Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 customers still represent a large group, as Microsoft has announced an additional year of Extended Security Updates (ESU) with a caveat. Only available for Microsoft Azure customers, the ESU program will allow Windows Server 2008 and R2 users on Azure cloud to get security updates until January 9, 2024. By no means is this not a free program, and Microsoft will bill this extensively as it is available internationally. Many customers are forced to join the ESU program for their Windows Server 2008 and R2 systems, as upgrading the OS to the latest version is not always possible without significant downtime or a hardware update.

The following customer base has legibility to the fourth year of the ESU program:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
• Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
• Windows Embedded POSReady 7
• Windows Embedded Standard 7
• All Azure virtual machines (VMs) running Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems on Azure, Azure Stack, Azure VMWare Solutions, or Azure Nutanix Solution.

On Day 2 of Intel Innovation, Intel illustrated how its efforts and investments to foster an open ecosystem catalyze community innovation, from silicon to systems to apps and across all levels of the software stack. Through an expanding array of platforms, tools and solutions, Intel is focused on helping developers become more productive and more capable of realizing their potential for positive social good. The company introduced new tools to support developers in artificial intelligence, security and quantum computing, and announced the first customers of its new Project Amber attestation service.

"We are making good on our software-first strategy by empowering an open ecosystem that will enable us to collectively and continuously innovate," said Intel Chief Technology Officer Greg Lavender. "We are committed members of the developer community and our breadth and depth of hardware and software assets facilitate the scaling of opportunities for all through co-innovation and collaboration."

p-Chip Corporation, a company that is revolutionizing the tracking of physical products and materials with its cutting-edge microtransponder technology, today introduced its newest breakthrough, the p-Chip Code secure tracking tag. The p-Chip Code tracker combines a silicon-based p-Chip microtransponder with a standard 2D matrix code to create hyper-secure QR codes, bar codes and other matrix codes.

"The pandemic brought widespread QR code use into the center of the consumer mainstream," said Joe Wagner, CEO of p-Chip Corporation. "But for many businesses, including food brands, pharmaceutical companies, automobile manufacturers and others, QR codes pose a host of potential security risks, since they are incredibly easy to create and replicate. The new p-Chip Code technology provides an additional layer of security for QR codes or other matrix codes, delivering a breakthrough in reliable traceability at an affordable price."

Marvell today unveiled its LiquidSecurity 2 (LS2) hardware security module (HSM) adapter, the industry's most advanced solution for enabling encryption, key management, authentication and other HSM services in the cloud. LS2 is a converged security platform for payment, privacy compliance, and general purpose applications, and is powered by a cloud-optimized Marvell OCTEON data processing unit (DPU), proven at scale across the world's largest hyperscale clouds. The new Marvell HSM adapter offers the industry's highest performing cryptographic acceleration and processing, including hardware-secured storage of up to one million keys for AES, RSA and ECC encryption algorithms, and 45 partitions for robust multi-tenant use cases.

As enterprises migrate from on-premises to private- or multi-cloud environments, the industry-leading Marvell LiquidSecurity platform empowers cloud service providers and large enterprises to create HSM-as-a-service clouds. Marvell's HSM adapters have the latest FIPS-certified security boundary, designed for the most demanding applications deployed at cloud-scale while offering best-in-class cost, performance and energy efficiency for both public and private clouds.

MSI, a world leader in high-performance and innovative computing solutions, announced its brand new software application - MSI Cloud Center. It is designed to be fast, and convenient to securely back up & download files between your PC, Android, and iOS mobile devices. It provides you a private cloud to help backup your photos, videos, and any files on your smartphone to the selected MSI All-in-One PC or desktop. The MSI Cloud Center is designed with efficiency and productivity in mind.

Have you ever received a message which shows that your cloud storage space is nearly full? You will have to either clean your cloud storage or pay for more storage. With the MSI Cloud Center, you don't have to pay an extra fee to enjoy its convenient design on your MSI All-in-One PC or the selected desktop. The MSI Cloud Center allows users to backup and downloads photos, videos, and any other files between the Android or iOS devices and the selected MSI All-in-One PC or desktop.

The x86 CPU family has been vulnerable to many attacks in recent years. With the arrival of Spectre and Meltdown, we have seen side-channel attacks overtake both AMD and Intel designs. However, today we find out that researchers are capable of exploiting Intel's latest 10th, 11th, and 12th generation Core processors with a new CPU bug called ÆPIC Leak. Named after Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that handles interrupt requests to regulate multiprocessing, the leak is claimeing to be the first "CPU bug able to architecturally disclose sensitive data." Researchers Pietro Borrello (Sapienza University of Rome), Andreas Kogler (Graz Institute of Technology), Martin Schwarzl (Graz), Moritz Lipp (Amazon Web Services), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology), and Michael Schwarz (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security) discovered this flaw in Intel processors.

