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At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced Defender Cloud Security Posture Management and Defender for DevOps, two new offerings within the company’s Defender for Cloud service (previously Azure Defender) aimed at managing software development and runtime security across multicloud, multiple-pipeline environments. Currently available in public preview, they work with GitHub and Azure DevOps to start, with additional product integrations to come down the line. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Microsoft CVP of cloud security Shawn Bice said that Defender for DevOps and Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (or Defender CSPM, to refer to it by its more wieldy acronym) arose from the challenges companies are increasingly facing as they use cloud-native services to deploy and manage applications. These customers often have incomplete visibility and a lack of prioritized mitigations, he said, making their security reactive as opposed to proactive. There’s truth to that. According to a 2020 report from Orca Security, 59% of cybersecurity teams report receiving more than 500 alerts about cloud security per day — a large portion of which are false positives. Tool sprawl is often cited as a challenge in maintaining code security. Responding to a GitLab survey from August, 41% of DevOps teams said that they used between six to 10 tools in their development toolchains, leading them to miss security issues. “The accelerated cloud transformation journey for our customers has created an urgent need for a unified solution to manage security from development to runtime in multicloud and multiple pipeline environments,” Bice said via email. Image Credits: Microsoft To this end, Defender CSPM leverages AI algorithms to perform contextual risk analyses of software dev environments. Resulting recommendations and insights are piped into source code management platforms like GitHub and Azure DevOps to drive remediation efforts; alternatively, users can create workflows connected to security recommendations to trigger automated remediation. Defender CSPM also provides “attack queries” that security teams can use to explore risk and threat data, as well as a dashboard showing all the rules implemented across dev environments and tools that allow security admins to define new rules.

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a whole bunch of updates for Windows 10 users. These updates also included KB5000802 cumulative update that caused PCs to crash with 'APC_INDEX_MISMATCH' BSOD error when trying to use printers. Yesterday, Microsoft acknowledged the issue and confirmed that the company was working on a fix for the problem. Now, it has updated the Windows Health status page to include a temporary workaround for the problem. According to Microsoft, the bug affects a subset of Type 3 printer drivers and does not affect Type 4 printers. As such, the company has shared a video for users to follow and fix the issue temporarily. If you are unsure about the type of printer drivers you have, you can follow the steps below to check it: REad More Here

Microsoft is almost as keen to kill off Legacy Edge, Windows 10's original great browser hope, as it is to stomp on the ancient Internet Explorer – because it looks like it'll be sticking around on the Surface Hub. Ostensibly a celebration of the fact that the Windows 10 Team 2020 update would finally go worldwide (for Surface Hub 2S devices at least) on 23 February, the announcement seemed to hold hope for users still clinging to the obsolete browser. Earlier this month the company warned Windows 10 users that Legacy Edge would drop out of support in March and eventually be stripped from the operating system in favour of Chromium Edge as part of the April update. Although the company insisted that "Microsoft Edge Legacy will no longer be on devices" after the update is applied, the rendering engine behind the scenes – EdgeHTML – will linger on. It seems that users of Microsoft's fancy whiteboard will be given a little extra time with the browser. While users are encouraged to install Chromium Edge, "the Microsoft Edge Legacy browser will remain the default browser on Surface Hubs until its replacement in a future update More Here

oday, Microsoft announced its next big Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, which means that they're supported for longer. Both Office and Windows 10 are typically on the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC), which gets feature updates every six months. LTSC releases come every few years. Essentially, both Office and Windows 10 are getting their LTSC releases later on this year. That's what it all adds up to, so for Windows 10, it's going to be the 21H2 release of the OS. There's also a new perpetual license version of Office coming, something that we've known since September, but now we know that it's going to be called Office 2021. The difference with a perpetual license version is that if you buy Office 2021, you own it forever, as opposed to a subscription model where you lose it if you stop paying. Of course, with Office 2021, you don't get new features over time. Office 2021 replaces Office 2019, and it's the first time that the name has increased by any amount of years instead of three in about a decade and a half. Read More Here

A group of high profile tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMWare have filed an amicus brief in support of Facebook’s legal action against NSO Group, Microsoft has announced. Facebook-owned WhatsApp sued the spyware vendor last year, alleging that its software was used to hack 1,400 devices via a vulnerability in the messaging service. Other companies listed on the filing include the Internet Association, and Microsoft subsidiaries GitHub and LinkedIn. In response to Facebook’s lawsuit last year, NSO Group has argued it should benefit from “sovereign immunity,” Reuters reports, because it sells its tools to foreign governments. However, in July a judge denied its request to dismiss the lawsuit. Now NSO Group is appealing to overturn the ruling, and it’s this appeal attempt that Microsoft and others are pushing back against. Read More Here