If you were running Windows 10, then you didn’t need to worry about your box being hit with the leaked NSA EternalBlue exploit; but things change and now researchers have ported EternalBlue to Windows 10. After the WannaCry ransomware attack, some defenders focused on building detection rules to protect against the DoublePulsar backdoor implant; but […]
Skype’s been in a strange place for the past few years. On one hand, it launched way back in 2003, counts 300 million monthly users, and qualifies as a staple of internet communication. Skype long ago became a verb, and once that happens, you’ve won. On the other hand, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Snapchat wield more […]
Microsoft’s top lawyer has blamed the government’s stockpiling of hacking tools as part of the reason for the WannaCry attack, the worldwide ransomware that has hit hundreds of thousands of systems in recent days. Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer, pointed out that WannaCrypt is based on an exploit developed by the National Security […]
The reports came swiftly on Friday morning, May 12—the first I saw were that dozens of hospitals in England were affected by ransomware, denying physicians access to patient medical records and causing surgery and other treatments to be delayed. Said the BBC: The malware spread quickly on Friday, with medical staff in the UK reportedly […]
The WannaCry ransomware has wormed its way into tens of thousands of Windows PCs in China, where Windows XP runs one in five systems, local reports said Monday. More than 23,000 IP addresses in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) show signs of infection, the country’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT) […]
Monday is going to suck for some folks, those who run old, unsupported Windows systems which are vulnerable to WannaCry ransomware, if they didn’t put in some weekend time applying security updates. In response to the massive global ransomware attack on Friday, Microsoft took the “highly unusual step of providing a security update for all […]
As a vicious new strain of ransomware swept the UK’s National Health Service yesterday, shutting off services at hospitals and clinics throughout the region, experts cautioned that the best protection was to download a patch Microsoft had issued in March. The only problem? A reported 90 percent of NHS systems run Windows XP, an operating […]
A Microsoft manager this week offered IT administrators a way to replicate — in a fashion — the security bulletins the company discarded last month. “If you want a report summarizing today’s #MSRC security bulletins, here’s a script that uses the MSRC Portal API,” John Lambert, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, said […]
Facebook showed off some nutty new tech this week at its annual developer conference, including social VR experiences, skin-based interfaces, and augmented reality markup for the real world. Some of these ideas are here already, and some are years away. Taken together, they show that Facebook is thinking about ways to squeeze its software into […]
After missing out on the mobile revolution, Microsoft is determined to play a role in whatever comes next. One of the most common guesses holds that what comes next is augmented reality, or virtual reality, or some combination. So Microsoft is covering all its reality bases, developing a system it calls “Mixed Reality” to power […]