Microsoft Office Patchday (December 7, 2021)

[German]On December 7, 2021 (first Tuesday of the month, Office Patchday), Microsoft releases non-security updates for still-supported versions of Microsoft Office. This month, however, there is only one update for Microsoft Office 2016. Here is a brief overview.

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Hellmann Logistics Victim of a cyber attack

Sicherheit (Pexels, allgemeine Nutzung)[German]The the internationally active German Logistics company Hellmann appears to have fallen victim to a cyberattack on its IT. This attack was probably detected at an early stage and the company reacted accordingly. Currently, however, some data connections have probably been cut, so that business operations are being affected. 

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Amazon AWS cloud outage causes chaos (2021/12/08)

[German]As of today, December 8, 2021, there was a major outage of Amazon AWS services in the US. The Amazon Cloud service was disrupted for about 8 hours, and all users who relied on this service were pretty much left looking down the tubes. No more orders, Alexa, Ring and Disney Plus were also on strike. Could have been a bigger drama for some users.

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Chrome 96.0.4664.93

[German]Google has released an update to Google Chrome 96.0.4664.93 for Windows, Mac and Linux (and version 96.0.4664.92 for Android) as of December 6, 2021. It is a maintenance update that also closes some vulnerabilities. Here's a quick overview.

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Excel XLL addins abused for malware installation

Sicherheit (Pexels, allgemeine Nutzung)[German]Here is another security topic, dealing with attacks via Excel XLL addins ein. This attack method has been known since July 2021 and is used by malware groups. I just came across a case where this approach was used to install the RedLine malware that stole passwords. Continue reading

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Why ISL Online: Critical factors when choosing a remote desktop solution

[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 ...


Microsoft has plans to increase Monthly subscription for Microsoft Office 365 by 20%

[German]Microsoft seems to have informed its sales partners that it wants to make Microsoft Office 365 subscription customers pay a bit more. Customers can expect a price increase of up to 20% if they continue to insist on monthly payments. The only way to avert this is with an annual subscription. This emerges from a report in a US medium.

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Gravatar: Approx. 114 million user names and e-mail addresses floating in underground

Sicherheit (Pexels, allgemeine Nutzung)[German]Datasets containing the email addresses and usernames of approximately 114 million Gravatar users circulate in underground networks. The service uses an MD5 hash value for the globally unique URLs of the Gravatars, which encrypts the email addresses. However, the MD5 hash has long been crackable, so the data in question could be extracted from the MD5 hash values.

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Thunderbird 91.4.0

[German]The developers of the Thunderbird email client have released Thunderbird 91.4.0 on December 7, 2021. This is a maintenance update for the 91 development branch, which makes numerous fixes. Here's a brief overview. TB 91.4.0 (portable) breaks my system.

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Firefox 95/91.4.0esr

Mozilla[German]Mozilla developers have released version 95.0.0 with some new features and 91.4.0esr of the Firefox browser with a fix rated High as of December 7, 2021. Thanks to the blog readers for pointing out the updates.

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Windows 11: Performance issues with NVMe-SSDs?

Windows[German]A brief question for the readers of this blog who are already running Windows 11 on NVMe SSDs. What about the performance in this constellation? There are reports from users in forums who complain about slow accesses with NVMe SSDs under Windows 11. Some report more than 50% performance loss compared to Windows 10.

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