Newsletter Archives

• When you are flagged as malicious

  Posted on March 6, 2023 at 02:42 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  ON SECURITY

  

  By Susan Bradley

  We rely too much on automated reporting in our security solutions.

  Most of the time, such automation works pretty well. When it doesn’t, the consequences can be quite damaging. We can think back to many times when antivirus updates accidentally flagged a file as malicious, and all sorts of fun ensued.

  Just recently, an update to Microsoft Defender interacted with Attack Surface Reduction rules and removed shortcuts on the desktop. If you were on Defender and had the “Block Win32 API calls from Office macro” Attack Surface Reduction rule in place, then updated to security intelligence builds between 1.381.2134.0 and 1.381.2163.0, you would find your icons missing. IT admins were scrambling for days to fix the resulting mess.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.10.0, 2023-03-06).

  On Security Abuse Reporting, false positive, Flagged websites, Newsletters, Patch Lady Posts, security

• What happens when Internet Explorer breaks big-time?

  Posted on November 7, 2010 at 16:00 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  My latest missive at InfoWorld Tech Watch.

  Scary, actually. Somebody flipped the wrong switch in Redmond, and suddenly thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of web sites got completely bogus “This web site has been reported as unsafe” warnings.

  Windows Patches/Security false positive, Internet Explorer