On July 15, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said that the Redmond giant has been quietly tackling the threat posed to Windows operating systems by the organization, dubbed a “private-sector offensive actor” (PSOA). A tip provided by human rights outfit Citizen Lab led Microsoft to the PSOA, dubbed Sourgum, a company said to sell cyberweapons including the DevilsTongue malware. “The weapons disabled were being used in precision attacks targeting more than 100 victims around the world including politicians, human rights activists, journalists, academics, embassy workers, and political dissidents,” Microsoft says....

January 2023 Patch Tuesday addresses two zero-day flaws but only one of them is known to be actively exploited, which is the critical Windows flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-21674. This flaw allows an attacker with local privileges to elevate to system, the highest level of privileges. It has a CVSSv3 severity score of 8.8 out of 10. Notably, this flaw affects the Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) and, as Rapid7’s Greg Wiseman notes, is reminiscent of an ALPC zero-day in September 2018 that was swiftly employed in malware campaigns....

The Presenter+ will sell for $79.99 and the Audio Dock for $249.99. Microsoft has yet to reveal the official availability. More: Everything Microsoft announced at the October Surface event The Presenter+ should click with Teams users The Presenter+ is a Bluetooth-enabled remote that lets you click your way through slideshows, toggle mute/unmute, and even direct your audience’s attention with the onscreen pointer function (see image above). Naturally, the remote works best with Microsoft Teams, with optimized features like raising or lowering your hand with a long press of the dedicated Teams button and the ability to dial into your next scheduled meeting by pressing the quick-access shortcut....

The Enterprise SKUs for Windows 365 are priced similarly. A single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM and 64 GV of storage will go for $20 per user per month. At the high end, the 8 virtual core, 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage SKU will go for $158 per user per month. Windows 365/Cloud PC won’t only support Microsoft apps; the service also will allow users to remotely log into any app that can run on Windows 10 or 11....

Surfaces are often classified as ‘convertible’ devices, where removing a keyboard turns a laptop into a tablet. You could argue that ripping off the keyboard isn’t converting the device, and you may well be right. But you certainly can’t say that about the 14.4-inch Surface Laptop Studio. Finally, a true convertible That’s because it truly is a convertible laptop. At first glance, it’s a laptop: it opens like a laptop and has a conventional keyboard....

The new Surface Pro 9 is the culmination of Microsoft’s biggest hits and lessons learned, offering its Windows-on-Arm and Intel-based platforms within the same hardware design. Sure, that comes at the loss of the Surface Pro X branding, but customers – more than ever – are presented with a leveled playing field, no matter which of the two architectures they desire. That said, I’ve been testing the 12th Gen Intel model (i7, 16GB RAM, 256GB), and, while I absolutely love the hardware-software combo as much as I did with the Surface Pro 8, I can’t help but think that Microsoft is pulling its punches when it had the chance for a 2022 knockout....

Rubrik and Microsoft plan to provide Microsoft 365, data protection and cloud services on Azure, according to Rubrik. According to a Bloomberg source, Microsoft’s investment was in the “low tens of millions” and valued Rubrik at about $4 billion. SEE: Ransomware: This new free tool lets you test if your cybersecurity is strong enough to stop an attack The company, which competes with Dell EMC, Commvault and other storage and backup companies, was valued at $3....

Group assignments, which will allow teachers to organize students into assignment group (coming in August)The ability of third-party apps to issue assignments directly from their apps inside of Teams (coming in August)New calendar integrations to allow students to see when their classes are and when assignments are due in the Teams and Outlook calendars (coming in August)More and better integration between Learning Management System (LMS) providers like Instructure and Blackboard, and Teams, Teams meetings and OneDrive (expected in August)Supervised Chat in Teams that will allow designated teachers to initiate and manage chats with students (coming later in May)...

MOOCs are most popular with younger generations. Almost two-thirds of students taking MOOCs are under 35 years old. However, people of all ages join the classes. What are MOOCs? So what is a MOOC? It’s an online course anyone can take. MOOCs often enroll large numbers of students from all over the world. Since MOOC classes are online, students can take courses offered by universities and countries in another part of the world....

