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Goldman Sachs Buys Anti-Bot Startup White Ops
29.12.2020  IT  Securityweek

Fraud and bot-detection specialists White Ops has been acquired by the Goldman Sachs merchant banking division in partnership with investment firms ClearSky Security and NightDragon.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

White Ops, known for its fraud-detection technology that protects businesses and online platforms from bots and automated attacks, had previously raised $31 million in venture capital funding.

Goldman Sachs was part of the earlier investments rounds alongside Clearsky and NightDragon.

Based in New York City, White Ops protects businesses and online e-commerce platforms from sophisticated bots that disrupt and hijack trillions of transactions globally.

White Ops said it grew its customer base by 40 percent in 2020 and plans to ramp up spending on expanding to new markets.

The company's Bot Mitigation Platform was used recently in tandem with the FBI, Google and Facebook to takedown 3ve, a massive botnet used to perpetuate click-fraud and other malicious attacks.

White Ops also recently uncovered ICEBUCKET, the largest and widest Connected TV (CTV) related fraud operation. The company said the the operation was highly successful until discovered, at its peak impersonating roughly 2 million users in more than 30 countries. It also counterfeited more than 300 different publishers, the researchers added.

The bots involved in the attacks were hidden “within the limited signal and transparency of server side ad insertion (SSAI) backed video ad impressions,” White Ops disclosed.

White Ops discovered that “66% of programmatic CTV-related SSAI traffic and 15% of programmatic mobile-related SSAI traffic” was part of this operation in January 2020.

Privacy Management Firm OneTrust Secures $300M at $5.1B Valuation
29.12.2020  IT  Securityweek

OneTrust, a provider of privacy, security and data governance tools, announced a $300 million Series C funding round led by new investor TCV.

The company’s valuation has nearly doubled in the past ten months, jumping from $2.7 billion when the company announced its $210 million Series B round in early 2020, to a current valuation of $5.1 billion.

Announced just before the Christmas holiday, the Series C funding brings the total amount raised to a whopping $710 million since being founded in 2016.

OneTrust says that more than 7,500 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 500, use its technology to comply with ever-changing privacy, security, and compliance requirements.

"Our mission is to build the technology platform that creates the trust fabric of an organization, while addressing the hundreds of privacy, security, and compliance requirements they are faced with today," said Kabir Barday, OneTrust CEO. "We were excited when TCV approached us for an investment. Even with most of our previously raised funds still available, their partnership allows us to further accelerate our mission, leverage our capital and currency to drive organic and inorganic growth, and deliver for our customers and partners long term."

Existing investors, including Insight Partners and Coatue, joined TCV in the funding round.

HelpSystems Acquires Data Protection Firm Vera
25.12.2020  IT  Securityweek

HelpSystems, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based software company, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired cloud-based data protection solution provider Vera for an undisclosed amount.

Vera offers a platform that enables developers to build encryption, tracking, policy enforcement, secure file transfer and access control into applications. The company also offers a solution designed to provide organizations with control over messages and files sent out via email by their employees.

Vera Logo

“With robust policy enforcement, strong encryption, and strict access controls, Vera's data-centric security solution enables employees to collaborate freely while ensuring a high level of security, visibility, and control,” the company explains.

HelpSystems has made several acquisitions in the security space in recent years, including the acquisition of the Core Security division of Irvine, Calif.-based SecureAuth in early 2019, along with the purchase of UK-based Clearswift in late 2019. It also acquired Boulder, Colorado-based Midrange Performance Group in 2018.

Founded in 1982, HelpSystems has more than 900 employees operating from 25 offices around the world. Private equity firm HGGC acquired a controlling stake in HelpSystems in 2018 in a deal that valued the company at more than $1.2 billion.

Tufin Adds Support for Google Cloud
16.12.2020  IT  Securityweek
Security policy management firm Tufin (NYSE: TUFN) announced this week that the SecureCloud component of the Tufin Orchestration Suite now supports the Google Cloud Platform.

Adding support for Google Cloud now allows Tufin customers to secure applications across the three leading cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Tufin for Google Cloud

Tufin also expanded its support for Microsoft Azure Firewall, with enhancements including the ability to automatically discover Azure Firewalls in monitored subscriptions and analyzes them for security risks and misconfigurations.

Last month, Tufin announced integration with AWS Network Firewall, a new managed security service designed to help customers add network protections across all of their AWS workloads.

Additional enhancements to SecureCloud include improved reporting capabilities, configurable security policies, support for policy exception management, and SOC2 compliance.

Oracle Says it Will Move HQ From Silicon Valley to Texas
13.12.2020  IT  Securityweek

Tech giant Oracle Corp. said Friday it will move its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, and let many employees choose their office locations and decide whether to work from home.

The business software maker said it will keep major hubs at its current home in Redwood City, California, and other locations.

“We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

The move comes the same week that Tesla founder Elon Musk announced that he has moved to Austin. Musk had criticized California officials for restrictions designed to limit the coronavirus pandemic.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott quickly boasted about Oracle’s decision.

“Oracle just announced they have moved their headquarters to Austin,” Abbott tweeted. “Texas is truly the land of business, jobs, and opportunity. We will continue to attract the very best.”

Texas has long targeted companies in high-cost California for relocation. This month, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, one of the early companies in Silicon Valley, said it will move to the Houston area and build a campus with two five-story buildings by 2022. In 2018, Toyota shifted its U.S. headquarters from Southern California, to Plano, Texas, a Dallas suburb.

In its most recent fiscal year, which ended May 31, Oracle reported earnings of $10.1 billion on revenue of about $39 billion. The company was founded in Santa Clara, California, in 1977 and as of May 31, employed about 135,000 people.

Divers Pull Rare Surviving WWII Enigma Cipher Machine from Bottom of the Baltic
9.12.2020  IT  Threatpost

This sealogged Nazi machine will undergo restoration.

German divers for the environmental group World Wildlife Fund were searching the ocean floor for abandoned nets threatening marine wildlife. What they found instead is a treasured piece of computing history, a World War II-era German Enigma crypto machine, sunk to the bottom of the Baltic Sea to protect its precious technology from Allied forces.

The development of the Enigma Cipher machine and the life-and-death race to crack its code wasn’t just crucial to deciding the outcome of World War II; it ushered in the modern computing age. And because the Enigma’s secure code was a guarded German secret, as Allied forced approached, the military was ordered to destroy them, leaving just 320 of them surviving today, out of the more than 25,000 built for the German army from 1929 through the end of WWII, according to Dan Perera, director of the Enigma Museum.

Enigma’s Value
Today these machines are highly sought after by governments, museums and private collectors, Perera told Threatpost. He added that Enigma machines have sold at auction priced between $190,000 and $270,000.

The WWF dive team was searching Gelding Bay in the Baltic Sea between Germany and Denmark for what they call “ghost nets,” a fishing device which gets hung up on something on the sea floor, harming marine life, Sophos Security explained. One ghost net they found was caught on something lead diver Florian Huber said his colleague described as an “old typewriter,.”

Huber said the Enigma was likely aboard one of 40 submarines sunk in the bay by the German Navy at the end of WWII. “We assume our Enigma went overboard in the course of events,” he told Sophos.

The Enigma was turned over the State Archaeological Office in Schleswig-Holstein where it will undergo a restoration process. Its first stop is back underwater for another year in distilled water to rinse the salt out of the device, Naked Security’s report added.

“Historians generally agree that the reading of secret messages sent by the German using Enigma machines shortened the war by at least two years, saved thousands of lives and deprived the Germans the time they needed to develop an atomic bomb,” Perera said.

The Allies, in their efforts to crack the Enigma’s secret code, also pushed technological boundaries.

“The Enigma machine helped birth the computer age,” Perera said. “The first functioning computers were developed as part of the Allied efforts to break the Enigma codes and the codes of other German cipher machines during WWII.”

Turing’s Cybersecurity Legacy
Alan Turing, father of modern computing, invented a computer to crack the Enigma code in 1942 and inspired generations of cryptographers to pick up his work.

