[German]In an international operation, the U.S. FBI and Europol, together with local partners, dismantled the Qabot network. The action succeeded after law enforcement managed to take over the PC of a Qakbot administrator. The infected devices were instructed to download and run an update to uninstall this malware. This is estimated to have freed over 700,000 devices from this botnet.
[German]Microsoft tried it again, and rolled out a campgaign of aggressive ads for their Bing search engines to Google Chrome users on Windows 11. Could have been the reason why some people contacted me about the obskure files BGAUpsell.EXE /BGAUpdate.exe found on their system Meanwhile, Microsoft had to stop this campaign again because the ads even affected games running on Windows 11 and the notification covered parts of the game.
The developers have released WordPress 6.3.1 as of August 29, 2023. It is a maintenance update that fixes 10 bugs (four in WordPress Core and 6 in Block Editor) according to the release notes.
[German]Brief information for users and administrators of Microsoft Office 365. I have received a message from an IT service provider who reports a problem with customers that the search in shared calendars in Outlook has been broken for a few days or that Outlook even crashes.
On September 21, 2023, Microsoft will hold an event in New York. I had not addressed the topic here in the blog, but has read first speculations of other media what will be shown at the event.
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In my blog post WinRAR Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2023-40477 I had mentioned a vulnerability in WinRAR, which has been fixed with the update to WinRAR version 6.23. Andreas Marx from AV-Test recently pointed out that basically all software that uses WinRAR libraries is vulnerable in principle and needs to be updated to newer versions. I had added the information to the above blog post and pointed out that virus scanners and security software may use these outdated WinRAR libraries. So if necessary check the Windows system for the library files mentioned in the blog post. Addendum: According to the WinRAR developer the libraries are not affected by the vulnerability.
[German]I received reports from users, that the Microsoft Edge browser has been installing the mysterious files bgaupdate.exe and bgaupsell.exe for quite some time. While these were not functional until now, something seems to have changed with Edge 116. Bloat- and malware is mentioned in hints from readers. I'll try to gather the information I have on this.
[German]Vendor Ivanti has had to warn about critical vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) several times in recent weeks and issue security updates. The starting point for this flood of security reports was that Norway's government was hacked via Ivanti-Zero-Day. For several weeks now, companies around the world – a great many of them also in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – have been reporting cyberattacks by exploiting various vulnerabilities in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile. Palo Alto Networks or its Unit 42 has now published a summary of the status.
[German]Short information for administrators of Office installations with Microsoft Outlook. I received reports, that since installing August 2023 updates for Microsoft Outlook were installed, the so-called body text of appointments can only be changed by the organizer of the appointment. This is by design, and documented by Microsoft.
[German]Microsoft has updated the Edge browser to version 116.0.1938.62 as of August 25, 2023. It is a maintenance update that probably fixes an issue with ignored group policies when logging in to the user account and also fixes vulnerabilities.
MVP:
2013 – 2016
WIMVP:
2017 – 2020
