After months of hype and media attention, Windows 10 is almost here. That means it’s decision time: Do you upgrade as soon as you can? Or do you wait?
Hard as it may be to resist the immediate promise of a better computing experience, upgrading to a new operating system as soon as it’s available isn’t always the best idea. July 29 will be the next version of the operating system Windows 10. Users of Windows 7 and 8.1 in 190 countries will be able to update it for free. A tempting offer. However, there are at least 6 reasons not to rush to “release” and wait for the following assemblies novelties. Don’t get confused by the fact that there are only 6 “AGAINST reasons”.
Read moreAn unknown number of frustrated Skype customers have been pestered by spoof messages on the Microsoft service for weeks, but the company is yet to close what appears to be a gaping hole in its software.
Instead, Redmond has advised Skype users to change their account passwords. But complaints are building up about the lack of communication coming out of the Microsoft camp regarding what seems to be a Skype security flaw. The problem first appeared late last month. Other users were quick to pile in with similar gripes about the service, while some folk moaned that their PCs had been offline when the spoofing attack occurred.
Read moreAbout a decade ago, spam brought email to near-ruin. The contest to save your inbox was on, with two of the world’s biggest tech companies vying for the title of top spam-killer. Microsoft boasted that its spam filters were removing all but 3 percent of the junk messages from Hotmail, the company’s online email service at the time.
Google responded by claiming that its service, Gmail, removed all but about one percent of spam messages, adding that its false positives rate was also about one percent. It was a point of pride for the two companies, particularly Microsoft, whose Hotmail service once carried such a poor reputation for spam.
Read moreA technology coalition headed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google urged President Barack Obama and other government officials to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone call metadata.
In a letter addressed to the President and other key figures, the coalition, made up of privacy advocates, technology firms, and trade companies, called the NSA program untenable, and urged the House to move forward with reforms. Critics say that the Patriot Act is being used to unjustly collect the phone records of innocent people that means people are not provided with personal and internet security.
Read moreMicrosoft has announced an ambitious plan to replace passwords with biometric identifiers in it’s yet to be released Windows 10 operating system. The race to replace passwords has been on for years, it offers the most realistic chance of eradicating the archaic.
The difficultly with password alternatives to date has been primarily a problem of adoption and practicality. Tattoos as passwords, for example, is a ridiculous idea. In body chip implants are promising but I imagine many people would be squeamish about having a computer chip injected into their bodies. Windows Ten may put biometric technologies within the reach of all computer users.
Read moreChina mounted a cyberattack on users of Microsoft's Outlook email service, with the apparent goal of spying on their communications. People within China using email clients to connect to their Outlook, Hotmail or Live accounts were subjected to a "man-in-the-middle" attack in which the attacker tried to hijack what's normally a secure, encrypted connection.
The activist group believes this is the latest attempt by China to intercept and spy on communications that it can't easily monitor. Some users reported the attack when they saw error messages using email clients connecting to Outlook's servers via IMAP and SMTP, protocols used to send and receive emails.
Read moreFacebook is secretly working on a new website called “Facebook at Work” to get a foothold in the office that will compete directly with Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn. The Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents.
The new site will look very much like Facebook, but will allow users to keep their personal profile with its holiday photos, political rants and silly videos separate from their work identity. Facebook employees have long used the site in their daily work and expanding this to other companies has been discussed internally for some time.
Read moreThe critical vulnerability in the Schannel technology in Windows that Microsoft patched is ripe for exploitation, experts say, and continues the long line of severe vulnerabilities in major SSL/TLS implementations in recent months.
The technology is in every supported version of Windows, and it can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers. The company said that the vulnerability was found during a “proactive security audit”. That vulnerability enables an attacker to read the memory of systems protected by vulnerable versions of the software under certain circumstances.
Read moreDridex, the latest descendent of the banking Trojan lineage has been a constant source of attacks using the malware since its release in July. To date, Dridex has centered on sending executable attachments via e-mail.
That seems to have changed this week, as we’ve seen a tactical shift to sending those executable attachments via Microsoft Word documents loaded with macros that download and execute the malware. Like its precursors, Dridex is a sophisticated Banking Trojan, similar to the infamous Zeus malware. Its core functionality is to steal credentials of online banking websites and allow a criminal to use those credentials to initiate transfers and steal funds.
Read moreMicrosoft is aware of a vulnerability affecting all supported releases of Microsoft Windows, excluding Windows Server 2003. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Microsoft Office file that contains an OLE object.
An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. Customers whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with administrative user rights. The attack requires user interaction to succeed on Windows clients with a default configuration.
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