Posted on Sunday May 06, 2018
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Researchers have found eight new flaws in computer central processing units that resemble the Meltdown and Spectre bugs revealed in January, a German computing magazine reported on Thursday. The magazine, called c't, said it was aware of Intel Corp's plans to patch the flaws, adding that some chips designed by ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan's Softbank, might be affected, while work was continuing to establish whether Advanced Micro Devices chips were vulnerable... The magazine said Google Project Zero, one of the original collective that exposed Meltdown and Spectre in January, had found one of the flaws and that a 90-day embargo on going public with its findings would end on May 7... "Considering what we have seen with Meltdown and Spectre, we should expect a long and painful cycle of updates, possibly even performance or stability issues," said Yuriy Bulygin, chief executive officer of hardware security firm Eclypsium and a former Intel security researcher. "Hopefully, Meltdown and Spectre led to improvements to the complicated process of patching hardware." Neowin now reports that Intel "is expected to release microcode updates in two waves; one in May, and the other in August."
Posted on Saturday May 05, 2018
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: Microsoft's patches for the Meltdown vulnerability have had a fatal flaw all these past months, according to Alex Ionescu, a security researcher with cyber-security firm Crowdstrike. Only patches for Windows 10 versions were affected, the researcher wrote today in a tweet. Microsoft quietly fixed the issue on Windows 10 Redstone 4 (v1803), also known as the April 2018 Update, released on Monday. "Welp, it turns out the Meltdown patches for Windows 10 had a fatal flaw: calling NtCallEnclave returned back to user space with the full kernel page table directory, completely undermining the mitigation," Ionescu wrote. Ionescu pointed out that older versions of Windows 10 are still running with outdated and bypass-able Meltdown patches. Wednesday Microsoft issued a security update, but it wasn't to backport the "fixed" Meltdown patches for older Windows 10 versions. Instead, the emergency update fixed a vulnerability in the Windows Host Compute Service Shim (hcsshim) library (CVE-2018-8115) that allows an attacker to remotely execute code on vulnerable systems.
Posted on Friday May 04, 2018
VoIP phone systems use the internet just like any PC. Therefore, hackers can gain access to your servers and data network through VoIP phones. Understanding how to combat theft of service in VoIP is critical, and if you want to learn how to do it, read on.
Posted on Thursday May 03, 2018
Microsoft is pushing its users to use the UWP (Universal Windows Platform) app of OneNote which will be included in Microsoft Office 2019 and Office 365. This means the OneNote desktop app will no longer be packed with future versions of Office.
Posted on Wednesday May 02, 2018
Hard drive space is a top priority for Windows 10 users. Techies who use budget computers navigate with limited storage or with Solid-State Drive (SSD). Having little disk space obstructs the free flow and enjoyment of using the hard drive, so you need more storage space. Here are some tips to free up your disk.
Posted on Wednesday May 02, 2018
GitHub has sent an email to some of its 27 million users alerting them of a bug that exposed some user passwords in plaintext. "During the course of regular auditing, GitHub discovered that a recently introduced bug exposed a small number of users' passwords to our internal logging system," said the email. "We have corrected this, but you'll need to reset your password to regain access to your account." ZDNet reports: The email said that a handful of GitHub staff could have seen those passwords -- and that it's "unlikely" that any GitHub staff accessed the site's internal logs. It's unclear exactly how this bug occurred. GitHub's explanation was that it stores user passwords with bcrypt, a stronger password hashing algorithm, but that the bug "resulted in our secure internal logs recording plaintext user passwords when users initiated a password reset." "Rest assured, these passwords were not accessible to the public or other GitHub users at any time," the email said. GitHub said it "has not been hacked or compromised in any way."