Earlier this month, BleepingComputer reported that a Windows 10 bug was discovered by security researcher Jonas Lykkegaard that allows non-privileged users to mark an NTFS volume as dirty.

Once the volume is marked as dirty, Windows would display an error stating that the drive was corrupted and prompt the user to reboot the computer to run chkdsk and fix the corruption.

For most people, Windows would run chkdsk, and the operating system would boot like normal soon after. Unfortunately, in a test by BleepingComputer, even after running chkdsk, the operating system would not start properly.

Third-party fix released for NTFS bug
OSR, a software development company specializing in Windows internals, has released an open-source filter driver that prevents the NTFS bug from being abused while waiting for an official fix from Microsoft.

This filter driver, called 'i30Flt', will monitor for attempts to access streams beginning with “:$i30:", and if detected, block them before they can trigger the bug.

"OSRDrivers/i30Flt: This is a simple filter that will block any attempt to access streams beginning with “:$i30:”. This stops the spurious corruption warning triggered on certain Windows 10 versions. (github.com)," stated OSR in a blog post about this bug.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Mon Mar 01, 2021 9:38 am

At 7.44% Internet Explorer still has more market share than Edge and only slightly less than Firefox. It is therefore good news that Microsoft is set to fix a flaw in the browser which could result in Remote Code Execution if some-one visits a specially crafted website using the software.

Microsoft told TechCrunch that it was was “aware of limited targeted attacks” and was “working on a fix.” The flaw appears similar to one affected Firefox and is credited to the same China-based security research team, Qihoo 360.

Microsoft will however not release an Out of Band update like last year, meaning users will have to wait until next Patch Tuesday on the 11th February.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Mon Jan 20, 2020 10:07 am

Microsoft has released an emergency update for its Internet Explorer browser to fix a bug that cyber-thieves are known to be exploiting.

The bug could let attackers hijack a web browser and use their access to install malware, it warned.

Attackers are believed to have built booby-trapped webpages harbouring malicious code that infects visitors.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Thu Sep 26, 2019 9:26 am

Overall, these detection techniques apply for organizations and for personal/home users, the best thing to do right now is to update every piece of software to make sure it’s running on the latest version. This includes Windows drivers, 3rd party softwares and even Windows Updates. Most importantly, don’t download or open any suspicious email or install any 3rd party software from an unknown vendor.

Microsoft announced last September that it would offer, for a fee, continuing security updates for Windows 7 to businesses through January 2023. Microsoft will no longer provide free Windows 7 security updates after January 14, 2020.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Tue Aug 27, 2019 7:59 am

Sometime in the past few hours, Microsoft posted official warnings about an 'invalid procedure call error' associated with August patches for all versions of Windows, from Win7 onward, and encompassing all flavors of Visual Basic. Who’s testing this stuff?

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Fri Aug 16, 2019 9:06 am

In Dell machines, the software is called SupportAssist. It's made by PC-Doctor, a maker of hardware-diagnostics software that licenses its software to other electronic-device makers.

The SafeBreach researchers said PC-Doctor refused to give them a list of its other clients, but the PC-Doctor website states that "leading manufacturers have installed over 100 million copies of PC-Doctor for Windows on computer systems worldwide."

Dell and PC-Doctor have pushed out a firmware update that fixes this issue, which you can install following the instructions on Dell's support page for the SupportAssist flaw. However, you might have to wait for more information regarding devices made by other licensees of PC-Doctor software.

"More than 90% of customers to date have received the update, released on May 28, 2019, and are no longer at risk. Dell SupportAssist updates automatically if automatic updates are enabled, and most customers have automatic updates turned on."

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Mon Jun 24, 2019 8:41 am

The problem may occur for anyone who installed cumulative updates, monthly rollups, and security-only updates released on June 11.

Microsoft has now offered a workaround to the problem, but is planning on rolling out a proper fix in late June, according to a support note.

The issue affects all versions of Windows, from Windows 10 version 1903 through to Windows 7, and corresponding versions of Windows Server.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Fri Jun 14, 2019 12:49 pm

The vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708) resides in the “remote desktop services” component built into supported versions of Windows, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008. It also is present in computers powered by Windows XP and Windows 2003, operating systems for which Microsoft long ago stopped shipping security updates.