ÆPIC Leak is the first CPU bug able to architecturally disclose sensitive data. It leverages a vulnerability in recent Intel CPUs to leak secrets from the processor itself: on most 10th, 11th and 12th generation Intel CPUs the APIC MMIO undefined range incorrectly returns stale data from the cache hierarchy. In contrast to transient execution attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, ÆPIC Leak is an architectural bug: the sensitive data gets directly disclosed without relying on any (noisy) side channel. ÆPIC Leak is like an uninitialized memory read in the CPU itself.

A privileged attacker (Administrator or root) is required to access APIC MMIO. Thus, most systems are safe from ÆPIC Leak. However, systems relying on SGX to protect data from privileged attackers would be at risk, thus, have to be patched.

EnGenius Technologies, a leading global manufacturer of networking and voice communications for more than 20 years, has released its first ever security gateway product line—that crucial first line of defense for business networks—bringing unparalleled simplicity, faster speed, enterprise features, enhanced security, and greater cloud management from anywhere. The EnGenius security gateway (ESG) series will consist of three sequential gateway models, beginning with the launch of the ESG510. The ESG series will work seamlessly with any third-party vendor network—all without the complex setup and configuration that plague other gateways.

"We are pleased to announce the launch of our company's very first cloud-managed security gateway. Most security gateways are complicated, but the EnGenius security gateway isn't. Our goal is to make installations easier and insights clearer," said M. C. Leo, general manager at EnGenius Technologies. "The gateway offers the horsepower and feature set to handle any business network of any size. The bottom line is an end-to-end cloud-managed solution that makes installation, configuration, and monitoring a snap."

Apple M1 chips are a part of the Apple Silicon family that represents a new transition to Arm-based cores with new power and performance targets for Apple devices. A portion of building a processor is designing its security enclave, and today we have evidence that M1 processors got a new vulnerability. The PACMAN is a hardware attack that can bypass Pointer Authentication (PAC) on M1 processors. Security researchers took an existing concept of Spectre and its application in the x86 realm and now applied it to the Arm-based Apple silicon. PACMAN exploits a current software bug to perform pointer authentication bypass, which may lead to arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability is a hardware/software co-design that exploits microarchitectural construction to execute arbitrary codes. PACMAN creates a PAC Oracle to check if a specific pointer matches its authentication. It must never crash if an incorrect guess is supplied and the attack brute-forces all the possible PAC values using the PAC Oracle. To suppress crashes, PAC Oracles are delivered speculatively. And to learn if the PAC value was correct, researchers used uArch side channeling. In the CPU resides translation lookaside buffers (TLBs), where PACMAN tries to load the pointer speculatively and verify success using the prime+probe technique. TLBs are filled with minimal addresses required to supply a particular TLB section. If any address is evicted from the TLB, it is likely a load success, and the bug can take over with a falsely authenticated memory address.

At RSA Conference this week in San Francisco, Intel reinforced its commitment to security. At the event, leaders from Intel and its ecosystem partners came together to discuss how the company is addressing some of the toughest security challenges, including hybrid workforces and an increase in connected devices. Intel's approach remains steadfast, investing in unparalleled people, processes and products to deliver security without sacrificing performance.

As the cyber and network security landscapes continue to grow and evolve, Intel's goal is to stay one step ahead by driving innovation across products and research to help build strong security communities both internally and externally. Intel's 2021 Product Security Report noted that 93% of vulnerabilities addressed in Intel products were a direct result of Intel's proactive investment in security assurance. Security begins with Intel, and every component in the system—from software to silicon and network to edge—plays its part to help secure data.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced the release of its latest encrypted USB drive, IronKey Vault Privacy 50 (VP50) with FIPS 197 certification and AES 256-bit hardware-encryption in XTS mode for data security. Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 50 supports Admin, User, and One-Time Recovery passwords with Complex or Passphrase modes. This multi-password option enhances the ability to recover access to data on the drive should one of the passwords be forgotten. While traditional Complex mode allows for passwords from 6-16 characters using 3 out of 4 character sets, the new passphrase mode gives users the ability to have a numeric PIN, sentence, list of words, or even lyrics from 10 to 64 characters long that's unique, yet memorable to them. To aid in password entry, the "eye" symbol can be enabled to reveal the typed-in password to reduce failed login attempts.

Admin can also enable a User and a One-Time Recovery password or reset the User password to restore data access. In addition, VP50 protects against Brute Force attacks by locking out User or One-Time Recovery passwords upon 10 invalid entries in a row and crypto-erases the drive if the Admin password is entered incorrectly 10 times in a row. So, while data is lost, there's no fear of a breach.