“This newly found Enigma is an exciting piece of military and intelligence history,” Rock Holland, security officer and vice president of strategy at Digital Shadows told Threatpost in reaction to the discovery. “The need to crack the Enigma code gave rise to cryptoanalysis, and ultimately modern-day Signals Intelligence. Alan Turing and his colleagues at the historic Bletchley Park helped turned the tide of World War II. The U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) origins can be traced to these encryption devices.”

Turning and his team of Bletchley Park codebreakers worked in secret to crack the Enigma code, building on the early work of polish mathematicians. Armed with the code, Turing ultimately developed his own computer, the Bombe. At the height of the war, 211 Bombe machines were built, cracking 3,000 German messages per day, according to the British Times.

The Bombe was an electromechanical device comprised of 36 individual Enigma machines. Each individual Enigma could be programmed to take assigned letters and mimic the encryptor’s 17,500 variable positions until it found a match, BT reported.

“There are rarely stories in last two centuries which have had a greater impact on modern technology and how society perceives it and its protagonists than this one,” Dick Schrader, global vice president at New Net Technologies, told Threatpost about Turing’s legacy, He added that current security professionals are still waging the same battles over encryption today as Turing was against the Enigma during the war.

“Using a programmable device to do the heavy lifting of mathematical operations can surely be seen the first hallmark of computing in modern history,” Schrader said. “Today, cybersecurity is often faced with the very same issues, just that our adversaries are usually not countries (and there’s no war), but we are here and put all our effort into finding technology-based solutions to problems caused by the very same technology used by attackers.”

Microsoft IE Browser Death March Hastens

27.10.20  IT  Threatpost

Internet Explorer end of support browser transition
Internet Explorer redirects more traffic to Edge Chromium browser as Microsoft warns of the upcoming demise of the once dominant browser.

As the death of the once dominant Internet Explorer (IE) draws closer, Microsoft is quickly pounding more nails into the browser’s coffin.

On Monday, Microsoft hastened its IE-to-Edge browser-transition strategy and announced new controls for users and IT staff when it comes to how the lame-duck browser will handle a growing list of websites incompatible with IE. Those include YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo Mail and 1,153 other leading internet destinations.

Microsoft also announced that in two short weeks, its own services would no longer be supported by 25-year-old browser that once crushed Netscape and other competitors. In 2004 IE enjoyed 95 percent market share. Today, an estimated 5 percent of users rely on it.
 

As a point of reference, the Microsoft Edge web browser comes built into Windows 10. In 2015 Microsoft said it would replace IE with Edge in an effort to support modern browser functions, such as extensions. In 2018, it announced further efforts to streamline its development — Edge be rebuilt on the Chromium rendering engine, which is the same code that Google’s Chrome browser uses.

Internet Explorer alert regarding Edge BrowserIE: The Long Goodbye
Part of IE’s shuttering entails redirecting users to the Microsoft Edge 87, to be released November 17. However, BleepingComputer reported that the redirects have already begun.

Last Monday, Microsoft explained that users of IE who visited an incompatible website would be presented with an interstitial webpage alerting them they were being redirected to Microsoft Edge. An opt-in prompt asks consent to copy a user’s browsing data and preferences from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge. In addition to that, a website incompatibility banner will appear below the address bar for every redirection, Microsoft said.

On Monday, Microsoft released instructions on how IT staff can change the behavior of Internet Explorer when it lands on an incompatible site.

One option is configuring IE to not redirect to Edge “RedirectSitesFromInternetExplorerPreventBHOInstall”.
A second option “RedirectSitesFromInternetExplorerRedirectMode” allows IE to open sites in Edge – and browser data and user preferences are automatically imported.
The third option doesn’t import browser data and user preferences, but hides any incompatibility warning message and redirects IE to Edge.
“Redirection from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge requires an Internet Explorer Browser Helper Object (BHO) named ‘IEtoEdge BHO,'” Microsoft explained.

“These policies will be available as ADMX file updates by October 26, 2020 and will be available in Intune by November 9, 2020,” wrote Microsoft. ADMX files are Windows registry-based policy settings that are XML-based and define policy settings and browser behaviors.

Security and Privacy Concerns?
For many, there will be few tears when IE is finally put out to pasture. The browser, which was the centerpiece to a 2001 antitrust lawsuit between United States and Microsoft, has a spotty history when it comes to security, privacy and compatibility.

There are more than a few reasons there will be no love lost with the expiration of IE. Since 2000, there have been over 1,000 serious vulnerabilities tied to it. The majority (28 percent) are tied to code-execution bugs, 25 percent related to IE memory-corruption flaws and 20 percent buffer-overflow vulnerabilities, according to CVE Details.

For an exhaustive look at the history of major IE bugs, Paul Szabo has an impressive collection.

The browser, often standardized within corporations, was the bane of many security teams because of Microsoft’s chronic foot dragging when it came to patching. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security advised companies and Windows XP users to ditch IE until Microsoft fixed a use-after-free bug that allowed unauthorized remote code execution.

Privacy concerns have also been paramount for users of IE, with many feeling that Microsoft’s access to browsing data coupled with services and application data was unsettling. Those Microsoft anxieties have been muted over time as massive data collected by Google, Facebook and Amazon have normalized the behavior.

Things have come full circle, with some arguing switching to Microsoft’s Edge Chromium browser is a way to avoid Google’s data collection, while still being able to reap the benefits the same browser engine.

“Microsoft Edge gives more privacy than Chrome, Google Chrome uses its user’s data to give a personalized advertisement for its revenue which would also make,” wrote a Microsoft contributor to its Tech Community.

That’s not to say Microsoft Edge doesn’t have security concerns.

On Monday, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of a Microsoft Edge memory-corruption flaw (CVE-2020-15999) rated high-risk. However, unlike with IE, this bug was tied to Google Chromium code and was patched last week. At the time, Google warned that adversaries were exploiting the bug in the wild.

Final Farewell
“Internet Explorer 11 is the last major version of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the version of Windows on which it is installed,” wrote Microsoft. Mainstream support for Windows 10 ends Oct. 13, 2020. Extended support, according to Microsoft, ends on Oct. 14, 2025.

Cisco Ordered to Pay $1.9 Billion in Cybersecurity Patent Infringement Case
6.10.20  IT  Securityweek

A US district judge has ordered Cisco to pay $1.9 billion to Centripetal Networks, Inc., for infringing on four patents related to cybersecurity.

Founded in 2009, Centripetal focuses on cyber threat intelligence, providing solutions that help organizations defeat cyber-attacks. The company has developed technology for operationalizing and automating threat intelligence and has been awarded various patents in the United States and abroad.

In a lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of Virginia in March 2018, the company claimed that numerous Cisco product series have been infringing on five of its patents for years.

“Cisco has willfully infringed each of the Asserted Patents. Centripetal is informed and believes that Cisco had knowledge of the Asserted Patents through various channels and despite its knowledge of Centripetal’s patent rights, engaged in egregious behavior warranting enhanced damages,” the company said in the initial filing.

The company also claimed that, although it knew of the Centripetal patented technology, Cisco continued to sell products infringing on those patents and made no effort to avoid infringement.

On Monday, District Judge Henry C. Morgan, Jr., ordered Cisco to pay a total of $1,903,239,287.50 to Centripetal, ruling that four of the five asserted patents were infringed.

Damages suffered by Centripetal amounted to $755,808,545, but Cisco’s infringement was “willful and egregious,” and the judge decided to multiply the figure by 2.5, to $1,889,521,362.50. To this, an interest of $13,717,925 is applied.

Furthermore, the court imposed a three-year running royalty of 10% of sales of the accused products and their successors, followed by a running royalty of 5% on those sales, for another three years. At the termination of the second three-year term, Centripetal won’t receive any further relief, the judge ruled.

Cisco expressed disappointment and said it would appeal the decision to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

"We are disappointed with the trial court's decision given the substantial evidence of non-infringement, invalidity and that Cisco's innovations predate the patents by many years," Cisco said.

