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Category: News

News is a core category, featuring (among other topics) journalistic articles, announcements about new software, discussions of new security incidents, and descriptions of new developments in the world of technology. Posts in this category are exclusively about new or upcoming topics.

Updated Posted by Arnon Erba in News on .

Bitdefender Antivirus — the free edition, at least — appears to be interfering with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections on Windows. Affected users may receive the following error when they try to log on to a remote PC or server with Network Level Authentication (NLA) enabled:

An authentication error has occurred.

The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted.

This could be due to an expired password.

While an expired password or a server-side misconfiguration can cause this error, it may also indicate a client-side issue. In this case, the error appears to be caused by Bitdefender Antivirus replacing the remote computer’s certificate in order to inspect encrypted RDP traffic. This process breaks Network Level Authentication and causes the connection to fail.

One workaround is to add file-level exclusions in Bitdefender for both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the Windows RDP client:

  • C:\Windows\system32\mstsc.exe
  • C:\Windows\syswow64\mstsc.exe

This is not an ideal solution, but the free version of Bitdefender Antivirus has a limited control panel and does not provide alternative workarounds.

References

Updated Posted by Arnon Erba in News on .

Some iPhones and iPads appear to be having trouble updating to iOS 14 from older versions of iOS. If you receive an “Unable to Install Update” error after downloading iOS 14, it may be worth temporarily disabling your passcode before trying the update again. Make sure to re-enable your passcode once your device successfully updates.

It’s unclear what devices and/or old versions of iOS are affected by this bug, but I confirmed the issue on an iPhone 7 running iOS 10. At the moment, several other users are reporting similar issues on the Apple Developer Forums.

If your device still won’t update with the passcode disabled, check if you have enough free storage space available. It’s also worth taking a look at Apple’s guide on what to do when your iOS device won’t update.

Updated Posted by Arnon Erba in News on .

Update 2/12/2020: Microsoft has reversed their decision to automatically install the Microsoft Search in Bing extension. The extension will still be made available but will not be automatically deployed with Office 365 ProPlus. The original post continues below:

Starting next month, Microsoft plans to use Office 365 ProPlus to push a browser extension for Google Chrome that will change users’ default search engines to Bing. Version 2002 of Office 365 ProPlus will forcibly install the Microsoft Search in Bing extension for all Chrome users who do not already use Bing as their default search engine.

Understandably, many system administrators are frustrated with the announcement, as unwanted browser extensions that change end-user settings are usually considered malware and are blocked accordingly. In fact, Microsoft’s own security tools already block dozens of programs that exhibit similar behavior.

On GitHub, users are responding to the change by opening issues in the OfficeDocs-DeployOffice repository. So far, it does not appear that Microsoft has responded to this influx of unsolicited feedback outside of publishing a blog post extolling the virtues of Bing.

Who Is Affected?

At this point, only businesses that have deployed Office 365 ProPlus are affected. Depending on the organization’s Office 365 license, ProPlus is the version of Office delivered to end-users when they install Office from the office.com portal. According to Microsoft, not all Office 365 plans include the ProPlus version of Office:

This extension is included only with Office 365 ProPlus. It isn’t included with Office 365 Business, which is the version of Office that comes with certain business plans, such as the Microsoft 365 Business plan and the Office 365 Business Premium plan.

Firefox Is Next

According to Microsoft, a similar extension for Firefox is also on the way:

Support for the Firefox web browser is planned for a later date. We will keep you informed about support for Firefox through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and this article.

Removing The Extension

By making the extension an opt-out feature, Microsoft is putting the onus on system administrators to deploy a method for blocking its installation. While there are official ways to prevent the extension from being installed, there is no easy Microsoft-supported method for removing the extension once it has already been deployed. Instead, Microsoft recommends running the following command as an administrator on each affected machine using a script:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\DefaultPackPC\MainBootStrap.exe uninstallAll

It should also be possible to blacklist the extension with the 3rd party Group Policy templates for Chrome and Firefox provided by Google and Mozilla.

Unfortunately, Group Policy and other enterprise management tools do not always apply to BYOD devices, leaving users who install Office on their personal machines with little recourse except to notice and remove the extension on their own if they find it undesirable.

Sources

Updated Posted by Arnon Erba in News on .

Update 1/16/20: According to Namecheap, the issues with DNSSEC have been resolved as of 2:00am EST (11:00 PM PST).

Have a domain registered at Namecheap with DNSSEC turned on? Now might be a good time to check if it still resolves.

Since at least 11:21pm Eastern Standard Time (8:21pm Pacific Standard Time) today, DNSSEC for domain names on Basic/PremiumDNS has been broken. So far, the issue appears to be caused by an expired signing key, but according to the latest status update “there is no current timeline for resolution of this issue”. This happens to be a fairly serious issue as DNSSEC validation for affected domain names will fail and cause websites and services to become inaccessible to some users.

The full text of the status update is copied below. This post will be updated if the status of the incident changes.

We are currently experiencing temporary technical issues with DNSSEC for domain names on Basic/PremiumDNS. If your domain name has DNSSEC option enabled, it may cause DNS performance issues. Unfortunately, there is no current timeline for resolution of this issue. We will keep you updated on the progress. Meanwhile, please contact our Support Team for assistance and more details. Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Thank you for your continued support and patience.

Oh well, maybe no one is using DNSSEC anyway.

Posted by Arnon Erba in News on .

It’s time: extended support for Windows 7 ends today. Originally released on October 22, 2009 and superseded by Windows 10 almost five years ago, Windows 7 carved out a huge market share for itself in enterprise and home environments alike. In fact, it took Windows 10 until the end of 2018 to finally break Windows 7’s dominant hold on the desktop OS market.

However, it’s time to move on. Windows 10 is a better, faster, and more secure OS that is — and has been for a while — the natural choice for modern environments and modern hardware. Even so, upgrading software and replacing legacy devices in huge organizations is difficult, and Windows 7 is sure to stick around as long as Microsoft offers the paid Extended Security Updates program to companies still trying to migrate. Just like with Windows XP, Windows 7’s story doesn’t end here.

Updated Posted by Arnon Erba in News on .

If you saw a headline earlier this week about a critical security flaw in VLC media player, you may not have gotten the whole story. In fact, the issue is not nearly as serious as it originally seemed.

About a month ago, a user opened a bug report for a crash in VLC caused by a specifically crafted mp4 file. With the cause of the crash still undetermined, MITRE assigned the bug a CVE identifier and gave it a “critical” score of 9.8.

With the bug’s true cause and impact still undetermined, Germany’s CERT-Bund issued an alert of their own warning of a critical flaw in VLC. Worse, because the now several-week-old VLC bug report did not list any significant progress by the VideoLAN team, CERT-Bund announced that no patch was available. The alert kicked off a flurry of other news articles that culminated in a misguided warning from Gizmodo to completely uninstall VLC.

Not a VLC Bug

The only problem was that there was never anything wrong with VLC in the first place. The crash described in the bug report was the result of a vulnerability in libEBML, a third-party library that VLC depends on. However, according to a thread on Twitter from the VideoLAN team, a patched version of libEBML has been shipped with VLC for over a year. It appears the bug report was generated from a Linux system with an older, vulnerable version of libEBML installed.

With that in mind, the CVE score was lowered to “medium” and the report in the VLC bug tracker was closed. Ubuntu released an update for libEBML, and Gizmodo withdrew their doomsday-level announcement. In the end, no patch for VLC is currently required, though some Linux distributions may need to make an updated version of libEBML available.

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