The results from Uniting Cloud’s Software Engineer and DevOps Industry Report 2022 found that 50% of developers and DevOps professionals have moved roles in the last year. Of the 50% who have not moved roles, 71% had considered doing do. Of the 400 UK software developers and DevOps professionals surveyed by Uniting Cloud, just 13% had not considered quitting their job for a new role – meaning 87% of tech professionals have either changed jobs in the past year of thought about doing so....

Okay, fine. It was more of a stunt investment than a real one. Towards the end of 2021, PayPal announced it was going to provide a Bitcoin wallet. You could transfer your PayPal funds to Bitcoin. I could not resist. So, on January 1, 2022, I bought a whopping $50 worth of Bitcoin. As I documented, it was not a smooth process. There were fees, and Bitcoin’s vaunted anonymity went out the window in order to meet PayPal’s verification requirements....

The task order, which has a base value of $228.5 million, makes Axiom a key partner in NASA’s ambitious plans to land Americans on the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The yearslong Artemis mission involves multiple stages of space exploration and will culminate with landing the first woman and person of color on the moon. SEE: What is Artemis? Everything you need to know about NASA’s new moon mission Axiom’s suits will allow astronauts to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before....

According to Naver, in an email sent to employees, Naver global investment officer and founder Lee Hae-jin said himself and the management team held the biggest responsibility over the incident. Lee said bullying within the company led to the "tragic incident" and said there was a problem with Naver's corporate culture. He said the solution was for younger and new leaders to overhaul the current corporate culture for fundamental changes....

In the latest instalment of the Measuring Broadband Australia report, NBN-alternative fibre connections sold by Uniti under its LBNCo and OptiComm monikers were included for the first time, albeit with a sample size of only 40 lines. The report said busy hours download speeds on Uniti were 101.6% of plan speeds while NBN full fibre could hit 103%. It was a similar story for upload speeds with Uniti lines reporting 88% of plan speeds and NBN lines hitting 91%....

The acquisition comes less than a year after NetApp acquired Spot (now Spot by NetApp), a CloudOps provider that automates and optimizes workloads running in public cloud environments. Lye said Data Mechanics’ staff and IP would be integrated with the Spot by NetApp team and portfolio to accelerate the development of NetApp’s recently announced Spot Wave storage package, which simplifies, optimizes and automates Spark workloads running in public clouds.

The CTO, long a broad-based role overlapping with that of chief information officers, is emerging as a leading player in the growth and viability of digital enterprises. A recent survey of 5,000 CTOs and CIOs by the IBM Institute for Business Value bears this out, stating that “the CTO has become one of the most strategic roles within an organization.” This “may come as a revelation for some,” the report’s authors, led by Rashik Parmar, an IBM Fellow....

The National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA), the body that passed the rules, governs the ACH Network, the payment system that drives direct deposits and direct payments for nearly all US bank and credit union accounts. The national automated clearing house processes massive amounts of credit and debit transactions in the US and handles financial transactions for consumers, businesses, and federal, state, and local governments. Starting on June 30, if an account number is used for any ACH payment – consumer or corporate – it must be rendered unreadable while stored electronically, according to NACHA, which added that any place where account numbers related to ACH entries are stored is in the rule’s scope....

The multimedia project was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, with a bit of help from a Ukrainian voice-cloning startup, Respeecher, which worked on Nixon’s voice. Alex Serdiuk, the CEO of Respeecher, says the idea behind this seven-minute film was to show what online misinformation will look like in the future. The project was “not just an opportunity to do cool stuff with our technology, but also to showcase what these technologies are capable of,” he said....

“Key elements to strengthen cybersecurity governance, controls, and culture are not sufficiently robust and not consistently applied. There has been insufficient progress to improve cyber security safeguards across NSW government agencies,” the auditor-general wrote in a compliance report [PDF] about the state’s cybersecurity capabilities. The audit assessed whether nine of the state’s lead cluster agencies – Premier and Cabinet, Communities and Justice, Customer Service, Education, Planning, Regional NSW, Health, Treasury, and Transport – had provided accurate reporting on their level of maturity in implementing the requirements of the state’s cybersecurity policy....

Must read: How does NordVPN work? Plus how to set it up and use itHow does ExpressVPN work? Plus how to set it up and use itHow does Surfshark work? How to set up and use the VPN Decision tree The winner in this competition is pretty decisively NordVPN, with four wins to one. But just because we awarded big category wins to Nord doesn’t mean that’s all you should consider when buying a VPN service....