As most people know, Microsoft Edge was the company's "reboot." After trying for years to patch and update their beleaguered Internet Explorer, Microsoft ultimately decided to scrap it and start fresh. Since Edge's launch, it has struggled to gain traction with users. Recently, Microsoft has upped the ante, at least where Edge for iOS and Android devices are concerned. A recent update sees the browser outfitted with a built-in ad blocker. Prior to the update, if you wanted an ad blocking … Read more
Watch Out For Rise In Microsoft Office Attacks
Menlo Security has recently published a new report that will probably dismay you if you're a business owner. Microsoft Office has been named as the attack vector of choice for hackers around the world. The most common form of the attack is a malicious Word document or other office document attached to an innocent looking email. There are, of course, plenty of other ways to take advantage of various security weaknesses in MS Office and Office 365. These include the use of remotely hosted … Read more
Turn Cortana Off At Lock Screen To Avoid Potential Hack
Do you use Cortana? It's a handy virtual assistant (like Siri) built into Windows 10. Unfortunately, as useful as she is, there's a problem. Even if you don't use Cortana yourself, take heed: Microsoft has recently issued a security update based on findings by McAfee researchers. It turns out that Cortana can be "summoned" from the lock screen of your PC and used to execute attacks by tricking the ever-helpful Cortana into indexing files from a USB drive, then executing them. To … Read more
New Trick Lets Hackers Bypass Office 365 Email Security
What's old is new again. Hackers have recently begun re-deploying a decade-old trick called 'ZeroFont' to get around Microsoft's security filters and deliver phishing and spam emails to Office 365 email accounts. The gimmick? Zero-point fonts. As anyone with even passing familiarity to Office 365 knows, if you're drafting a document, you can change the font size to suit your tastes and preferences. What few people realize is that you can use html code to set your font to zero-point … Read more
Microsoft Ending Forum Support For Older Operating Systems
Big changes are coming from Microsoft starting in July (exact date unknown), and it has potentially dire implications if you're using some of the company's older technology. Microsoft announced that in July, they'll no longer provide forum-based support for a wide range of products and software, including: Microsoft Band Zune Surface Pro Surface Pro 2 Surface RT Surface 2 Microsoft Security Essentials Internet Explorer 10 Office 2010 Office 2013 Windows … Read more
Microsoft Purchases GitHub – What Does This Mean For Open Source?
Microsoft just made a big, significant purchase that has raised more than a few eyebrows. They just acquired GitHub for a hefty $7.5 billion. What makes the purchase interesting and potentially troublesome is that Microsoft is the world's largest proprietary software company, and GitHub is the world's largest open source hosting service. The natural question on everyone's mind then, is what does this mean for open source? Is it doomed? Is it soon to go the way of the dinosaur, or will … Read more
Microsoft Is Issuing Surface Book 4 Replacements
Do you own a Surface Book 4? If you do, you may have been unfortunate enough to get one that suffers from a peculiar screen flickering issue. It's not known exactly how many Surface Book 4's have been affected by the issue, but thousands of angry users have been comparing horror stories about it on various discussion forums around the web. For their part, Microsoft has been very slow to even acknowledge the existence of the issue, even though there are some user videos showing the screen … Read more
Microsoft Surpasses Google In Latest Valuation
Microsoft's stock price is surging, putting the company's total valuation at $753 billion. This makes it the third most valuable company on the planet, behind Amazon (782 billion), Apple ($923 billion) and leaving Google in fourth place, valued at $739 billion. Google first overtook Microsoft in 2012, and since that time, the two companies have traded places repeatedly. So Microsoft's current 3rd place position is expected to be relatively short-lived. It's worth noting, however, that … Read more
Passwords May Be Dead Soon If Microsoft Gets Its Way
Karanbir Singh (a program manager at Microsoft) is on a mission: Kill the password. As he said in a recent blog post: "Nobody likes passwords. They are inconvenient, insecure, and expensive. In fact, we dislike them so much that we've been busy at work trying to create a world without them--a world without passwords." The company's stated goal is to make it possible that an end user will never have to bother with passwords on a day to day basis and would instead provide credentials … Read more
Having Chrome Issues Since The Latest Windows 10 Update?
Microsoft has been having some "issues" of late. It's April Windows 10 rollout had to be delayed on account of some mysterious BSOD ("Blue Screen of Death") issues. This month's rollout is plagued by similar problems, trading the BSOD issues for problems with both "Hey Cortana" and Google's Chrome browser. The problem is that when you try to navigate the web using Chrome with the latest Windows 10 update, the entire system will inexplicably hang. The company is hoping to have a fix ready … Read more
