Windows

A security researcher has revealed a way to determine the password needed to access a protected Windows or OS X account. Using Rob Fuller's technique, it doesn't matter if the computer in question is locked, and it uses a USB SoC-based device to crack user credentials.

By modifying the firmware of a USB dongle, Fuller was able to make the device appear as an Ethernet adaptor. By spoofing a network connection, it is then possible to trick a target computer into giving up an account password.

If you're setting up a PC for others to use then you’ll often want to limit their actions, prevent them running other applications or tweaking system settings.

Windows has many security and user settings that can help, but they're scattered across many applets and may be hard to find.

With all the options out there, organizations may be having a hard time deciding which operating system to go with. The three most common are Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. But which is the best for your business?

An OS should have a robust set of characteristics to serve the diverse needs of a busy office. It should be reliable and secure, yet flexible enough to scale with business demands. The user interfaces should be feature-rich and easy to navigate for both end-users and IT administrators. Windows remains by far the most popular, used in around 85 percent of businesses, with Mac a distant second and Linux operating systems hanging in at over 5 percent.

Google has come to the realization that hardly anyone is using Chrome apps. As such, the company plans to phase out support for the apps on Windows, Mac and Linux over the next couple of years.

While admitting that packaged apps are used by just 1 percent of users of the three platforms, Google says that the decision comes after a drive to integrate the feature of apps into web standards. Chrome apps will live on in Chrome OS "for the foreseeable future", but a wind-down timetable has been set out for everyone else.

Windows continues to lose ground to Android and iOS in the smartphone market, according to a new report from Gartner. Driven by the poor performance of the Lumia line, its share dropped to just 0.6 percent in Q2 2016, down from 2.5 percent a year ago.

Microsoft is the largest platform vendor, selling over 90 percent of the smartphones that run Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile, so its performance has a direct impact on Windows' share in this market. And, since in Q2 2016 it only sold 1.2 million Lumia devices, it dealt the platform yet another blow.

Windows' User Account Control (UAC) feature was designed to help keep computers safe from malicious software installations, but there are already at least a couple of ways to bypass it. A new technique for circumventing UAC not only makes it possible to execute commands on a computer, but to do so without leaving a single trace.

Security researchers Matt Nelson and Matt Graeber discovered the vulnerability and developed a proof-of-concept exploit. The pair tested the exploit on Windows 7 and Windows 10, but say that the technique can be used to bypass security on any version of Windows that uses UAC.

Apple and Microsoft target the same crowd with the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4, but they go about it from totally different directions. The former has repurposed a consumer-oriented platform to handle the heavier loads required by prosumers while the latter has tweaked its full-fledged PC operating system to work on a tablet touted to be a laptop replacement.

It is this difference in approach which has proven controversial and, to stir the pot once more, Microsoft has released a new Surface Pro 4 ad to suggest that it is a real "computer" while the iPad Pro is basically nothing more than a glorified iPad with keyboard support. Surprised?

In May, Microsoft introduced a Convenience Rollup for Windows 7 SP1 that brought the operating system fully up to date. The company also announced that it would be issuing monthly update rollups for Windows 7 and 8.1, as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

Those rollups only contained non-security updates, so you could still choose which security patches to apply, which to avoid, and when to apply them. Not anymore.

A year on from the release of Windows 10 most businesses are still reluctant to adopt the OS, according to research by solutions and managed services company Softchoice.

Based on an evaluation of more than 400,000 Windows-based computing devices between January and May this year, across 169 organizations in the US and Canada using the TechCheck asset management solution, the study reveals less than one percent were running Windows 10.

In an attempt to get more users to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft announced early this year that it would drop support for Intel Skylake processors on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 after July 17, 2017. The controversial policy was short lived though, as a few months later the software giant gave its customers a one-year reprieve, pushing the deadline to July 18, 2018.

But, as you can see, that is not the end of the story, as Microsoft has changed its mind once again. Today, it announces that Intel's sixth-generation processors will actually be supported for an even longer period of time on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 devices. That is good news for those who are not planning on upgrading to Windows 10 in the foreseeable future.

Microsoft is doing its part protecting its users from hackers, but it can’t do everything on its own.

According to new figures released by Secunia Research in its Country Reports, covering Q2 2016 for 12 countries, the number of unpatched Windows machines is on the decline. Compared to Q1 this year, when 6.1 percent of systems were unpatched, only 5.4 percent are not up to date now. Same time last year, the figure was 10.3 percent.

Microsoft has created a backdoor in Secure Boot, the security feature designed to ensure that a device can only run the operating system that it is meant to. And, to make matters worse, it has just accidentally leaked the "golden keys" needed to bypass it.

The Secure Boot backdoor is there to, for instance, allow a Microsoft developer to install a new build of Windows on a device -- that has the security feature enforced -- without it having to be digitally signed beforehand. It makes their job easy, but it also makes the security system ineffective if -- when -- the golden keys that unlock it make their way into the wrong hands.

Open source hard drive monitor and smartctl front-end HDD Guardian has been updated to version 0.7.0 with some welcome new features.

The program detects even more drives, but if they’re still not found it’s now possible to add them manually. If a drive is failing, or its temperature is too high, you can have the program play a sound or power off the PC (other options include displaying a popup message and sending an email).

Kaspersky Labs has released Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2017, Kaspersky Internet Security 2017 and Kaspersky Total Security 2017 in the US and Canada. New features include Secure Connection, a virtual private network which automatically kicks in to protect you when using wifi hotspots, web banking sites and more.

An Installation Assistance tool looks out for adware and other pests that get silently installed with some free software, and the Software Cleaner helps you decide what to remove.

One-stop Windows command line tool Swiss File Knife has just been updated to version 1.7.7. A new sfk web command allows sending a web request to a server, filtering and displaying the results.

For example, you might use sfk web domain.com +xex "_<head>**</head>_" to extract an HTML Head tag, or pass sfk a file to batch process every URL it contains.