Latest Technology News

The Silicon Power Blaze B07 USB-A flash drive can kill germs and keep you healthy

With cloud storage continuing to grow in popularity, USB flash drives have largely fallen out of favor with consumers. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, as USB flash drives are both easy to lose and are susceptible to failure -- the cloud is arguably more safe and secure. With that said, there should always be a need for local storage; sometimes you just can't trust certain documents, such as company secrets, to the cloud.

Understandably, it is hard to get excited about a new USB flash drive these days. However, a new USB-A offering from Silicon Power is actually quite interesting. Called "Blaze B07," it looks like a standard flash drive, but it has a really cool stand-out feature -- it is coated in an antibacterial substance in an effort to fight germs and sickness! This would be very beneficial in an office setting where a flash drive is passed around from person to person.

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How the Okta breach exposed organizations' cybersecurity immaturity

In early March 2022, authentication security company Okta reported that there had been an attempt to compromise the account of a third-party customer support engineer from Sitel in January. The organization released a statement claiming that the matter had been investigated and contained.

Okta CSO David Bradbury later admitted that up to 366 customers may have been breached, apologizing for not notifying customers earlier. In the weeks since the attack, Okta has released a conflicting statement arguing that the attack affected just two customers, although this is perhaps naïve and hard to prove. Okta has said it recognizes the broad toll this kind of compromise can have on customers, but there is little to suggest that the attackers aren’t already lying dormant inside the networks of further customers.

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CCleaner 6 is here, complete with better updating mechanism and a unique Performance Optimizer

In the world of system optimization and clean-up utilities, there are lots of names vying for attention, but it is CCleaner that wins the popularity contest. It has been a while since the app received a significant update but that changes with the release of CCleaner 6.

There is a lot to talk about in this latest release, but the headline grabber is the new, unique and patented Performance Optimizer feature. While many performance optimization techniques found in other apps make only a subjective differences, the boost given by this new feature can be measured in benchmarks.

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Best Windows apps this week

Four-hundred-ninety in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

The KB5013943 update for Windows 11 is causing application start issues on some devices. Affected users may want to check Sofia's article, as it contains a workaround.

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Open source security plan aims to deliver on development, patching and more

open source

White House officials, The Linux Foundation, OpenSSF and 37 private sector tech companies have announced a 10-point open source and software supply chain mobilization plan and $150 million of funding over two years.

At a summit meeting yesterday several participating organizations came together to collectively pledge an initial tranche of funding towards implementation of the plan. Those companies are Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and VMWare, pledging over $30M.

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Emotet rockets to the top of the malware charts in Q1

malware alert

The latest Threat Insights Report from HP Wolf Security shows a 27-fold increase in detections resulting from Emotet malicious spam campaigns in the first quarter of 2022.

Based on findings from millions of endpoints running HP Wolf Security, this makes Emotet the most seen malware family in the period accounting for nine percent of all malware captured.

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The challenge of guarding against supply chain attacks [Q&A]

Broken chain

In recent years we've seen a trend towards attacks targeting the software supply chain rather than being directly against businesses.

Attacks can include poisoning the software components, stealing secrets to compromise an account, or modifying code repositories to allow for exploits.

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Microsoft warns that KB5013943 update is causing authentication failures in Windows 11, Windows Server and more

Microsoft logo on glass building

Following the release of this month's Patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft has issued a warning that installing the KB5013943 update can lead to authentication issues for various Windows services.

The update was released on May 10, and was meant to -- among other things -- fix an issue with screen flicker in Safe Mode. But in addition to causing error messages for some users, the KB5013943 update has also led to authentication failures Windows domain controllers.

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Enterprises struggle to discover cloud access policies

Cloud use is commonplace among large enterprises, with 82 percent of organizations with $1B or more in revenue using three or more clouds, up from 66 percent last year.

However, with the majority of companies (70 percent) using two or more identity systems, 75 percent of respondents say they lack the ability to easily discover all existing access policies, according to a new study conducted by Osterman Research for Strata Identity.

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UK consumers willing to give up social media rather than part with more data

A new study shows that 63 percent of the UK population distrust social media due to privacy concerns and what's more as a result of privacy issues or other public scandals involving social media, 30 percent of consumers have either disabled social media (17 percent) or plan to within the next 12 months (13 percent).

The research, from digital experience company Acquia, shows only 27 percent say they would be willing to part with more data to retain access to platforms. While 48 percent indicate that recent revelations about data sharing practices have led to them using social media less often.

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Get 'Python for Geeks' ($39.99 value) FREE for a limited time

Python is a multipurpose language that can be used for multiple use cases. Python for Geeks will teach you how to advance in your career with the help of expert tips and tricks.

You'll start by exploring the different ways of using Python optimally, both from the design and implementation point of view. Next, you'll understand the life cycle of a large-scale Python project. As you advance, you'll focus on different ways of creating an elegant design by modularizing a Python project and learn best practices and design patterns for using Python.

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Turn data into knowledge to accelerate innovation

DevOps

Blackberry, Nokia, Blockbuster and Kodak: these are just some of the once-successful companies that failed because they failed to innovate. In our digital world, the difference between sinking and swimming often rests on a business’s ability to provide continuous digital innovations to its customers.

But consumer demands for new technologies and experiences also come with a stipulation: the availability of digital instant gratification must remain uninterrupted. After all, our digital economy doesn’t have normal business hours. It’s always running, and consumers expect to digitally access, interact and purchase at their convenience, at any hour of the day. Digital apps and services must always remain on. And facing an outage or poor system performance, consumers will just switch to another company that provides a better digital experience.

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Google is bringing secure virtual credit cards to Chrome

Virtual credit card

Making payments online is fraught with potential dangers, and there is risk involved with making purchases with your credit card. To help offer a level of protection, many companies -- including the likes of Revolut -- enable their customers to create virtual, disposable credit cards.

Inspired by this, Google is building the same functionality into Chrome. The company announced the upcoming payment security feature at Google I/O, saying that there will be support for autofilling details to help speed up transactions.

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Five years on from WannaCry -- what have we learned?

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the notorious WannaCry ransomware attack which hit a number of large organizations around the world and was many people's first encounter with ransomware.

Five years on then, what have we learned from the attack and what long-term effect has it had on the industry?

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KB5013943 update for Windows 11 is causing 0xc0000135 errors

Windows 11 thumb down

While each Patch Tuesday sees Microsoft fixing various problems with Windows 11, the following days see the negative fallout. We've become used to the updates that Microsoft releases having unwanted side, and this month's KB5013943 update is a prime example.

With echoes of a previous update fiasco that caused endless problems with printing, Microsoft intended the KB5013943 update to fix an issue with .NET Framework 3.5 apps introduced by another update. But rather than fixing the problem, installing the KB5013943 update seems to have made things worse for some users.

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