It Cloud services are exceptionally popular as a cost effective and simple method to maintain common operational needs. Everything from email to fully fledged infrastructures can be maintained in the “cloud”. All of these can be accomplished at lower overall cost than trying to maintain the same systems on prem. By shifting the general operation, maintenance and even security to the cloud service provider organizations get to reduce their total ownership cost including reducing the number of skilled employees they need to keep on staff. This reduction in the total cost of ownership and maintenance is a huge item when you are trying to ensure profitability.

TA542 the wonderful people that brought you Emotet appears to be in the middle of a development and testing cycle on new delivery methods. According to researchers at ProofPoint the creators or the Emotet Botnet are potentially looking to find a new delivery method in response to the, long overdue, default disabling of VBA based Macros by Microsoft in their office products. Although ProofPoint seems to think this is development testing, the activity could also be part of a more targeted campaign.

Yesterday we reported that the source code stealing group, Lapsus$, claimed they have breached and stollen source code from Microsoft. They made the announcement on their Telegram account by posting a screenshot of the projects they claimed to have access to. Now, as with other leaks, they have dropped a compressed file (7zip) via Torrent which appears to contain around 37GB of source code.

The Lapsus$ group has been in the news recently for theft of source code form some high-profile targets. These targets have included companies like NVIDIA, Samsung, Vodafone, and Ubisoft. The NVIDIA event was noteworthy as it included a claim that NVIDIA hacked the attackers back in order to encrypt the data that have been taken out of their environment.

Yesterday we reported that insider builds of Microsoft’s Windows 11 were displaying ads for other Microsoft services inside File Explorer. Like most people, we felt this was not a good thing and the news went around the internet at a pace typical of things that are bad. In response to this Microsoft release a statement saying, “This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off,” Basically the marketing equivalent of a 5-year-old saying they got the cookie for you.

Microsoft, famous for bad marketing moves, is looking to make another one. In this case the mistake has not hit the general public but is in a preview build of Windows 11. The mistake is shoveling ads to people for other Microsoft products as part of the Windows File Explorer. To say that this move caused some concern with testers is a bit of an understatement. Some even called it “one of the worst places to show ads”

It seems that Microsoft shares an issue that is a bit like one that can happen in mobile devices. When you reset your device on an Android Device and you have accounts that sync data with their own internal folders, there can be lingering information even after a reset of the device. Although not as prevalent as it once was, the advice was and still is, to remove all accounts before beginning the reset process. This is so that there is no data left behind after a reset. This same issue has popped up in Windows 10.

App Stores have been around for a while and pretty much everyone has one. Although they started off in the mobile device world, they quickly were bolted on to the other areas. As their usage has grown attackers have found them to be a very valuable resource as well. We have seen poisoned apps across just about every platform and the sophistication of them is increasing as well.

Will someone tell Microsoft (again) that to lead in the industry means not just following the competition? They seem to have lost that message again as we are hearing that they will require a Microsoft account to set up and use future versions of Windows 11 Pro. This frustrating need to be attached to the internet and beholden to Microsoft just to use your operating system has always been an odd choice to me, but it is Microsoft and when they can’t figure out what to do, they tend to just copy features (and bad ones at that) from Apple or Google.

Firefox was once one of the leading “alternative” browsers on the internet. After the death of Netscape Firefox came along and offered people an alternative to the building Windows Internet Explorer and even to Safari on macOS. This trend continued into the mobile arena, at least until Google launched the Chrome Browser. Although Chrome had a bit of a rocky start (with clear indications of data collection), it has grown in popularity and gobble up about 64% of the browsing on the internet.