AMD today announced new Confidential virtual machines (VMs) on the existing the N2D and C2D VMs on Google Cloud, all powered by AMD EPYC processors. These VMs extend the AMD EPYC processor portfolio of Confidential Computing on Google Cloud with the performance of 3rd Gen EPYC processors in compute-optimized VMs.

A key Confidential Computing component provided by AMD EPYC processors is AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), part of AMD Infinity Guard. This advanced hardware-based security feature encrypts full system memory and individual virtual machine memory as well as isolating the VM memory from the hypervisor, without dramatically impacting performance. With the expansion of Confidential Computing in N2D and C2D VMs, Google Cloud customers now have access to advanced hardware enabled security features powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors that will help protect sensitive, wide-variety workloads.

In a joint effort to make the web more secure and usable for all, Apple, Google and Microsoft today announced plans to expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. The new capability will allow websites and apps to offer consistent, secure, and easy passwordless sign-ins to consumers across devices and platforms. Password-only authentication is one of the biggest security problems on the web, and managing so many passwords is cumbersome for consumers, which often leads consumers to reuse the same ones across services. This practice can lead to costly account takeovers, data breaches, and even stolen identities. While password managers and legacy forms of two-factor authentication offer incremental improvements, there has been industry-wide collaboration to create sign-in technology that is more convenient and more secure.

The expanded standards-based capabilities will give websites and apps the ability to offer an end-to-end passwordless option. Users will sign in through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices, such as a simple verification of their fingerprint or face, or a device PIN. This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, is advising consumers and businesses to retire a whole range of D-Link routers, due to the devices being EOL. This is due to a severe vulnerability that affects the devices that goes under the CVE-ID of CVE-2021-45382. This is a remote command execution (RCE) vulnerability and it's not likely to get patched by D-Link and is considered serious enough that these devices should be taken offline post-haste. The vulnerability would allow an attacker to take over these devices using "diagnostic hooks" in the ncc2 service, which is tied to the DDNS function and would allow an attacker to gain full access by injecting malicious code.

Proof of concept code already exists on GitHub, which makes the likelihood of this attack vector being used even more likely. The known affected devices so far are the D-Link DIR-810L, DIR-820L/LW, DIR-826L, DIR-830L, and DIR-836L and all hardware revisions are affected. Most of these routers were released around 2012 to 2014 and are either 802.11n or 802.11ac devices based on what appears to be Realtek or Ralink (now MediaTek) hardware. These aren't the only devices that CISA has given advice on recently, as the D-Link DIR-610 and DIR-645, as well as the Netgear DGN2200 are also devices that CISA recommends retirement for.

Microsoft is giving final touches to a what it refers to as a groundbreaking new security feature update for the Windows 11 operating system, which should significantly improve application-level security, and safeguard you from malicious apps based on the way they behave. Trouble is, to use the feature, you will have to reinstall your operating system (i.e. a clean reinstall), if you're on the current release of Windows 11, or any build that's older than the one that carries this update.

The Smart App Control feature by default blocks untrusted or uncertified applications from running on your PC, and unlike browser-level protections such as Smart Screen, is baked directly into the OS, and monitors application code at a process level, to detect potentially malicious application behavior. It does this using a combination of code-signing by the application publisher and an AI model for trust within the Microsoft cloud. The OS keeps in touch with the cloud 24x7 (whenever the PC is up), to receive the latest threat intelligence and AI model updates from the cloud. It's very likely that Smart App Control will be part of the next significant version milestone of Windows 11 (such as "22H2"), which means everyone on 22H1 or older will be made to reinstall to use it.

Last week, NVIDIA systems were compromised by the attack of a hacking group called LAPSUS$. It has been a few days since the attack happened, and we managed to see source code of various software leaks through third-party anonymous tipsters and next-generation GPU codenames making an appearance. Today, NVIDIA issues a statement for the German PC enthusiast website Hardwareluxx, and we manage to see it below fully. The key takeaway from this quote is that NVIDIA believes that the compromised files will not impact the company's business in any meaningful manner, and operations continue as usual for NVIDIA's customers. The company's security team is analyzing the situation, and you can check out the complete statement below.

NVIDIA StatementOn February 23, 2022, NVIDIA became aware of a cybersecurity incident which impacted IT resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further hardened our network, engaged cybersecurity incident response experts, and notified law enforcement.

We have no evidence of ransomware being deployed on the NVIDIA environment or that this is related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, we are aware that the threat actor took employee credentials and some NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online. Our team is working to analyze that information. We do not anticipate any disruption to our business or our ability to serve our customers as a result of the incident.

