April 12, 2024   04:13 PM   7 Microsoft has started testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu, a new experiment the company says will help users find new "great" apps in the Microsoft Store. The trial is now rolling out in the Beta Channel to what Redmond describes as a "small set of Insiders" who have installed Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3495. "Building on top of recent improvements like grouping recently installed apps and showing your frequently...

April 7, 2024   10:17 AM   1 Microsoft is now using a Windows driver to prevent users from changing the configured Windows 10 and Windows 11 default browser through software or by manually modifying the Registry. Windows users can still change their default browser through the Windows settings. However, those who utilized software to make the changes are now blocked by a driver quietly introduced to users worldwide as part of the February updates for Windows 10...

April 5, 2024   06:31 PM   0 Microsoft says Windows 10 updates released since the start of the year are breaking Microsoft Connected Cache (MCC) node discovery on enterprise networks. MCC servers are software-only caching solutions that can be deployed on Windows servers, bare-metal servers, or VMs to cache and deliver content downloaded from Microsoft's content delivery network (CDN). For instance, once a client downloads a Windows update, the rest of the...

April 5, 2024   01:38 PM   0 Microsoft has fixed a known issue causing 0x80073cf2 errors when using the System Preparation (Sysprep) tool after installing November Windows 10 updates. Admins use Sysprep to prepare Windows installations for deployment by removing computer-specific information. It also helps manage multiple computers on a network or fine-tune a single Windows image for a specific PC. The known issue only impacts Windows 10, version 22H2...

April 3, 2024   08:21 PM   0 The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) has released a scathing report on how Microsoft handled its 2023 Exchange Online attack, warning that the company needs to do better at securing data and be more truthful about how threat actors stole an Azure signing key. Microsoft believes that last May's Exchange Online hack is linked to a threat actor known as 'Storm-0558' stealing an Azure signing key...

April 2, 2024   06:09 PM   2 Microsoft has confirmed that some Outlook.com users are experiencing issues with emails being blocked and marked as spam when trying to email Gmail accounts. This known issue only impacts users with Outlook.com country domains, according to a support document published by Redmond on Tuesday. Affected Outlook users are being told in follow-up emails from Gmail's servers that their messages were suspicious and have been stopped from...

Microsoft added Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to let anyone run a Linux distro directly. Thanks to WSA, you don’t need to dual-boot Linux or create a virtual machine, but the feature is limited to Windows Terminal. Microsoft understands that some of you may be uncomfortable with the command line and is creating a GUI for managing Linux distros. First spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft quietly published a proposal on its GitHub listing for WSL. On Github, the company...

March 23, 2024   10:14 AM   0 Microsoft plans to limit access to over fifty cloud products for Russian organizations by the end of March as part of the sanctions requirements against the country issued by EU regulators last December. The suspension was initially scheduled for March 20, 2024, but it was moved to the end of the month to give impacted entities more time to set up alternative solutions. The news of these impending suspensions was first reported by...

March 22, 2024   06:12 PM   0 Microsoft has released emergency out-of-band (OOB) updates to fix a known issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash after installing the March 2024 Windows Server security updates. As reported by BleepingComputer on Wednesday, many system administrators have warned since this month's Patch Tuesday that servers are unexpectedly freezing and restarting due to a memory leak in the Local...

March 21, 2024   08:27 AM   0 Microsoft confirmed that a memory leak introduced with the March 2024 Windows Server security updates is behind a widespread issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash. As BleepingComputer first reported on Wednesday and as many admins have warned over the last week, affected servers are freezing and restarting unexpectedly due to a Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process...

March 18, 2024   03:51 PM   0 Microsoft has announced that RSA keys shorter than 2048 bits will soon be deprecated in Windows Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide increased security. Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) is an asymmetric cryptography system that uses pairs of public and private keys to encrypt data, with the strength directly related to the length of the key. The longer these keys, the harder they are to crack. 1024-bit RSA keys...

March 17, 2024   01:08 PM   10 Microsoft is once again harassing Google Chrome users on Windows 10 and Windows 11 with popup desktop advertisements promoting Bing and its GPT-4 Bing Chat platform. However, due to the quality of the pixelated ads, some who received them were concerned that they were being displayed by malware, even though the embedded links led directly to Microsoft. Microsoft has since confirmed that the popup ads are legitimate,...

The new Digital Markets Act (DMA) update brings many changes to Windows and other Microsoft apps and services. One important change is related to Edge pop-ups. When you try to change your default browser, you will no longer see promotional pop-ups for Edge in Windows 10 and 11. Previously, a pop-up touting the Edge browser’s benefits appeared when you tried switching to another browser like Chrome. You might have also noticed Microsoft Edge promotions under the...

March 12, 2024   06:25 PM   6 The KB5035849 cumulative update released during today's Patch Tuesday fails to install on Windows 10 and Windows Server systems with 0xd0000034 errors. According to a wave of reports from administrators and users, KB5035849 will not install when checking online for updates via Windows and Microsoft update servers. Affected systems include those running Windows Server 2019 or Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC...

March 11, 2024   03:15 PM   0 Security researchers have created a knowledge base repository for attack and defense techniques based on improperly setting up Microsoft's Configuration Manager, which could allow an attacker to execute payloads or become a domain controller. Configuration Manager (MCM), formerly known as System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM, ConfigMgr), has been around since 1994 and is present in many Active Directory environments, helping...