Microsoft said the company has not yet observed any evidence of attacks against the dangerous security flaw, but that it is trying to head off a serious and imminent threat.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Wed May 15, 2019 9:19 am

This program works by comparing a Windows SystemInfo report with a downloaded CSV file of known vulnerabilities and their associated security updates. Using this data, Windows Exploit Suggester will display a report showing all of the unpatched vulnerabilities found on the computer and their respective CVE IDs, Microsoft knowledge base article numbers, and a link to any known exploits for that vulnerability.

According to the projects description, every version of Windows between Windows XP and Windows 10, including the Windows Server counterparts, is supported.

This InSpectre utility was designed to clarify every system's current situation so that appropriate measures can be taken to update the system's hardware and software for maximum security and performance.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Tue Mar 05, 2019 8:51 am

Microsoft has issued an emergency update that fixes a critical Internet Explorer vulnerability that attackers are actively exploiting on the Internet.

The memory-corruption flaw allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code when computers use IE to visit a booby-trapped website, Microsoft said Wednesday. Indexed as CVE-2018-8653, the flaw affects all supported versions of Windows. The vulnerability involves the way Microsoft's scripting engine handles objects in memory in Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has launched a new $25,000 malware challenge for data scientists on the Google-owned Kaggle crowdsourcing site to develop an algorithm that can predict what types of Windows PCs are most likely to be soon infected with malware.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Fri Dec 21, 2018 7:04 am

The vulnerability affects Windows versions 7 through 10 and can be used by an attacker to escalate their privileges to all-access SYSTEM account level.

Microsoft did not patch the ALPC bug to this day, but it is expected to release a fix in its monthly security updates, on September 11.

Some mitigation is possible without Microsoft's help, though the company did not approve it. A solution provided by Karsten Nilsen blocks the exploit and allows scheduled tasks to run, but it may break things created by the legacy Task Scheduler interface.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Thu Sep 06, 2018 7:57 am

In what amounts to be an amazingly nefarious bit of malware, hackers have created an exploit that watches 2.3 million high-value crypto wallets and replaces the addresses in the Windows clipboard with an address associated with the hackers. In other words, you could paste your own wallet address – 3BYpmdzASG7S6WrpmrnzJCX3y8kduF6Kmc, for example – and the malware would subtly (or unsubtly) change it to its own private wallet. Because it happens in the clipboard most people wouldn’t notice the change between copying and pasting.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:08 am

The change will take into effect on July 2018, and Microsoft Staff will no longer proactively review, monitor, or answer questions for a certain subset of old Microsoft products (seen below). Microsoft Staff, however, will still be present in these parts of the Answers forum and will instead moderate and ensure a safe and positive environment. Support for the following products is being discontinued across various forums in the Microsoft Answers community.

Windows 7, 8.1, 8.1 RT
Microsoft Security Essentials
Internet Explorer 10
Office 2010, 2013
Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface RT, Surface 2
Microsoft Band – this topic will be locked. Users are invited to participate in Microsoft Band 2 topic.
Mobile devices forum – Microsoft support will continue in “Other Windows mobile devices” topic
Zune – this topic will be locked, but will remain available for browsing

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Tue Jun 12, 2018 5:32 am

"These enhanced Spectre attacks allow an unprivileged attacker to read the contents of memory, including memory that should be protected by the range registers, such as SMM memory," he notes.

"This can expose SMM code and data that was intended to be confidential, revealing other SMM vulnerabilities as well as secrets stored in SMM. Additionally, since we demonstrate that the speculative memory access occurs from the context of SMM, this could be used to reveal other secrets in memory as well."

Microsoft and Google are jointly disclosing a new CPU security vulnerability that’s similar to the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that were revealed earlier this year. Labelled Speculative Store Bypass (variant 4), the latest vulnerability is a similar exploit to Spectre and exploits speculative execution that modern CPUs use. Browsers like Safari, Edge, and Chrome were all patched for Meltdown earlier this year, and Intel says “these mitigations are also applicable to variant 4 and available for consumers to use today.”

However, unlike Meltdown (and more similar to Spectre) this new vulnerability will also include firmware updates for CPUs that could affect performance. Intel has already delivered microcode updates for Speculative Store Bypass in beta form to OEMs, and the company expects them to be more broadly available in the coming weeks. The firmware updates will set the Speculative Store Bypass protection to off-by-default, ensuring that most people won’t see negative performance impacts.

“If enabled, we’ve observed a performance impact of approximately 2-8 percent based on overall scores for benchmarks like SYSmark 2014 SE and SPEC integer rate on client 1 and server 2 test systems,” explains Leslie Culbertson, Intel’s security chief.

Statistics: Posted by burger2227 — Mon May 21, 2018 6:48 am