ComputerWorld – Page 37 – PossibleThreat Articles

Apple is sneaking around its own privacy policy — and will regret it

February 2, 2022 0 Comments Apple, Data privacy, Mobile, Privacy, small and medium business

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2022 03:04:00 -0800

Apple has a rather complicated relationship with privacy, which it always points to as a differentiator with Google. But delivering on it is a different tale.

Much of this involves the definition of privacy. Fortunately for Apple’s marketing people, “privacy” is the ultimate undefinable term because every user views it differently. If you ask a 60-year-old man in Chicago what he considers to be private, you’ll get a very different answer than if you asked a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles. Outside the US, privacy definitions vary even more. Germans and Canadians truly value privacy, but even they don’t agree on what they personally consider private.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint brings remote deployment to iOS

February 2, 2022 0 Comments Apple, endpoint protection, enterprise mobile management, iOS, Microsoft, Security

Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2022 07:45:00 -0800

With the latest Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) preview for iOS, Microsoft has taken another step that should make life easier for IT administrators who need to secure remote iOS devices at the endpoint.

Endpoint protection without the user friction

The MDE preview includes a new capability to install Defender for Endpoint remotely and automatically on any devices enrolled in the service. The company first announced its intention to deliver the feature last month.

In practice, this seems relatively friction-free.

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ComputerWorld Independent

7 smart steps to get your Android phone in tip-top shape for 2022

February 2, 2022 0 Comments Android, google workspace, Mobile, Operating Systems, Privacy, Security, small and medium business

Credit to Author: JR Raphael| Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

Happy New Year! I don’t know about you, but I find the start of a fresh voyage around this shiny ol’ sun of ours to be a fine time for tidying up, optimizing, and getting good and organized for the months ahead. And while I’d love to pretend I’m the type of person who has one of those disgustingly pristine, clutter-free desks you see on the internet, let me be brutally honest: The physical space around me tends to resemble a half-abandoned hog parlor.

But my Android phone? My Android phone is as orderly as can be, gosh darn it. And if you ask me, that makes far more of a difference than the state of the physical space around me.

Our mobile devices are where we do so much of our actual work and contemplation these days, after all — and yet it’s all too easy to overlook the importance of maintaining an optimal arrangement for both productivity and security within ’em. So now, as we gaze ahead at the promise-filled 2022 calendar, join me in taking 10 minutes to get your own trusty Android phone fine-tuned and fully ready for the coming year.

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ComputerWorld Independent

How to manually update Microsoft Defender

February 2, 2022 0 Comments IDG Insider, Microsoft, Security, small and medium business, Windows, Windows 10, windows 11

Credit to Author: Ed Tittel| Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

Microsoft Defender is the built-in anti-malware package that’s included with modern Windows operating systems. It’s alternatively known as Windows Security (it shows up under Settings as Windows Security) or Windows Defender (sometimes with Antivirus at the end of the name, as in this Microsoft Docs page). But whatever you want to call it, for many Windows users, this tool is the go-to default for handling security on their PCs.

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(Insider Story)

ComputerWorld Independent

When biometrics can be outsmarted this way, we need to talk

February 2, 2022 0 Comments Mobile, Security, small and medium business

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2022 06:43:00 -0800

It’s one of the sad facts of mobile authentication that the industry tends to initially support the least effective security options. Hence, phones initially supported authentication based on fingerprints (which can be impacted by prescriptions, cleaning products, hand injuries, and dozens of other factors) and then moved on to facial recognition.

In theory, facial recognition is supposed to be more accurate. Mathematically, that’s fair, as it is examining far more data points than scanning a fingerprint. But the reality in the real world is much more problematic. It requires a precise distance from the phone and yet offers no pre-scan markers for the user to know when they hit it correctly. That’s one reason I see facial recognition reject a scan roughly 40% of the time — even though it will approve a positive scan two seconds later.

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ComputerWorld Independent

12 security tips for the ‘work from home’ enterprise

March 17, 2020 0 Comments Apple, iOS, Macs, Mobile, Security

Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2020 06:26:00 -0700

If you or your employees are working from home while our governments lurch awkwardly through the current crisis, then there are several security considerations that must be explored.

Your enterprise outside the wall

Enterprises must consider the consequences of working from home in terms of systems access, access to internal IT infrastructure, bandwidth costs and data repatriation.

What this means, basically, is that when your worker accesses your data and/or databases remotely, then the risk to that data grows.

While at normal times the risk is only between the server, internal network and end user machine, external working adds public internet, local networks and consumer-grade security systems to the risk mix.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Take your time, get it right for March Patch Tuesday

March 17, 2020 0 Comments Microsoft Office, PCs, Security, Windows

Credit to Author: Greg Lambert| Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 11:41:00 -0700

This is a big update to the Windows platform for the Microsoft March Patch Tuesday release cycle. Consisting of 115 patches, mostly to the Windows desktop, with almost all of the critical issues relating to browser-based scripting engine memory issues, this will be a difficult set of updates to release and manage.

The testing profile for the Windows desktop platform is very large, with a lower than usual exploitability/risk rating. For this month, we do not have any reports of publicly exploited or disclosed vulnerabilities (zero-days), so my recommendation is to take your time, test the changes to each platform, create a staged rollout plan and wait for future (potentially) imminent changes from Microsoft.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Come on, Microsoft! Is it really that hard to update Windows 10 right?

March 17, 2020 0 Comments Microsoft, Security, Windows

Credit to Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols| Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 07:47:00 -0700

Yesterday, on Patch Tuesday, as I was finishing up the column that follows lamenting the sorry state of Windows 10 patches and providing copious examples of things gone very wrong, a big, fat example landed in my lap (but happily not in my laptop). Word emerged that Microsoft had accidentally leaked news about a new Server Message Block (SMB) bug with a maximum severity rating, a.k.a. SMBGhost. The leak also said that this bug wasn’t patched in that day’s releases.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Patch Tuesday’s tomorrow. We're in uncharted territory. Get Automatic Updates paused.

March 17, 2020 0 Comments Microsoft, Security, Windows

Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 07:06:00 -0700

It’s always a good idea to pause Windows updates just before they hit the rollout chute. This month, we’re facing two extraordinary issues that you need to take into account. Wouldn’t hurt if you told your friends and family, too.

Take last month’s Windows patches. Please. We had one patch, KB 4524244, that slid out on Patch Tuesday, clobbered an unknown number of machines (HP PCs with Ryzen processors got hit hard), then remained in “automatic download” status until it was finally pulled on Friday. We had another patch, KB 4532693, that gobbled desktop icons and moved files while performing a nifty trick with temporary user profiles. Microsoft never did fix that one.

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