Latest Technology News

Computer maker MSI has confirmed that it fell victim to a security breach, confirming rumors that sprang up in recent days. The Taiwanese company says that it "suffered a cyberattack on part of its information systems", and has warned customers to exercise caution when downloading BIOS and firmware updates for its products.

Although MSI has shared little in the way of detail about the incident, the confirmation comes after the ransomware group Money Message was said to have breached the company's defenses. The group has made demands for $4 million with the threats of leaking stolen files.

Five-hundred-and-thirty-seven 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.

Microsoft's official Store on Windows 11 has a new section for widgets. Follow this link to open the Widgets section. Listed widgets may be installed so that they may be displayed in the Widgets interface.

As well as a new Windows 11 build for Insiders on the bleeding edge Canary Channel, Microsoft has rolled out a new flight for testers on the Dev Channel.

New features here include a change to how urgent and important notifications are handled when 'do not disturb' is turned on -- users will have the option to click a 'view notification' button.

Windows Insiders have been made to wait all week for a new Windows 11 build, but arriving in time for the weekend comes a new flight on the experimental Canary Channel.

Build 25336, which is also available for Insiders with Arm64 devices, comes with a couple of changes and improvements.

Passwords have been under attack for a long time. Not just by data breachers, but by people writing, ad nauseum, about how passwords are an ineffective means of authentication. And yet, after years of password warnings by IT departments, and plenty of hand wringing over how passwords need to be more complex and how often people should change them, the most used passwords are easily guessable (things like Password123, 123456 and QWERTY).

Still, passwords remain in wide use today, and we are paying for it. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 82 percent  of data breaches are due to the "human element." Chief among this element is stolen credentials, which means passwords.

ChatGPT, OpenAI's flagship product, is a generative language model that is capable of generating natural language responses to a wide variety of prompts. Microsoft is bringing this AI functionality to many of its products, including Microsoft 365, but another company is already offering a powerful ChatGPT add-in for Microsoft Office.

We spoke to Ghostwriter's creator Patrick Husting about his product and plans for the future.

Microsoft has issued a reminder to users of certain versions of Windows 10 that their operating system will reach end of serving in mid-June.

The announcement applies to the Home, Pro, Pro Education and Pro for Workstations editions of Windows 10 21H2, and when June 13 rolls around no more monthly security updates will be issued. Microsoft says that in order to ensure protection, users will be automatically updated to a supported version of Windows.

In recent years supply chain attacks have become much more commonplace, targeting vulnerabilities and getting legitimate apps to distribute malware.

We spoke to Nir Valtman, CEO and founder at Arnica, to discuss the issues these attacks raise and how organizations can defend against them.

HP has issued a security warning about a vulnerability which affects numerous HP Enterprise LaserJet and HP LaserJet Managed printers. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2023-1707 is described as "critical" having been assigned a CVSS rating of 9.1.

Despite the severity of the bug -- which HP says could lead to "information disclosure when IPsec is enabled with FutureSmart version 5.6" -- it could take up to 90 days to issue a fix. However, the company has provided a temporary firmware mitigation.

It is a month since Microsoft added Mouse Jump and Paste As Plain Text utilities to PowerToys, and now there is yet another new toy to play with -- Registry Preview.

We first heard about this new registry editing and visualization module last week, and now it has been officially released as part of PowerToys v0.69.0. Microsoft says that the v0.69 release cycle focuses on new features, stability and improvements, and the company gives early notice for v0.70 which is due for release next month.

In The Courage Playbook: Five Steps to Overcome Your Fears and Become Your Best Self, Gus Lee, bestselling author and leadership expert, delivers an astonishing reveal that with moral courage, we can overcome our fears.

This is a practical guide to gaining your courage to live rightly, treat others without bias and lead inspirationally.

Two years ago, Microsoft unveiled its subscription-based Windows 365 service which allowed users to stream Windows 10 and Windows 11 from the cloud to any device.

Today, it announces Windows 365 Frontline is available to preview, aimed at workers who only need a Cloud PC for a limited amount of time during a working day.

Cloud spending is now a critical KPI for the majority of data teams, according to a new report. Almost 80 percent of business stakeholders say cloud spending is a critical KPI while 55 percent of data practitioners say the same.

The study, from data observability platform Unravel Data, surveyed 350 data professionals at the Data Teams Summit event earlier this year and shows that in addition to cloud spending being elevated as a top KPI, 44 percent report that they believe that they are leaving money on the table when it comes to their public cloud utilization.

As organizations and their customers become more reliant on digital services, DevOps teams are often required to get together quickly to troubleshoot and resolve outages or user experience problems.

However, against the backdrop of the 24/7 economy and a shortage of technology skills, it’s time to reassess whether these 'war rooms' remain an effective tactic for dealing with urgent issues. Or, could they be exacerbating the challenges organizations face in retaining staff and managing skilled DevOps teams’ workloads?

Since its inception, Microsoft Defender Antivirus (FKA Windows Defender) was considered somewhat of a joke by power users. They would assert that it provided you with the protection of an umbrella in a hurricane. While its deficiencies were often exaggerated, indeed, it didn’t give you the same depth and scope as high-quality third-party solutions. 

When Bitdefender retired its free antivirus solution in 2021 (only to release a new free antivirus in 2022), many turned back to Microsoft Defender. After all, Microsoft should ultimately know the best ways to secure its software. It's surprising it took so long for the company to expand the coverage of its Microsoft Defender line, especially, with the largest share of its revenue being made from intelligent cloud computing.