Cisco to Buy Network Intelligence Firm ThousandEyes
29.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Cisco on Thursday said that it plans to acquire privately held network intelligence firm ThousandEyes, as the networking giant looks to boost network visibility and intelligence across its enterprise networking, cloud and application services portfolios.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Bloomberg reports the price tag to be nearly $1 billion, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Cisco Logo

Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2010, ThousandEyes provides an internet intelligence platform that delivers deep visibility and insights into application and services delivery over the Internet.

The company was started by Mohit Lad (CEO) and Ricardo Oliveira (CTO) with an initial grant of $150k from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“ThousandEyes’ technology warns us when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint where those failures were caused,” Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud, explained in a blog post. “With thousands of agents deployed throughout the Internet, ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the Internet and grows more intelligent with every deployment.”

ThousandEyes will join Cisco's newly-formed Networking Services business unit headed by Nightingale, and Lad will take on the role of GM of ThousandEyes, while Oliveira will focus on ThousandEyes product vision and strategy.

ThousandEyes will continue to be agnostic to underlying implementations so customers can benefit from it no matter what vendors they use, according to Lad.

The acquisition is expected to close before the end of Cisco's Q1 FY'21.

Crowdsourced Security Testing Firm Synack Raises $52 Million
29.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Crowdsourced security testing provider Synack on Thursday announced that it closed a $52 million Series D funding round, bringing the total raised by the company to $112.1 million.

Founded in 2013, Synack gathers cybersecurity talent to help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their assets. The Synack Red Team (SRT) is powered by over 1,500 ethical hackers from 82 countries.

Synack’s platform is leveraged by worldwide banks, retailers and healthcare companies, as well as major federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, and aerospace and defense organizations for security bug hunting.

The company says it will use the new funding to invest more in the SRT community, as well as to advance its SmartScan technology that can continuously monitor for vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, the company plans to use the financial boost to expand internationally (it already provides bug hunting services to organizations in the U.S., Europe, and parts of the Middle East and Asia) and beyond Global 2000 firms, to cater to medium-size and small enterprises.

The company also plans on continuing investing in its core products (which combine hacker talent with AI and machine learning for vulnerability discovery), and invest in new products and offerings to expand its crowdsourced cybersecurity model to accommodate the increased reliance on remote workforces.

“The only way to guarantee trust and control in cybersecurity used to be through on-site work. That’s simply no longer the case. Synack can maintain trust and visibility all while giving customers access to an army of the most talented ethical hackers to defend against today’s relentless cyberattacks,” Synack CEO Jay Kaplan said.

The new funding round was co-led by B Capital Group and C5 Capital, but also saw participation from previous investors GGV Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Icon Ventures, Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s venture fund M12 and Singtel Innov8.

How to download Google Chrome's offline installer
25.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, but its standard installer won't work if you are not connected to the Internet or can't reach their servers. This is where a Google Chrome offline installer comes into play as it contains all the files it needs to install the browser.

Google Chrome's normally offers a small 2MB installation program that connects to the Internet to download any files it needs to install the browser.

This installer, though, will fail if you are prepping a new computer and do not have Internet connectivity yet or are having trouble connecting to Google's servers.

In these situations, you can download a Google Chrome offline installer that contains all the files it needs to get the browser installed.

This installer will try to connect to the Internet when installing to download any updates, but if it fails to connect, the browser will still install.

These types of installers have their advantages as they can be downloaded from a machine with Internet connectivity and then used to install the browser on other devices you are setting up for the first time.

Another advantage is if you live under strict bandwidth limitations, you can use Chrome 83 offline installer and install it on multiple PCs without re-downloading the update.

Download Google Chrome offline installer
To download the Google Chrome offline installer, or Chrome Standalone installer as they call it, follow these steps:

Use this special URL when visiting Google Chrome's download site.
Click on 'Download Chrome.'
The Google Chrome offline installer will now be downloaded and will have a name similar to ChromeStandaloneSetup64.exe.

Chrome Offline Installer
Double-click on the ChromeStandaloneSetup64.exe executable to install the browser.
Once Chrome is installed and connected to the Internet, you should then click on the Chrome menu and select Help -> About Google Chrome to download any available updates and install them.

Microsoft Surface Book 3 is now available for purchase
23.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the Surface Book 3, which is the company's most powerful laptop with dedicated Nvidia GPU support. Just like the previous generation, Surface Book 3 is available in the same 13- and 15-inch version.

Microsoft's Surface Book 3 starts at $1099 and the 2-in-1 detachable device is available for purchase starting today.

Microsoft says that Surface Book 3 provides up to 50% more performance than Surface Book 2 and up to 17.5 hours of battery life. Both 13-inch or 15-inch comes with a high-DPI PixelSense Display and it also comes with a comfortable keyboard.

There's also no cosmetic change between Surface Book 3 and Surface Book 2, so if you liked the previous generation, you're probably going to like the Surface Book 3 as well.

Inside the Surface Book 3, you'll find 10th Generation Intel Core Ice Lake processor and choice of discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX or Quadro RTX GPUs.

Here are the full specs of the Surface Book 3:

13.5” or 15” touchscreen
8GB, 16GB, or 32GB 3733Mhz LPDDR4x
Quad-core 10th Gen Intel Core i5-1035G7 Processor and Core i5-1065G7
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with Max-Q Design w/4GB GDDR5 graphics memory
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with Max-Q Design w/6GB GDDR6 graphics memory
Solid-state drive (SSD) options: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB PCIe SSD
If you're interested, you can buy Surface Book 3 from the Microsoft Store and Amazon.

How to use Google Chrome Tab Groups to stay organized
23.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Google recently implemented Tab Groups in the Chrome browser, which is an incredibly useful feature to keep your browser tabs more organized. Tab Grouping has been in development for quite a while and Google says the feature is now ready for the users.

Tab Groups allows you to organize tabs by topic. You can use it to lump similar websites under one umbrella, which is called a group. These groups are organized by their name, color, and tab strip.

Tab Groups can be accessed from the tab context menu. If you don't see Tab Groups in the context menu, you can turn it on manually by following these steps:

Open Chrome://flags menu,
Search for 'Tab Groups' and enable it.
Relaunch Google Chrome.
To create a new tab group, follow these steps:

Right-click on a tab.
 

Select "Add to new group".
Once a new group is created, you can drag open tabs across the group strip and tabs will automatically become a part of the group.

Tapping on the group icon allows you to set a custom name and you can choose from eight colors, which is applied across the tab strip.

For example, you can create a group called 'work' and another group called 'social'. If you want to show a tab in 'work' group, right-click on the tab and click “Add to existing group” and then select 'work'.

Likewise, you can follow the above steps to add sites such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook to the 'social' group.

Below you can see a demonstration of how Tab Groups work.

Both groups are visually organized by color. To disband a group, you can click on the circle icon and select “Ungroup” tabs or close everything inside the group.

According to Google, Tab Groups will help you in the following ways:

For instance, it helps if you’re working on several projects, or looking through multiple shopping and review sites.
Others have been grouping their tabs by how urgent they are — “ASAP,” “this week,” and “later.” Similarly, tab groups can help keep track of your progress on certain tasks: “haven’t started,” “in progress,” “need to follow up,” and “completed.”
If you do not see the Tab Groups feature yet, please be patient as it rolls out. If you do not want to wait, you can use the steps listed in the article to enable it now.

Cyber Insurance Provider Coalition Raises $90 Million
21.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Cyber insurance and security provider Coalition this week announced that it has raised $90 million in equity capital.

Founded in 2017, the San Francisco-based startup provides up to $15 million of cyber and technology insurance coverage to companies in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and CAD $20M of coverage across all 10 provinces in Canada.

The company is backed by global insurers Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, Lloyd’s of London, and Argo Group. It has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta, Denver, Austin, Vancouver, and Toronto.

Over the past year, Coalition saw its customer base grow 600%, to pass the 25,000 mark. The new funds, the company says, will help it support rapid growth and global expansion.

The company provides a combination of insurance and proactive cybersecurity. The offer includes a cyber risk management platform for automated security alerts, threat intelligence, guidance, and cybersecurity tools.

With the new funding, Coalition aims to provide small and mid-sized businesses with enhanced cybersecurity capabilities; to expand worldwide, starting with Canada; and deliver new insurance products to address a wider range of threats.

“Traditional cybersecurity technology such as firewalls and antivirus were designed to protect networks, not businesses. Coalition protects an entire business by offering cybersecurity-as-a-service without any additional hardware or software, security and incident response services, and comprehensive insurance cover of up to $15 million,” Joshua Motta, founder and CEO of Coalition, commented.

The new funding round was led by Valor Equity Partners, but also saw participation from Felicis Ventures, Greyhound Capital, and Coalition’s existing investors, including Vy Capital, Ribbit Capital, Hillhouse Capital, and Greenoaks Capital, among others.

To date, the company raised a total of $140 million, including $125 million in equity funding.

Earlier this year, Coalition announced the acquisition of internet scanning and threat intelligence services provider BinaryEdge for an undisclosed amount.

New Microsoft Teams enhancements announced at Build 2020

21.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Microsoft announced today the rollout of a series of new features and enhancements to the Microsoft Teams cloud collaboration platform including improvements to meetings and events, productivity, automation, and scheduling.

Microsoft Teams is designed to combine meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration within a single communication tool that preserves context and keeps everyone in the workspace up to speed.

Teams has seen a huge increase in user numbers since the COVID-19 pandemic has started, reaching 75 million daily active users (DAUs) on March 30, which represents a 70% increase since March 19 when Microsoft reported 44 million DAUs.

Incoming Microsoft Teams enhancements
The announcement made during Microsoft's annual Build annual conference event highlights the introduction of new custom templates for creating teams, support for Power Virtual Agents chatbots, Power BI sharing, automated workflows, virtual appointment scheduling, event broadcasting, and secure remote scheduling.

"When creating a new team, you’ll soon be able to pick from a variety of customizable templates," Microsoft revealed. "Choose from common business scenarios, like event management and crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates, like a hospital ward or bank branch."

All new team creation templates feature pre-defined guidance, channels, and apps, while admins will be able to create new ones based on their organization's existing teams to standardize teams' structures once Templates in Teams will roll out in the next few months.

Microsoft is also extending the Shifts capabilities in Microsoft Teams — introduced during January 2019 — for custom workforce management systems and "auto-approvals for shift requests in scenarios where a manager’s approval is not needed."

Teams Shifts (Microsoft)
Organizations will also be able to "schedule, manage, and conduct business-to-consumer virtual appointments through the new Bookings app integration in Microsoft Teams."

Those working remotely are also getting enhancements as they will be able to take advantage of Skype TX interoperability and the new Network Device Interface (NDI) support for customized, high-scale broadcasts.

Teams will soon allow users to create and manage chatbots with the help of the Power Virtual Agents app and Power BI users to share reports and charts using a new "Share to Teams" button.

New Microsoft Teams features in development
According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, Redmond's developers are working on rolling out multi-window meetings and calling next month for Windows and macOS clients, allowing users to "pop out meetings and calling into separate windows to help them optimize their workflow."

Microsoft Teams is also getting support for allowing meetings attendees to upload their own images to customize their backgrounds.

"We are building upon the heavily popular background effects feature in Teams meetings with custom upload capabilities," Microsoft says.

You can find tips on how to set custom video backgrounds in Microsoft Teams in the video embedded below.

Group chats will also be enhanced to accommodate up to 250 users at a time for occasions when creating a new team is not really needed and you only want to "organize an ad-hoc discussion with staff at an event," or with colleagues you're not working with on a regular basis.

Starting with Q4 2020, Microsoft also plans to roll out suggested replies to Microsoft Teams to allow users to "quickly reply to a given message by tapping on a suggested reply."

Website Security Provider Source Defense Raises $10.5 Million
21.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Client-side web security provider Source Defense this week announced raising $10.5 million in a Series A+ funding round.

Founded in 2014, the company provides a website security solution aimed at delivering real-time protection against attacks originating at website supply-chain vendors.

The company says it can keep sites safe from third-party scripts such as Magecart and Formjacking attacks, thus helping businesses and government organizations alike avoid interruptions.

The company’s VICE Client-side Web Security Platform leverages machine learning and industry best practices to deliver a fully automated solution to control access and permissions of various dynamic components on a website.

Source Defense says it will use the new funding to accelerate growth and improve its platform to better meet growing demand on the market.

Over the past 12 months, its sales more than tripled, and the company expanded its research and development team, established partnerships, and added more people to its executive team.

“The demand for combining premium online shopping experience with the state-of-the-art security controls has proved an urgent need for our solution,” said Source Defense CEO Dan Dinnar. “Our success with several Fortune 500 companies, including a most recent deployment at a Fortune 50 company is proof of the value we can provide industry leaders, in view of rampant activity by attackers.”

The new funding round added Capital One Ventures as an investor, but also saw participation from existing investors JVP, Allegis Cyber, Global Brain, and NightDragon.

Container Security Company Aqua Raises $30 Million in Series D Round
20.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Israel-based container security company Aqua Security has raised another $30 million in a Series D funding round, which brings the total raised to date to more than $130 million.

The latest funding round was led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from previous investors Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and TLV Partners.

“This funding will support the continued operation of the company as well as ongoing investment in new territory development in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and South America regions,” Dror Davidoff, co-founder and CEO of Aqua Security, told SecurityWeek.Aqua Security raises another $30 million

Aqua Security provides solutions designed to help organizations secure their cloud, container-based and serverless applications and infrastructure. The company’s products provide visibility and security automation capabilities across an application’s lifecycle.

Its first SaaS offering, a cloud security posture management solution, was launched following the company’s acquisition of CloudSploit in November 2019. Its second SaaS product is named Aqua Dynamic Threat Analysis and it enables organizations to detect and mitigate threats in container images using a secure container sandbox.

Aqua says it has more than doubled revenue and employee headcount over the past year, and the company claims it now has over 400 customers across a wide range of sectors.

“Aqua has made impressive strides building its customer base and establishing itself as a market leader in securing cloud native applications,” said Hunter Somerville, general partner at Greenspring Associates. “Even under today’s challenging business conditions, the company has demonstrated strong revenue growth, and an ability to introduce new, exciting products that differentiate their offering. With enterprises continuing to migrate aggressively to the cloud, we see Aqua as well-positioned to benefit from and enable that adoption.”

Aqua previously raised $25 million in a Series B funding round in 2017 and $62 million in a Series C round in 2019.

Zoom global outage preventing meetings, video, and audio
19.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Update: Zoom states that the issue has been fixed and that users should log out of their session and try again.

If that does not work, log out of Zoom, log back in, and then try to access their meeting again.

Zoom has a global outage that is preventing users from joining meetings or see video and hear audio once they have joined. There is currently no indication as to when the issue will be resolved.

If you were hoping to join your Sunday school class, attend virtual Church, or access your virtual exercise class, you might have to do something else today as people are having issues connecting to all of these types of meetings.

According to the outage monitoring site DownDetector, Zoom began experiencing difficulties at approximately 7 AM EST, causing problems when attempting to join or conduct virtual meetings.

Zoom outage reports on DownDetector
According to the Zoom status page, they began investigating the outage at 9:42 AM EST and have stated that this is only affecting a small subset of users.

Zoom Status Updates
Zoom's latest update was 10:41 AM EST when they stated that they are "continuing to investigate this issue."

Unfortunately, until this is resolved, Zoom meetings will not work.

Update 5/17/20 11:45 EST: Zoom states that the issue has been resolved.

PE Firm Gets Cold Feet With $1.9 Billion Acquisition of Forescout Technologies
18.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Forescout Warns That Acquisition by PE Firm Advent International May Not Happen

Enterprise device security firm Forescout Technologies (NASDAQ: FSCT) said on Monday that private equity firm Advent International would not be moving forward as planned with its $1.9 billion acquisition of Forescout that was announced in February.

In a deal that was originally scheduled to be complete during Q2 2020, Advent had agreed to acquire all outstanding shares of Forescout common stock for $33.00 in cash, a premium of nearly 20% over Forescout’s closing share price on February 5, 2020.

Shares of ForeScout plummeted nearly 25% to $22.50 per share at the time of publishing, giving the company a market cap of roughly $1.1 billion.

“On May 15, 2020, Advent provided notice to Forescout that it would not be proceeding to consummate the acquisition of Forescout on May 18, 2020, as scheduled,” Forescout said in its announcement. “Forescout and Advent are engaged in ongoing discussions regarding timing to close and the terms of the transaction. There can be no assurance that Forescout and Advent will be able to reach agreement on terms."

News of Advent pulling back came the same day as it was reported that Fortinet has sued Forescout for allegedly violating three patents held by Fortinet that came from its 2018 acquisition of Bradford Networks.

“This is an uncertain time for everyone, as businesses and communities across the world navigate the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Michael DeCesare, CEO and President of Forescout. “We continue to believe that Advent is the right partner for Forescout and we remain committed to completing the transaction in the near-term. We thank our employees for their extraordinary efforts and commitment to Forescout, and we remain focused on continuing our course of advancing our innovation roadmap and strategic cloud and business transformation.”

Forescout and Advent have already received all necessary approvals to complete transaction.

In 2016, Forescout raised $76 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation, and became a public company after its initial public offering (IPO) in October 2017.

In November 2018, Forescout acquired operational technology (OT) network security firm SecurityMatters for approximately $113 million in cash to expand its industrial cybersecurity offerings.

Forescout had $336.8 million in revenue in 2019, an increase of 13% over 2018, according to financial results released on February 6, 2020.

Free Grand Theft Auto V offer brings down Epic Games Store
17.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT
 

Epic Games store is experiencing an outage after being bum-rushed by gamers looking to snag a copy of Grand Theft Auto 5 being offered for free today.

Earlier today, in a now-deleted tweet, Epic Games announced that Grand Theft Auto V Premium Edition was free until May 21st via the Epic Game Store.

After that tweet, everything went downhill as a massive surge in traffic from eager gamers quickly overwhelmed the Epic Games Store site and brought it down.

Epic Games pretty much DDoSed themselves with this free offer.

When people attempt to access the free offer, many are now greeted with a '403 Forbidden' or a '500 An unexpected error has occurred' message, as shown below.

A 500 HTTP error indicates that the server encountered an error and could not proceed with loading the desired web page.

Epic Games has since confirmed that the huge amount of traffic the online store is receiving is causing the outages, slow loading times, and crashes in the launcher.

Epic Games tweet

For me, at least, the Epic games client is working fine, and I was able to access the free GTA V offer.

For those who are still having problems, do not worry.

You still have a week to get the free game.

Crooks stole $10 million from Norway’s state investment fund Norfund
15.5.20  Securityaffairs  IT

Norway’s state investment fund, Norfund, suffered a business email compromise (BEC) attack, hackers stole $10 million.
Hackers stole $10 million from Norway’s state investment fund, Norfund, in a business email compromise (BEC) attack.

Norfund is a private equity company established by the Norwegian Storting (parliament) in 1997 and owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The fund receives its investment capital from the state budget.
The fraudsters compromised the Norfund email system and monitored communications between the employees of the fund and their partners for months.

Once identified the employee that responsible for money transfers. the attackers created a Norfund email address to impersonate an individual authorized to transfer large sums of money through the bank Norfund.

In a classic BEC scheme, hackers replaced the payment information provided to the partners to hijack the transfer to an account under their control in a bank in Mexico.

“Through an advance data breach, the defrauders were able to access information concerning a loan of USD 10 million (approx. 100 million NOK) from Norfund to a microfinance institution in Cambodia.” reads a notice published by Norfund.

“The defrauders manipulated and falsified information exchange between Norfund and the borrowing institution over time in a way that was realistic in structure, content and use of language. Documents and payment details were falsified”

Norfund was not able to block the fraudulent wire transfer because the attackers managed to delay of its discovery.

The BEC attack took place on March 16, but it was discovered more than a month later, on April 30 when the fraudsters attempted to carry out a new fraud, that was detected and blocked.

To delay the discovery of the scam, the attacker sent an email to the Cambodian beneficiary informing it of a delay due to the current Coronavirus lockdown in Norway.

“This is a grave incident. The fraud clearly shows that we, as an international investor and development organisation, through active use of digital channels are vulnerable. The fact that this has happened shows that our systems and routines are not good enough. We have taken immediate and serious action to correct this” said company CEO, Tellef Thorleifsson.

VMware to Acquire Kubernetes Security Firm Octarine
14.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

VMware announced on Wednesday during its virtual Connect 2020 cybersecurity conference the acquisition of Kubernetes security company Octarine and a new Next-Gen Security Operations Center (SOC) Alliance.

Octarine has developed a platform that provides continuous security and compliance for Kubernetes applications. Following the acquisition of Octarine, VMware plans on integrating that technology into its Carbon Black Cloud solutions to provide more visibility into cloud-native environments, enabling customers to identify and reduce risks posed by attacks and vulnerabilities.

VMware acquired Carbon Black last year for $2.1 billion and the virtualization giant announced the launch of its new Security Business Unit when the acquisition was completed.

Octarine technology will also integrate with VMware Tanzu, which provides an enterprise-grade Kubernetes runtime.

“Acquiring Octarine will enable us to further expand VMware’s intrinsic security strategy to containers and Kubernetes environments by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud,” said Patrick Morley, former CEO of Carbon Black and current GM and senior vice president of VMware’s Security Business Unit.

Morley added, “This, combined with native integrations with Tanzu, vSphere, NSX and VMware Cloud Foundation, will create what we believe is a unique and compelling solution for intrinsically securing workloads. And, with the addition of our AppDefense capabilities merged into the platform, we can fundamentally transform how workloads are better secured.”

As for the Next-Gen SOC Alliance, VMware announced that members of the alliance include Splunk, Google Cloud’s Chronicle, IBM Security, Sumo Logic and Exabeam, whose products will be integrated with Carbon Black Cloud to streamline and improve SOC operations.

“The Next-Gen SOC Alliance brings a critical mass of XDR context and capabilities to SOCs in a fully intrinsic way – one that can uniquely leverage the VMware fabric,” said Tom Barsi, VP of Alliances for VMware Carbon Black. “In partnership with the industry’s leading SIEM/SOAR players, we’re setting a strong vision for the modern SOC and delivering unprecedented visibility and remediation capabilities across endpoints, networks, workloads, and containers.”

Code Analysis Company SonarSource Acquires RIPS Technologies
14.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

Code quality and security solutions provider SonarSource has acquired code security testing company RIPS Technologies.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, SonarSource provides open-source and commercial code analyzers that support 27 programming languages and aim to help developers solve coding issues in their projects.

RIPS Technologies is a startup from Bochum, Germany. Founded in 2016, the company is best known for its PHP code analyzer, but it also provides analyzers to automatically detect vulnerabilities in languages such as Java and JavaScript.

Following the acquisition, the SonarSource and RIPS Technologies teams will be working together on the development of Static Application Security Testing (SAST) products, with a focus on helping developers improve the security of their software.

SonarSource says it remains committed to helping improve application security through providing developers with automated feedback on their code’s security from the development phase.

"The Code Security market very much looks like the Code Quality market 10 years ago, niche and very fragmented. At SonarSource we are committed to disrupting this market, building the best products and having those adopted by all developers and development teams,” said Olivier Gaudin, CEO and co-founder of SonarSource.

All of RIPS Technologies’ employees are expected to join SonarSource following the acquisition.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Enterprise Identity Protection Firm Semperis Raises $40 Million
13.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

Enterprise identity protection company Semperis on Wednesday announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B funding round, which brings the total raised to date to $54 million.

The funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors. Semperis plans on using the funds to “expand its global presence and accelerate hiring across all functional areas.”

Semperis is headquartered in New York City and has R&D teams in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel. The company says most of its customers are in the United States, with some initial customers in Europe and the APAC region.

