Displaying items by tag: secure boot

Microsoft has addressed 147 CVEs in its Patch Tuesday release for April, including three critical vulnerabilities.

A US Government initiative to implement a cyber security certification and labelling program from 2024 named Cyber Trust Mark has been roundly criticised by security industry veteran Robert Graham.

The community Linux distribution, Debian, has released a new stable version over the weekend, with version 12, otherwise known as Bookworm, emerging after a year and nine months of development.

Microsoft has issued patches for 38 vulnerabilities, including three zero-days, in its Patch Tuesday fixes for May. Seven of these fixes are rated critical, with the other 31 rated as important.

Global PC vendor Lenovo has fixed two vulnerabilities in some of its laptop models that could lead to a disabling of secure boot, thus exposing a user to the injection of malicious code at boot time.

Researchers at security firm Eclypsium have discovered a means whereby malicious code can be inserted during the boot-up process on a device running Linux, due to a flaw in the bootloader used: the grand unified bootloader otherwise known as GRUB, now in its second version.

The Debian GNU/Linux Project has released version 10 of its community Linux distribution, with Buster, as the release is named, having hit the download servers after 25 months of development.

Slovakian security firm ESET has discovered an UEFI rootkit in the wild, a first of sorts, with the company saying this showed that such a rootkit was a real threat, not some conference topic.

Microsoft's secure boot fiasco has shown one thing: while the company makes a big show about standing up to government on behalf of its customers, in reality it is more than willing to fall in line and create backdoors for law enforcement.

Two researchers have cracked Microsoft's secure boot technology, finding a so-called golden key that was protecting the feature.

Today I paid the Microsoft tax. I needed to get secure boot back working on my test PC and without a new graphics card, that has been certified as being Windows 8 ready, it is not possible to have this feature working.

Windows 10 will turn off secure boot when one upgrades from Windows 8/8.1 unless a graphics card that has the Windows 8 ready logo is present in the system.

Linux companies Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical will benefit from the decision by Microsoft to suggest that OEMs not provide a means of turning off secure boot on PCs running Windows 10.

Microsoft has indicated that its internal culture remains the same and its philosophy has not changed one whit: its strategy of embrace, extend and extinguish is still its guiding principle.

Microsoft will leave the option of including a switch to turn off secure boot in computers that are loaded with Windows 10 up to the manufacturer, leaving open the possibility of locking out users of alternate operating systems.

The Free Software Foundation has given an annual award this year for work that enslaves people to the demands of Microsoft – something that flies in the face of all that the organisation has stood for since its founding.

Is Microsoft finally resigned to the fact that Windows can never again be the dominant operating system on our planet? Or is the behemoth planning to make one final attempt to control what you use?