[German]Another little tip for Windows users regarding "desktop icons suddenly changed". It often happens that Windows suddenly overlays all or some desktop icons with a gray X symbol. Then good advice is expensive, because what is the cause and how do you get rid of it? After it happened to me, I take up the topic in a blog post and show you what you can do.
[German]An unpleasant development in the USA, where the city of Columbus in Ohio was the victim of a ransomware attack. The mayor tried to play down the case, claiming that the data was useless to criminals. A security researcher looked at the data leaked by the ransomware gang and proved that the data was sensitive. The city sued the security researcher and he was granted a temporary injunction prohibiting him from reporting.
[German]Facebook recently changed its strategy regarding policy violations. With a lot of prose, users are supposed to be "educated" on policy violations in order to avoid such things – this is supposed to prevent the previous "blocks". Since "Facebook is broken by design", the "training" is simply "white salve" and an attempt to save what cannot be saved. And for me, it's a great opportunity to outline how broken Facebook and its AI algorithms for content control are. And it is a prime example to show that these "filters", which are also always brought into play by the EU Commission & Co. to control internet content, are failing and that AI is dragging people into the abyss.
[German]I'll combine two topics into one post. Google has released its Android 15 (Vanilla Ice Cream) as an Android Open Source Project (ASOP). This means that the operating system is available for various mobile device manufacturers – they can port Android 15 to their models and roll it out. I also received (surprisingly) Android 14 on the Motorola Moto G13 a few weeks ago.
[German]Veeam warns of a critical RCE vulnerability in Backup & Replication. Blog reader j. pointed out the vulnerability yesterday in the discussion area (thanks for that) – but I had already heard about it elsewhere. The vulnerability CVE-2024-4071 was classified with a CVSS index of 9.8, so it should be fixed as soon as possible. Veeam has therefore published corresponding updates to its Backup & Replication software to close these vulnerabilities. But there are other vulnerabilities in various products. Here is a brief overview of this topic.
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[English]Brief information for administrators of Sophos firewalls – a reader has informed me that since September 5, 2024, he has been observing increased attempts to attack his Sophos firewalls. And the VPN portal in particular is being flooded with login versions via port 443. The IP from which the attacks are being launched points to Russia. There are indications that hackers are trying to access corporate networks via cracked VPN accesses. Here is the information I have.
[German]Zyxel has released security updates to close a critical vulnerability in several of its business routers. These vulnerabilities, rated with a CVSS v3 score of 9.8, may allow unauthenticated attackers to inject operating system commands. Updates are available to close the vulnerabilities.
[German]In anticipation of the upcoming releases of Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025 at the end of August 2024, Microsoft has published a tech community article on the topic of "SMB Security Hardening". The whole thing is part of the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative (SFI), and the operating systems are to have hardened SMB settings right from the start in order to better protect against cyberattacks.
[German]On September 3, 2024 (first Tuesday of the month), Microsoft released non-security updates for Microsoft Office 2016. I'll summarize some information about these updates here in the blog.
MVP:
2013 – 2016
WIMVP:
2017 – 2020
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