Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2020 05:06:00 -0800
Imagine all your tax documentation could be examined by officials from any government merely on suspicion. That’s the future some governments are pushing for when they demand Apple puts security backdoors into its products.
Think about the nature of security backdoors:
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:36:00 -0800
Microsoft today figuratively told Window 7 – which ended support with a final security update – not to let the door hit it on the way out.
“Ten-year-old tech just can’t keep up,” Jared Spataro, an executive on the Microsoft 365 team, wrote in a post to a company blog. “As we end support for Windows 7, I encourage you to transition to these newer options right away.”
Not surprisingly, Spataro named those newer options as Windows 10 to replace Windows 7, and Office 365 to fill in for the retiring-in-October Office 2010. Combined, they make up the bulk of Microsoft 365, the business subscription plan Microsoft wants all customers to adopt.
Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:30:00 -0800
Apple turned down a request from U.S. Attorney General William Barr this week, saying it will not help unlock two iPhones used by a terrorist suspect last month in the deadly shooting at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.
Barr said the shooter, 21-year-old Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, acted alone when he shot and killed three service members and wounded several others, including two sheriff’s deputies responding to the attack. Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi Air Force and an aviation student at the base, was shot dead on the scene by police.
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 05:48:00 -0800
Over the past few years we’ve seen a few security holes that have drawn Chicken Little warnings and vast amounts of unthinking press reports. When you turn on a local news program and hear from the hometown weather reporter that you really need to get Windows patched, a bit of skepticism might be in order.
Today’s Patch Tuesday appears to be headed down the same well-worn chute.
Brian Krebs, the security guru with impeccable credentials, fired an opening salvo in his blog post yesterday:
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 04:16:00 -0800
Today Microsoft issues its final free security update for Windows 7, putting an end to that operating system’s decade.
To remember that service – a retirement party but without the cloyingly-sweet cake and cheap gold watch – Computerworld selected seven highlights of Windows 7. While the seven do not pretend to trace Windows 7’s history, they illustrate the influence and impact of the OS.
Here’s to Windows 7. Raise a glass, for cryin’ out loud.
The numbers say it all.
Windows Vista, the 2006 replacement for Windows XP, topped out at 20% of all Windows versions in October 2009. Even though the OS it followed was long in the tooth – XP was nearly twice the age of a typical version when it was supplanted – Vista struggled to put a dent in its forerunner’s share.
Credit to Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols| Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800
Listen, I get it. Windows 7 has worked really well. After the Vista fiasco, you were so happy to get a decent version of Windows. You dodged the Windows 8.x sinkhole, and, boy, were you glad! Then, you thought about Windows 10, but 7 just did the job so you stuck with it, and then you felt vindicated because of Windows 10’s dodgy upgrades and patches. Now, today, Jan. 14, 2020, Windows 7 has reached its end of life, and either you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 or you’re working on another Windows 7 alternative like Chrome OS, macOS or Linux, right?
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2020 11:46:00 -0800
Just one day after releasing Firefox 72, Mozilla updated the browser with a fix to shut down active attacks, the company acknowledged.
On Wednesday, Mozilla issued Firefox 72.0.1, which included one change: A patch for the vulnerability identified as CVE-2019-17026. “We are aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw,” Mozilla said in the short description of the flaw, signaling that criminals were already leveraging the zero-day vulnerability, the term applied because there no time elapses between patching and exploitation.
Credit to Author: Preston Gralla| Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2020 10:18:00 -0800
When Iran launches cyberattacks in revenge for the killing of Major Gen. Qasem Soleimani — which it almost certainly will do — the attack vector, as always, will be Windows. And when that happens, your PC and your business’s PCs will be right in the crosshairs. Here’s why — and how you can protect your machines and your business.
To understand the coming cyberattacks, it’s useful to look back. For more than a decade, the U.S. and Iran have engaged in low-level cyberwarfare, with occasional bursts of higher-level attacks. The most destructive of them was Stuxnet, launched in 2009 by the U.S. and Israel against Iran’s nuclear program. It exploited four zero-day flaws in Windows machines, which controlled the centrifuges Iran used to create nuclear material that can be used in nuclear weapons.
Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2020 06:54:00 -0800
Your iPhone (like most smartphones) knows when it is picked up, what you do with it, who you call, where you go, who you know – and a bunch more personal information, too.
The snag with your device knowing all this information is that once the data is understood, that information can be shared or even used against you.
Jane Horvath, Apple’s senior director for global privacy, appeared at CES 2020 this week to discuss the company’s approach to smartphone security. She stressed the company’s opposition to the creation of software backdoors into devices, and also said:
