Whatsapp has had a tough year from a security standpoint and has suffered losses in the size of its user base as a result.

To their credit, the company has been working hard to make their product more secure.

Recently they took another powerful step in that direction with the introduction of disappearing messages. These allow you to set a time delay that will cause your conversations with other users to have a pre-defined shelf life of either 24 hours or 90 days at your option.

This builds on the disappearing messages feature the company introduced last year which allowed users or admins to set messages to disappear after seven days.

The company had this to say about the recent changes:

“When enabled, all new one-on-one chats you or another person start will be set to disappear at your chosen duration, and we’ve added a new option when creating a group chat that lets you turn it on for groups you create.  This new feature is optional and does not change or delete any of your existing chats.

For people who choose to switch on default disappearing messages, we will display a message in your chats that tells people this is the default you’ve chosen.

This makes clear it’s nothing personal – it’s a choice you’ve made about how you want to communicate with everyone on WhatsApp moving forward.

We believe disappearing messages along with end-to-end encryption are two crucial features that define what it means to be a private messaging service today, and bring us one step closer to the feeling of an in-personal conversation.”

These are good changes and they do indeed serve to mitigate the risks of Whatsapp users.  Kudos to the company for continuing to improve their product and make it more secure.

Cox Communications is a major provider of cable, internet, and phone service in the United States.  The company is the latest in a seemingly unending parade of companies to fall victim to a hacking attack. In this case, the hacker gained access to company servers by impersonating a member of Cox Communication’s Customer Support team.  At this point details are sketchy as the investigation into the matter is ongoing.

The company’s breach notification statement reads:

“On October 11, 2021, Cox learned that an unknown person(s) had impersonated a Cox agent and gained access to a small number of customer accounts. We immediately launched an internal investigation, took steps to secure the affected customer accounts, and notified law enforcement of the incident.

After further investigation, we discover that the unknown person(s) may have viewed certain types of information that are maintained in your Cox customer account, including your name, address, telephone number, Cox account number, Cox.net email address, username, PIN code, account security question and answer, and/or the types of services that you receive from Cox.”

At this point the exact number of records the hacker gained access to is not known. However given the above if you are a Cox customer you should change your password and security question(s) at a minimum.

Although payment card information associated with impacted accounts was not specifically mentioned it pays to closely monitor whatever payment cards you have tied to your Cox account just to be safe.

It is also worth mentioning that the company is in the process of contacting impacted customers and has offered one free year of Experian Identity Works. The program can help monitor credit reports and detect signs of fraudulent activity.

We wish we could say that this will be the last major breach of the year but sadly it almost certainly won’t be.  Stay vigilant.  It’s dangerous out there.

Apple Wallet just got a powerful new feature that’s sure to make it more attractive to busy travelers. Thanks to an agreement with Hyatt your Apple Wallet is now capable of serving as a digital hotel key.

This counts as a promise kept. At the 2021 WWDC Apple promised that it would be adding digital hotel key functionality to its wallet app.

Although it took some time to hammer out the details of an agreement Hyatt is the first hotel to embrace the idea.

If your iPhone is running iOS 15 or later or if you’ve got an Apple Watch running WatchOS 8 or above you’ll be able to use it. You will select the key on your device hold it near the built-in sensor on the hotel room door and gain entry just as though you used a conventional room key card.

What’s even better is that keys can be added before your arrival at the hotel so all you’ll need to do is walk up to the front desk to get them activated. Best of all is the keys support alterations after the fact so if there was a problem with your reservation and you need a different room assignment all of that is easy to deal with.

At present the digital keys are only available at a limited number of Hyatt locations. However the company is excited to expand their portfolio and is hoping to develop a global digital key footprint in the months ahead.

Meanwhile Apple is busy making arrangements with other hotel chains and is currently working with a number of governmental agencies (starting in the US) to make digital government IDs a reality.

All of this is very good news that will radically expand the number of use cases for the Apple Wallet and that is fantastic news for anyone who’s a part of the massive Apple ecosystem.

