[German]Lousy security culture, products as full of holes as a Swiss cheese, but "to big to fail and everyone is dependent". That's a description of Microsoft – not mine, but the tenor of the statements made by the former White House Director of Cyber Policy, Andrew J. Grotto, in an interview with the British newspaper The Register.
[German]The move from Microsoft, which has just been uncovered and is causing anger among developers. Their Store team has started to secretly repackage Store apps. The apps are provided with an executable .NET wrapper that adds telemetry and other code into the app. Furthermore, .netfx 4.7.2 is currently being used – regardless of what .netfx version the app uses. The explanation I read, is that Microsoft now wants to offer .exe applications for download directly from the store in a simple way. Here is some information on this.
A Chinese manufacturer has inadvertently disclosed the data of surveillance devices. An unsecured database, which was freely accessible on the internet, contained 3 billion data records with details of surveillance systems from Chinese manufacturer Raysharp.
[German]A short addendum or information for administrators in companies who are responsible for Microsoft Office. There will be a Microsoft Office 2024 in 2024, and a preview was announced for April 2024 (see Microsoft Office Office 2024 and Microsoft Office LTSC Office LTSC 2024: Preview in April 2024). Microsoft has now officially released the Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 version as a preview for the macOS and Windows operating systems. Interested administrators from the corporate environment can now test this Office version, which is aimed at corporate environments. The preview is explicitly not aimed at private users. Continue reading
[German]Users of Windows 10 22H2 must be prepared to be annoyed by various prompts soon. Firstly, there is the full-screen notification that support will end in October 2025. And there is probably a request to finally switch from a local account to a Microsoft account. According to my information, these two annoying notices will be unleashed on users in the future.
[Sponsored Post]In the rapidly evolving IT world, choosing the right remote desktop software is critical for organizations that value security, ease of use and reliability. One provider of secure remote access that has been on the market since 2001 is ISL Online, which presents some considerations for choosing such software below. More ...
[German]An "accidental" update to the Microsoft Edge browser at the end of March 2024 led to parts of the Copilot app being installed on Windows 10/11 and Server. Microsoft states that this was not intentional and emphasizes that this app "does not perform any spying functions" – a remarkable statement. They want to correct this with the next update.
[German]The free software PuTTY can be used to establish connections via Secure Shell, Telnet, remote login or serial interfaces with a server. However, there is a critical vulnerability in the software in question (CVE-2024-31497) that can be used to reconstruct private SSH keys. PuTTY versions 0.68 to 0.80 as well as other products (FileZilla for example) are affected. However, it is not enough to update the products to a patched version, as the keys may already be reconstructed.
[German]The ongoing criticism of VMware by Broadcom's licensing policy by customers may be having an impact. At least VMware by Broadcom has responded to the topic again with a blog post and wants to offer customers with perpetual licenses a "relieve". And EU competition authorities are responding to a formal complaint from CISPE and have sent Broadcom a series of questions around VMware licensing.
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[German]Question for Citrix users: Has anyone tried to renew licenses in the last few days? I have received information that there are "currently" problems getting license renewals from Citrix. And another reader has informed me that VMware is discontinuing their web client.
[English]On April 2, 2024, the US cybersecurity authority CISA issued a directive to the administrators of US authorities requiring them to "mitigate" or eliminate the cyber risks posed to customers by a hack of the Microsoft Cloud or the Microsoft email system by Midnight Blizzard by April 30, 2024. The background to this is that state actors were able to read the email communication between customers and Microsoft during the hack and that these emails probably also contained security information for customer systems.
MVP:
2013 – 2016
WIMVP:
2017 – 2020
