Exploit Kit nastier. Here's How the New Threat Works:
Read moreWindows users who rely on TrueCrypt to encrypt their hard drives have a serious security problem: a researcher has discovered two critical flaws in the program.
TrueCrypt may have been abandoned by its original developers, but it remains one of the few encryption options for Windows. That keeps researchers interested in finding holes in the program and its spin-offs. A member of Google’s Project Zero team has recently discovered two vulnerabilities in the driver that TrueCrypt installs on Windows systems. The flaws could allow attackers to obtain elevated privileges on a system if they have access to a limited user account.
Read moreIt has been nearly two months since the launch of Windows 10, and Microsoft is finally responding to the growing privacy concerns around the new operating system. In a detailed blog post from Windows chief Terry Myerson, Microsoft details all of the ways Windows 10 collects and uses data.
There have been a number of concerns over the content of application crash data, but Myerson reveals Microsoft doesn't collect content or files, and that the company takes "several steps to avoid collecting any information that directly identifies you, such as your name, email address or account ID."
Read moreLenovo seems to be testing the boundaries of trust. First came the Superfish scandal where they were found to be pre-loading ad software that was so poorly implemented that it left victims/customers vulnerable to serious security flaws.
Then, Lenovo software was discovered on a fresh install of the retail edition of Windows. Lenovo had been modifying the BIOS, to insure that, no matter what a customer did, their software got installed. And, this was software referred to as "crapware". That the software was buggy, just made a bad situation worse. In the end, Lenovo updated the BIOS not to muck around with the installed copy of Windows.
Read moreTech support scammers have mocked up a web page with an even more dire version of Microsoft’s infamous Blue Screen of Death error page.
The website, registered behind an anonymity service, wants to convince surfers tricked into visiting it that their PC has been derailed in order to dupe prospective marks into phoning scammers, who will attempt to extract a big fat fee for solving non-existent problems. Victims are lured to scam pages via either spam messages or malicious advert redirects. Surfers with Javascript enabled will get nagged with a pop-up message featuring an even more dire warning until they kill the browser instance.
Read moreWindows 10 is a good operating system, all things considered, but its abundant user-tracking has prompted many privacy-minded individuals to stay pat with older versions of Windows.
Now, Microsoft’s providing those concerned individuals a reason to upgrade. No, the company’s not walking back its privacy-encroaching features. Instead, Microsoft’s quietly rolling out updates that bake new tracking tools into Windows 7 and Windows 8. The story behind the story: Privacy concerns have marred an otherwise sterling launch for Windows 10, which is already installed on 75 million PCs.
Read moreA recently uncovered feature – which had been swept under the rug – allowed new Lenovo laptops to use new Windows features to install the company’s software and tools even if the computer was wiped.
The users discovered the issue in May when using a new Lenovo laptop that automatically and covertly overwrote a system file on every boot, which downloaded a Lenovo updater and installed software automatically, even if Windows was reinstalled from a DVD. The only problem is that nobody actually asked for this software, and it persisted between clean installs of Windows. Lenovo was essentially exploiting a rootkit on its own laptops to ensure its software persists if wiped.
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