The company says it has been profitable for the past six quarters — it could have continued to operate without raising additional funds — but decided that it wants to grow more, and it believes that global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners is perfect for helping it achieve that goal. Teddie Wardi, managing director at Insight Partners, will join Semperis’ board of directors.

Semperis currently offers two products: Semperis Directory Services Protector, which helps organizations protect Active Directory, and Semperis Active Directory Forest Recovery, designed to help organizations recover following an attack.

Mickey Bresman, CEO of Semperis, told SecurityWeek in an interview that the company’s solutions are designed to help organizations prior, during and after an attack. Prior to an attack, they scan Active Directory deployments for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and in case an attack is detected they provide organizations with visibility and enable them to easily revert the changes made by the attackers.

As an example, Semperis provided the NotPetya attack and its impact on Danish shipping giant Maersk. In that incident, the Active Directory recovery process took nine days, but Bresman said his company’s solutions can reduce the recovery time to 4 hours — even less, depending on the company’s size and business processes.

“This funding event marks a significant milestone for Semperis, and we’re proud to have such an elite group of investors joining us in our mission,” Bresman said. “Cybersecurity programs, big and small, are on the front lines of a new war that has virtually no boundaries and no rules of engagement. If you think about hospitals that can’t access their systems to save a life, or cities that get held hostage, we have a responsibility to help organizations take back control. That’s what drives us.”

CyberArk Acquires Identity as a Service Provider Idaptive for $70 Million
13.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

CyberArk on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Idaptive, an Identity as a Service (IDaaS) provider based in Santa Clara, California, for $70 million in cash.

CyberArk says that the addition of Idaptive’s technology will allow it to deliver a modern identity platform that takes a SaaS-delivered, AI-based approach to managing identities with privileged access management at its core.

“CyberArk will extend its ability to manage and protect identities with various levels of privileges across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling customers to improve their overall security posture with a more efficient and seamless user experience, and address ever-increasing and complex regulatory requirement,” the company said.

CyberArk also announced financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2020 on Wednesday, noting that total revenue for the quarter was $106.8 million, up 11% compared with the first quarter of 2019.

“Given the weakened economic environment due to Covid-19, we expect customers to make more cautious purchasing decisions which will impact our revenue and cash flow from operations in the near term,” stated Josh Siegel, CyberArk Chief Financial Officer.

Have fun learning robotics with a DIY Bionic Robot Lizard kit
10.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

As people are staying indoors more, rather than going out and socializing, it may be a good time to learn a fun skill by yourself or with your family that could spark an interest in technology and robotics.

Today we have a deal for 16% off the SunFounder DIY Bionic Robot Lizard, which will teach you how to build a robot lizard and program your new pet with the Arduino programming language.

This bundle normally has a value of $65.99 but is now discounted by 16% to $54.95 as part of this deal.

DIY Bionic Robot Lizard
The kit includes everything you need to assemble the robot and program it to move around and interact with the environment using the included Sunfounder Nano board.

If you are not interested in robotics but still want to pick up some new skills, we also have deals on courses in White Hat Hacking, PowerShell, and Windows MCSA certifications.

You can also take a look at our Pay What You Want deals that let you beat the average price to get all of the items in the bundle.

Microsoft script installs Folding@Home in Windows 10's Sandbox
12.4.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Microsoft has released a PowerShell script that allows you to quickly start donating your CPU cycles to the Folding@Home project by deploying the program in the Windows 10 Sandbox.

The Folding@Home project is a distributed computing project that allows people to donate their CPU cycles to simulate the folding of proteins to research diseases and news drugs and treatments.

This project has become immensely popular since the Coronavirus outbreak, and with malware impersonating the program, Microsoft has released a PowerShell script that lets you quickly and securely get up and running with Folding@Home.

This is done through the Windows Sandbox feature that lets you launch a virtual machine that can be used to run programs without the risk of infecting your normal Windows 10 operating system.

Quickly setup Folding@Home in the Windows Sandbox
To start using Folding@Home in the Windows Sandbox, you can download the install_folding_sandbox_on_host.ps1 PowerShell script and save it to your computer.

Once downloaded, open a PowerShell administrator prompt and execute the following command to setup Windows Sandbox, deploy the Folding@Home client, and join the Windows_Sandbox Folding@Home team anonymously:

Powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install_folding_sandbox_on_host.ps1
You can use this command instead to join the Windows_Sandbox team under a particular name:

Powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install_folding_sandbox_on_host.ps1 -username [your username]

PowerShell script installing Folding@Home
When executed, the script will perform the following steps to get you up and running:

Check if Windows Sandbox is installed and if not install it. This feature is only available on Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise Insider builds 18362 or later.
Download the latest Folding@Home installer.
Create a configuration file for Folding@Home. This configuration file will automatically add you to Microsoft's windows_sandbox Folding@Home team.
Launches the Windows Sandbox and automatically starts the Folding@Home client with the configured configuration file.
When done, Windows Sandbox will automatically be launched and the Folding@Home client will be started as seen below.

Folding@Home in the Windows Sandbox
By default, this PowerShell script will create a Folding@Home configuration file that automatically adds you to Microsoft's windows_sandbox Folding@Home team. If you want to appear as a specific name under their team, make sure you use the second PowerShell command listed above to specify a user name.

Microsoft's windows_sandbox Folding@Home team
Microsoft's PowerShell script makes it easy to get started using Folding@Home and contribute spare CPU to a great project researching the Coronavirus and other diseases.

The best part is that you can simply close the Windows Sandbox when done and no installed files will be left installed behind.

When you are ready to contribute again, you can simply launch the PowerShell script to start donating your CPU again.

WinRAR 5.90 Final Released For Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android
4.4.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

WinRAR 5.90 Final has been released with numerous performance improvements and bug fixes for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

For those not familiar with WinRar, it is an archiving software from RARLAB that supports the ARJ, BZIP2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LHA, RAR, TAR, UUE, XZ, Z, ZIP, ZIPX, 7z, 001 (split) archive formats.

WinRAR is distributed as trialware, which means that anyone can use it as a full-featured product before purchasing it.

WinRAR 5.90 offers quite a few performance improvements such as additional CPU support and a greater amount of threads. The full changelog can be read below.

1. RAR compression speed is improved for CPUs with 16 and more cores.

2. "Fastest" method (-m1 command line equivalent) typically achieves
a higher compression ratio for highly compressible data types
when creating RAR5 archives.

3. Maximum number of utilized threads is increased from 32 to 64.
Command line -mt switch accepts values from 1 to 64.

4. "Multithreading" parameter on "General" page of WinRAR settings
is replaced with "Threads" input field, where you can specify
the desired number of CPU threads. It can take values from 1 to
maximum number of available logical CPU units.

5. WinRAR displays packed and unpacked folder sizes when browsing
archive contents.

6. "Total folders" field is added to list of archive parameters
displayed by WinRAR "Info" command. Same field is added to
"Archive" page in archive properties in Windows Explorer.

7. Window including a progress bar and "Cancel" button is displayed
if reading archive contents takes noticeable time.
It can be useful for archive formats with slower access to contents,
such as large TAR based archives like .tar.gz and tar.bz2.

8. Archiving and extraction progress windows, also as progress windows
for some other commands, can be resized.

9. "Repair" performance for RAR5 archives with recovery record
and without data shifts is improved. It deteriorated in WinRAR 5.80
and is now restored to original level.

10. Password prompt is not issued when performing recovery record based
repair for RAR5 archives with encrypted file names.
This command can be performed without providing a password.

11. If folder for converted archives in "Convert archives" command
does not exist, WinRAR attempts to create it. Previous versions
failed to create converted archives in non-existent destination folder.

12. Added extraction support for GZIP archives with optional header
checksum field.

13. Bugs fixed:

a) "Repair" command could erroneously display "Recovery record is
corrupt" message when processing an archive with valid recovery
record. This message did not prevent further repair operation;

b) if quick open information option was set to "Do not add" in default
compression profile and this profile was loaded by some command
or dialog, WinRAR ignored quick open information when browsing
contents of RAR archives. For example, it happened after opening
archiving or password dialogs;

c) Ctrl+C "Copy" shortcut key did not work in archive comment window;

d) if "Put each file to separate archive" and "Archives in subfolders"
options were set, WinRAR ignored the destination path specified
in archive name field.