Emotet is one of the most feared malware strains circulating right now. The team behind it has managed to infect a staggering array of targets all around the globe. To say that it is a major threat would be an understatement. Recently the group behind Emotet just upped the ante even further. Researchers have recently discovered that the malware is now being distributed via a new channel.

The new channel is a malicious Windows App Installer that appears to be an innocuous Adobe PDF reader. Windows App Installer is a built-in feature of both Windows 10 and 11 and systems can be infected by “tricking” users to click attachments in emails which trigger the App Installer.

Emotet’s preferred methodology revolves around a “conversation in progress” approach. An email is crafted that already has several replies. So at a glance it appears that the recipient and whomever sent this email have already been conversing about something. The “most recent” reply says some variation of “please see attached” and contains a PDF file.

When the recipient clicks the file the built in App Installer is triggered and the malware is installed. Note that this completely bypasses most malware and AV software because the recipient is making a conscious decision to open the file in question.

The campaign is amazingly well put together. The attachment and subsequent prompts appear to be legitimate Adobe Acrobat components right down to sporting an official company icon and a certificate marking it as a trusted application. So there’s no reason for a user to think that there’s anything amiss unless they look more closely at the email containing the attachment.

That’s exactly what the hackers are counting on. They know that people are busy and may only give the body of the email a cursory glance before clicking to see what all the fuss was about.

As ever vigilance and mindfulness are the keys to avoiding these types of shenanigans.

Microsoft is making a few UI changes across its entire product line in anticipation of rolling out Windows 11. Early this year (2021) the company announced that they were updating the UI for Office 365 and Office 2021.

Over the summer small groups of users participated in an open beta and began playing with the updated versions of those app suites.

Now the company is ready for the big reveal and is rolling the new UI out to all Office 365 and Officer 2021 users. The changes don’t add anything in the way of new functionality but offer a different look and feel that brings the ubiquitous office suite into aesthetic alignment with what’s planned for Windows 11.

If you haven’t already started to see the changes you will soon. Primarily you’ll notice that icons and menu buttons have a softer more rounded appearance in keeping with the company’s slowly evolving aesthetic. Also note that the update will “remember” if you selected the light or dark theme you set inside Windows and your office suite will match that selection.

Users can toggle the new look on or off via the “megaphone” icon visible in the right-hand corner of Word Excel PowerPoint and OneNote. All Windows 11 users should see it the next time they open any of those apps.

Similar changes are planned for the Web and Mobile versions of the office suite. However, shifting those versions of the suite into alignment with what’s planned for Windows 11 is a significantly larger project that the company says will take at least another year to complete and possibly closer to two.

In the end though Windows will offer a single seamless aesthetic across its products which should improve and enhance the overall user experience and that’s good stuff.

Recently Twitter’s CEO stepped down. Since then, the company has been gearing up to make some changes that many of the industry’s insiders regard as long overdue.

The first of these changes has now been rolled out with the company modifying its privacy policy and outlining new rules related to the sharing of pictures and videos. The company explained the change and the rationale behind it in a recent blog post.

Their recent blog post reads in part as follows:

“Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm.

The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities. When we receive a report that a Tweet contains unauthorized private media, we will now take action in line with our range of enforcement options.”

The company does understand that sometimes users may share photos and/or videos in a bid to help a third party in a crisis and their new policy does include some provisions to try and assess those on a case-by-case basis.

In the same blog post the company had this to say about cases like that:

“In such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service.

For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest or is relevant to the community.”

These are good changes overall. It will be interesting to see the early results of the company’s case-by-case assessment where those exceptions are concerned. In any case kudos to Twitter for taking some important steps in the right direction.

Most people have a home network these days which connects their computers and tablets, allows them to stream video from their Smart TVs, and surf the web from their phones using their home network rather than their cellphone’s data plan.

If you have a home network then you should keep reading. Recently security researchers tested nine of the most popular WiFi routers on the market today and found a staggering 226 security flaws even on routers that were running the latest firmware.

