[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.
[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.
[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
[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.
[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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[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.
[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.
[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.
[German]This is probably a solid scandal – there is an app Life360 – Familie suchen, which is also available on Android in Germany has millions of users. The app allows family members to be tracked via their smartphone. Now it comes out that the creators of the app have sold the location data of their users to data traders (data brokers) from the industry since 2016.
[German]There was a successful cyber attack on SPAR stores in Yorkshire, England. Some of the stores had to close because payment systems could no longer be used and card payments were no longer possible. Here is some information about what I know so far.
MVP:
2013 – 2016
WIMVP:
2017 – 2020