Grammarly is Now Available for Microsoft Word on Mac
4.4.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Grammarly has announced that its AI-driven writing assistant is now available for Mac users as an add-in for Microsoft Word.

For years, Grammarly has been available as a stand-alone product, a browser extension, and an add-in for Microsoft Word for Windows. Mac users, though, who wanted to integrate the writing assistant into Word for Mac were not able to do so.

Today, Grammarly has announced that their add-in for Word for Mac is now generally available for download.

"Grammarly for Microsoft Word has been available for some time, but until now, it was only compatible with the Windows version of Word. We heard loud and clear that you needed a Mac version, so we’ve been hard at work to make that happen. And if you’re a fan of Word Online, we’re happy to tell you that Grammarly now works there, too!," Grammarly's announcement stated.

Just like Word for Windows, the Mac add-in will display grammatical, spelling, and rewrite suggestions as you type based on the tone you wish to set for the document.

For Mac users who want to give it a try, you can download the add-in at the Grammarly for Microsoft Word and Outlook page.

Google Resumes Chrome Releases on an Adjusted Schedule
29.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer   IT

Google today announced that Chrome and Chrome OS releases will be resumed on an adjusted schedule after previously pausing them due to employees having to work from home during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Google Chrome development team is currently working remotely throughout the novel coronavirus outbreak with development efforts being focused on releasing Chrome v81, the next stable release, on April 7.

This schedule page can be checked for accurate release dates for future Google Chrome milestones — dates for M84 and beyond can still be changed at any given time.

The new release schedule is as follows:

M83 will be released three weeks earlier than previously planned and will include all M82 work as we canceled the M82 release (all channels).
Our Canary, Dev and Beta channels have or will resume this week, with M83 moving to Dev, and M81 continuing in Beta.
Our Stable channel will resume release next week with security and critical fixes in M80, followed by the release of M81 the week of April 7, and M83 ~mid-May.
We will share a future update on the timing of the M84 branch and releases.
"We continue to closely monitor that Chrome and Chrome OS are stable, secure, and work reliably," Google's blog post reads.

"We’ll keep everyone informed of any changes on our schedule on this blog and will share additional details on the schedule in the Chromium Developers group, as needed."

Chrome v82 is off the table
Google announced a week ago that they will no longer work on Chrome 82 development because of the new release schedule and will skip to Chrome 83 instead.

This is now confirmed by the Chrome milestones schedule page that only lists the 81, 83, and 84 builds, with build 82 being jumped because of COVID-19 adjustments.

After Chrome releases were paused, Google said that they will prioritize security updates that will be released as Chrome v80 updates.

"We’ll continue to prioritize any updates related to security, which will be included in Chrome 80," Google said.

Google Chrome 80.0.3987.149 was released right after the company announced the Chrome v81 delay, with security fixes for 13 high severity vulnerabilities.

Google Chrome Adding Option to Always Show Full URLs
29.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Google is working on providing Chrome users with an option to set the browser to always show full URLs for all websites they visit.

At the moment, the option to always show full URLs can only be enabled using an experimental flag on Google Chrome Canary version 83 and it can be accessed via the Omnibox context menu by Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS users.

As we'll also show below, Google has a long history of working towards hiding the protocol and of what they call trivial subdomains or special-case subdomains from the URLs displayed in Chrome's address bar.

How to reenable full URLs in Chrome Canary
Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS users who utilize Google's Chrome Canary can configure their browsers to show the full URLs for all websites using the omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls experimental flag.

The newly added flag is designed to provide Chrome Canary users with an omnibox context menu option that will prevent URL elisions aka the removal of some URL elements Google considers not important.

To do this, you have to go through the following steps:

1. Go to chrome://flags/#omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls.

2. Click the drop-down menu on the right side of the flag to select 'Enabled'

3. Restart the web browser.

Enabling the Chrome 'show full URLs' option
Afterward, you will be able to find an 'Always show full URLs' Omnibox context menu option that will tell Chrome to display the entire URL, without eliding any components.

A slimmed-down or early version of this option has already been rolled out to some users of Google Chrome version 80, as BleepingComputer was also able to confirm.

The 'Show URL' option allows them to enable full URLs on a per-page basis — the setting doesn't stick though as it will be forgotten after refreshing the page.

As it is currently being tested Google Chrome Canary version 83.0, the 'Always show full URLs' Omnibox context menu option will most likely roll out once the stable version Google Chrome will be released.

Full URL in the address bar
Out of sight, out of mind
The WWW and M subdomains together with the protocol part (e.g., HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP) of the URL were initially stripped from Chrome's address bar with the release of Chrome 69 in September 2018.

Following users' outcry opposing this change, Google reversed the decision but, once again, hid them from URLs shown in the address bar for users of Chrome 76 on desktop and Android devices.

"The Chrome team values the simplicity, usability, and security of UI surfaces," as product manager Emily Schechter said at the time.

"To make URLs easier to read and understand, and to remove distractions from the registrable domain, we will hide URL components that are irrelevant to most Chrome users," she added. "We plan to hide 'https' scheme and special-case subdomain 'www' in Chrome omnibox on desktop and Android in M76."

Google did leave in an option to have it reversed, as users were still able to enable full URLs in the Omnibox by enabling the temporary-unexpire-flags-m76 flag. However, that lasted until Chrome 79 was released as that flag was permanently removed.

Eric Lawrence 🎻
@ericlaw
TIL (Thanks Emily!) that if you have the Suspicious Site Reporter browser extension enabled, Chrome 76 doesn't hide the "https://www" at the front of the omnibox.

16
10:33 PM - Jul 31, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Eric Lawrence 🎻's other Tweets
The only way to see the full website address while using Chrome 79 or a newer version is to click twice in the address bar to edit the URL or to install Google's Suspicious Site Reporter Chrome extension.

More recently, Google has also started testing displaying the search query in the Chrome address bar instead of the actual URL of the loaded page when performing searches on Google.

This experimental feature is currently called "Query in Omnibox" and it has been available as a Google Chrome flag since Chrome 71 but it is disabled by default.

"People have a really hard time understanding URLs. They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general, I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity," Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager said in a Wired interview,

"So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them."

TeamViewer Stops Commercial Use Checks in Coronavirus-Affected Regions
29.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

TeamViewer has stated that they will stop performing checks for commercial use of their remote control product in regions heavily affected by the Coronavirus.

TeamViewer is a remote control software that is commercial organizations can purchase to offer remote support and for non-commercial, or personal, users to use for free to control their computer or help friends and family.

Even personal use of TeamViewer is meant to be for free, some users are erroneously detected as being used for commercial use.

When this happens, their sessions will be disconnected and they are prompted to purchase the program with various alerts, some comical, as shown below.
TeamViewer Commercial use detected alerts
With more people working from home, friends and family helping each other with technical issues, or some using it for commercial reasons without a license, many TeamViewer users have started to receive the dreaded "Commercial use detected" alerts.

Once they receive this alert, their TeamViewer ID is added to a bucket of users who will continue to see this message when using TeamViewer. The only way to use TeamViewer again for personal use is to submit a request to have their TeamViewer ID reset.

After reaching out to the TeamViewer, TheRegister was told that TeamViewer is stopping the checks for commercial users in regions heavily affected by the Coronavirus.

"We have stopped checking connections for commercial use in heavily affected regions like China and Italy already some weeks ago and are currently implementing that for lots of other affected countries including UK," TeamViewer told TheRegister.

In a statement to BleepingComputer, TeamViewer stated that the USA is region where commercial checks are not being conducted anymore.

"Yes, the US is also included now in the regions where we don’t check commercial use anymore to allow individuals (not commercial companies) to use TeamViewer in the current crisis situation for whatever purpose they need it," TeamViewer told BleepingComputer.