The routers tested are offered by some of the biggest names in the industry including D-Link, Netgear, Asus, AVM, Edimax, TP-Link, Linksys, and Synology. These are used by millions of people around the world. In terms of total numbers the worst offender was TP-Link’s Archer AX6000 router which was found to have 32 security issues. The Synology RT-2600AC was right behind it with 30 security flaws ripe for exploitation.

The research was conducted by IoT Inspector in collaboration with CHIP magazine and the group focused specifically on models popular with home and small business users.

Florian Lukavsky Founder of IoT Inspector had this to say about the project:

“For Chip’s router evaluation, vendors provided them with current models, which were upgrade to the latest firmware version. The firmware versions were automatically analyzed by IoT Inspector and checked for more than 5,000 CVEs and other security issues.”

Although a broad range of issues were discovered in the routers tested broadly speaking they fell into several common categories.

The most common issues included:

• Outdated Linux kernel in the firmware
• Outdated multimedia and VPN functions
• Over-reliance on older versions of BusyBox
• Use of weak default passwords like “admin”
• And the presence of hardcoded credentials in plain text form

Whatever model you purchased the two biggest and best things you can do to make your router more secure are changing the password on first use and enabling automatic updates.  It’s by no means a perfect solution but it will go a long way toward minimizing your risk.

Microsoft has had a long and interesting relationship with its venerable “Paint” app.

Most people are familiar with Paint. It’s been around since the earliest versions of Windows and let’s be honest it was never a great application.

It allows users to do the basics but it was quickly eclipsed by more robust and feature-rich programs.

How many people would make the claim that Paint stacks up well against Photoshop, GIMP, or Paintshop Pro? Very few indeed.

Nonetheless Paint has a loyal and vocal following. Microsoft found that out not long ago when they retired the app temporarily while replacing it with the new Paint 3D. This led to a near-rebellion against Microsoft and Paint’s supporters were so insistent that the app be brought out of retirement that the company bowed to the wishes of its customers. The company left open the possibility that they may retire it once and for all at some later date.

Microsoft seems to have changed their collective minds because recently Paint got an overhaul that gives it a new aesthetic in line with the new sleeker look of Windows 11. The changes amount to tweaks to the UI rather than a major upgrade to functionality and Microsoft is billing it as a “modern spin on the classic app.”

Paint fans should be pleased. The recent change underscores the company’s commitment to keeping the app alive even if it is no longer as an integrated component of Windows but as a free app available on the Microsoft store.

Overall it’s very good news. It costs Microsoft very little to keep the app around even given the modest expense associated with updating the UI. It keeps a small but vocal segment of their user base happy. That sounds like a win for everyone.

It’s no real secret that Microsoft has never been a big fan of Chrome, FireFox, or any other web browser that it didn’t build.  The company clearly hasn’t gotten over the fact that it lost the browser wars and lost them handily. That’s why it keeps trying periodically to reinvent the wheel offering up new and improved versions first of its “Internet Explorer” browser and more recently of Microsoft Edge.

The latest incarnation of Edge is interesting in that it was built around Chromium. That means under the hood the new Edge and Google’s Chrome browser sport the same basic technology.

Unfortunately, even that hasn’t been enough to keep users from downloading Chrome. Naturally Microsoft wants to do anything that it can in a bid to keep users browsing via the browser that ships with Windows. The company has begun bombarding users with messages when they try to download Google Chrome.

There are a few different prompts a user may see including:

• “‘I hate saving money,’ said no one ever. Microsoft Edge is the best browser for online shopping.”
• “That browser is so 2008! Do you know what’s new?  Microsoft Edge.”
• “Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft.”

The new prompts are appearing mostly for Windows 11 users though some Windows 10 users have reported them as well. They aren’t part of any website but rather are generated from inside Microsoft Edge as a kind of “defense mechanism” to guard against being replaced.

This kind of thing verges on being dirty pool and although Google hasn’t issued any kind of formal response you can bet that one will be coming. Google isn’t the kind of company that will take a direct threat to its browser dominance lying down so the months ahead should be interesting indeed.