Update 3/25/20: Added TeamViewer's statement about the USA.

YouTube and Amazon Also Lowering Video Quality in Europe
22.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Following in the footsteps on Netflix, Amazon and YouTube have also agreed to lower the video streaming quality of their services to prevent European network infrastructure from becoming overburdened.

With people increasingly turning to the Internet for entertainment and information during the Coronavirus pandemic, the European Union has asked that streaming providers reduce the quality of its videos to standard definition (SD) to reduce the burden on Internet infrastructure.

"As a result of social distancing measures put in place across Europe to fight the Coronavirus pandemic, the demand for Internet capacity has increased, be it for teleworking, e-learning or entertainment purposes. This could put networks under strain at a moment when they need to be operational at the best possible level. In order to prevent congestion and to ensure the open Internet, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has called on the responsibility of streaming services, operators and users. Streaming platforms are advised to offer standard rather than high definition and to cooperate with telecom operators."

Yesterday, Netflix agreed to lower the bit rate of their streaming videos by 25% for the next 30 days.

Today, both Amazon and Google stated that they would also reduce the quality of streaming videos for their platforms as well.

"We support the need for careful management of telecom services to ensure they can handle the increased internet demand with so many people now at home full-time due to COVID-19. Prime Video is working with local authorities and Internet Service Providers where needed to help mitigate any network congestion, including in Europe where we’ve already begun the effort to reduce streaming bitrates whilst maintaining a quality streaming experience for our customers," a Prime Video spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

In a statement to Reuters, Google has also stated that they will reduce the quality of YouTube video to SD in or

"We are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default," Google told Reuters.

While Netflix has stated that they plan to reduce the quality for only 30 days, there is a good chance that this reduction in quality will last longer if necessary.

Audible Stories Give Parents a Break With Free Audio Books for Children
22.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Audible has launched a new service called Audible Stories where children and teenagers can listen to a huge selection of stories in six different languages for free.

With the launch of their new service, Audible Stories says these audiobooks will be free for as long as school is out to help continue learning and take a break from these stressful times.

"For as long as schools are closed, we're open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids," Audible Stories states on their home page,

Included in this offer is a wide range of books ranging from elementary school stories to classic stories for teenagers in high school.

Some of the books available on Audible Stories
The available audiobooks include classics such as Winnie-the-Pooh and Stone Soup for younger kids to White Fang, The Call of the Wild, Brave New World, and Roots for the older ones.

With school out, these free audiobooks come at a great time as they not only can be fun to listen to for the whole family but can also give parents a break to get some work done.

Netflix Reduces Video Quality in Europe by 25% to Lower Load
22.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Netflix is reducing the quality of its streamed shows and movies in Europe for the next 30 days to reduce congestion on Internet infrastructure.

With European countries on national lockdowns, mandated curfews, and people performing social-isolation during the pandemic, the EU commission has been concerned that the increased video streaming would overburden Internet infrastructure.

Today, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton called on streaming providers to reduce the quality of the video streams to standard definition (SD) rather than high definition (HD) to reduce the bandwidth required for streaming a show.

"As a result of social distancing measures put in place across Europe to fight the Coronavirus pandemic, the demand for Internet capacity has increased, be it for teleworking, e-learning or entertainment purposes. This could put networks under strain at a moment when they need to be operational at the best possible level. In order to prevent congestion and to ensure the open Internet, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has called on the responsibility of streaming services, operators and users. Streaming platforms are advised to offer standard rather than high definition and to cooperate with telecom operators."

After a conversation with Commissioner Thierry Breton and Reed Hastings, Netflix has agreed to reduce the bit rate on all streams in Europe by 25% for the next 30 days.

"Following the discussions between Commissioner Thierry Breton and Reed Hastings - and given the extraordinary challenges raised by the coronavirus - Netflix has decided to begin reducing bit rates across all our streams in Europe for 30 days. We estimate that this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25 percent while also ensuring a good quality service for our members", Netflix told BleepingComputer.

BleepingComputer has also contacted other streaming providers such as Hulu and Amazon to see if they would reduce their bit rate but have not heard back at this time.

Microsoft Teams Reaches 44M Daily Users After 12M Weekly Gain
22.3.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Microsoft announced today that its Teams collaboration service experienced a huge usage spike with 12 million new daily active users being added within the last seven days, bringing the total to 44 million.

The newly added Microsoft Teams users are already behind more than 900 million call and meeting minutes each day during the last week.

"It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak," Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said.

"We are committed to building the tools that help organizations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart."

Microsoft Teams which is part of Microsoft's Office 365 enterprise subscription services was launched in November 2016 as a direct competitor to Slack's instant messaging platform.

Slack reported in October 2019 that it has reached over 12 million daily active users, lagging behind the 13 million users reported by Microsoft earlier, in July 2019 — Teams reached 20 million daily active users in November 2019.

Microsoft
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@Microsoft
Microsoft Teams' 44 million users have generated more than 900 million meeting minutes every day this week. As organizations adapt to remote work, we're helping users stay connected. https://msft.it/6005TdOZc

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Tens of thousands of users from hundreds of orgs
20 Microsoft Teams customers including Ernst & Young, SAP, Pfizer, and Continental AG currently have over 100,000 employees using the service on a daily basis, while Accenture has also added has 440,000 additional Teams users.

At the moment, employees from 93 Fortune 100 companies are using Microsoft's Teams service, while more than 650,000 other organizations have more than 10,000 Teams users in their ranks.

Microsoft says that only intentional actions like replying to messages, joining meetings, or opening files made by users on their desktop, mobile, or web Teams clients are taken into consideration when counting the number of active users.

Interactions such as minimizing the Microsoft Teams client or closing the application do not automatically tag the user as being active.

Image: Microsoft
New features rolling out
Microsoft also announced that new features are rolling out to Microsoft Teams users including automatic real-time noise suppression to reduce background noise during meetings.

Microsoft Teams users will also get support for offline and low-bandwidth usage making it possible to read messages even when using it without an Internet connection and in low-bandwidth network environments.

"Teams users will now be able to open Teams even when no network is available," Microsoft says. "You will be able to create and read messages, browse previously viewed channels, and to view calendar summaries."

"If conditions are too poor to send a message, Teams will notify users of this and then save the message until the user has returned to a functioning network. This functionality is coming to Teams in the next few weeks."

Raise hands feature (Microsoft)
Users will also be able to draw attention while in Teams meetings using a new "raising hands" feature that makes it easy to actively take part in large meetings.

"Everyone will see a visual cue on the attendee’s video feed, as well as in the participant list, and can be sure to give them the room to participate in the conversation at hand," Microsoft adds.

The number of members in individual teams will also be raised from 5,000 to 10,000 users during the incoming updates in the next few weeks, just as the number of people being able to join a group chat which can now accommodate up to 250 users.

Microsoft Teams goes free, outage issues
Microsoft also announced earlier this month that Microsoft Teams will be free during the next six months to help orgs' to move towards a remote workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"At Microsoft, the health and safety of employees, customers, partners and communities is our top priority," Microsoft EVP and President JP Courtois said. "By making Teams available to all for free for six months, we hope that we can support public health and safety by making remote work even easier."

At the start of this week, Microsoft Team also experienced an outage caused by the huge influx of new users, affecting both EU and US users on March 16 and March 17, with reports mentioning messages not being sent, the admin portal being unreliable, and team member management not working properly.

Microsoft 365 Status
@MSFT365Status
We're investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams. Please refer to TM206544 in your admin center for further details. ^JP

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9:50 AM - Mar 16, 2020
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Microsoft resolved the on March 17 and determined that it was a caching issue within one of Microsoft Teams infrastructure's components.

The company is also currently working on scaling down select non-essential Office 365 capabilities in response to increased demand and the increasing number of new Microsoft 365 customers.

"Microsoft is actively monitoring performance and usage trends to ensure we're optimizing service for our customers worldwide, and accommodating new growth and demand," a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

"At the same time, these are unprecedented times and we’re also looking at what steps we can take to proactively prepare for these high-usage periods."