Security is a continuous process that we take very seriously at NVIDIA - and we invest in the protection and quality of our code and products daily.

CyberLink Corp. a pioneer of AI and facial recognition technologies, will showcase several new, cutting-edge applications of its market-leading solution, FaceMe, at CES 2022 in Las Vegas. Learn how FaceMe can be deployed across use cases covering security, access control, health & safety, contactless payment, identity verification, visitor analytics, and more at booth #9543, North Hall, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, January 4-8, 2022.

FaceMe offers a broad and growing set of features and tools powered by CyberLink's highly ranked AI facial recognition engine. It is at the forefront of biometric solutions with innovation that pushes standards for accuracy, performance, security, and flexibility across a wide range of industries. Since the launch of FaceMe in late 2018, CyberLink has collaborated with over a hundred global partners, including hardware makers, solution providers, and system integrators, deploying its technology across multiple scenarios.

AMD EPYC class of enterprise processors has gotten infected by as many as 22 different security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities range anywhere from medium to high severity, affecting all three generations of AMD EPYC processors. This includes AMD Naples, Rome, and Milan generations, where almost all three are concerned with the whole 22 exploits. There are a few exceptions, and you can find that on AMD's website. However, not all seems to be bad. AMD says that "During security reviews in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, potential vulnerabilities in the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP), AMD System Management Unit (SMU), AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and other platform components were discovered and have been mitigated in AMD EPYC AGESA PI packages."

AMD has already shipped new mitigations in the form of AGESA updates, and users should not fear if they keep their firmware up to date. If you or your organization is running on AMD EPYC processors, you should update the firmware to avoid any exploits from happening. The latest updates in question are NaplesPI-SP3_1.0.0.G, RomePI-SP3_1.0.0.C, and MilanPI-SP3_1.0.0.4 AGESA versions, which fix all of 22 security holes.

Over the past couple of years there has been a huge increase in ransomware attacks, and now scientists claim to have a solution that could help protect SSDs from getting encrypted by ransomware. The SSD-Insider++, as the solution has been named, claims to be able to detect ransomware activity and reverse the encryption on the fly.

SSD-Insider++ was developed by a group of engineers from South Korea's Inha University, Daegu Institute of Science and Technology, and the Cyber Security Department at Ewha Womans University (EWU), as well as a researcher from the University of Central Florida in the US. It's a firmware level based protection that looks for patterns of ransomware activity on the drive and stops it before any damage has been done.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

AMD processors have been very good at the field of security, on par with its main competitor, Intel. However, from time to time, researchers find new ways of exploiting a security layer and making it vulnerable to all kinds of attacks. Today, we have information that two new research papers are being published at this year's 15th IEEE Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT'21) happening on May 27th. Both papers are impacting AMD processor security, specifically, they show how AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) is compromised. Researchers from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Lübeck are going to present their papers on CVE-2020-12967 and CVE-2021-26311, respectfully.

While we do not know exact details of these vulnerabilities until papers are presented, we know exactly which processors are affected. As SEV is an enterprise feature, AMD's EPYC lineup is the main target of these two new exploits. AMD says that affected processors are all of the EPYC embedded CPUs and the first, second, and third generation of regular EPYC processors. For third-generation EPYC CPUs, AMD has provided mitigation in SEV-SNP, which can be enabled. For prior generations, the solution is to follow best security practices and try to avoid an exploit.

The US Government, specifically the Department of Defense (DoD), has under the Trump administration blacklisted the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. This was a way to impose sanctions on the Chinese company as it was believed that Xiaomi was involved with the Chinese military, thus the Trump organization had problems having US investors taking a share of it. However, the company has issued legal proceedings against the US government for making such claims, and now the US govt., administrated by the President Joe Biden, has reached an agreement with the company. Xiaomi managed to prove that it is not owned or controlled by the Chinese military, so the US DoD has removed the company from its blacklist.

This has caused the company shares to soar on the Hong Kong stock exchange by as much as 6.7% after the news appeared. "The Biden Administration is deeply concerned about potential U.S. investments in companies linked to the Chinese military and fully committed to keeping up pressure on such companies", said Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.

Starting today, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint expands its use of Intel Threat Detection Technology (Intel TDT) beyond accelerated memory scanning capabilities to activate central processing unit (CPU) based cryptomining machine learning (ML) detection. This move further accelerates endpoint detection and response for millions of customers without compromising experience.

"This is a true inflection point for the security industry as well as our SMB, mid-market and enterprise customers that have rapidly adopted Windows 10 with built-in endpoint protections. Customers who choose Intel vPro with the exclusive Intel Hardware Shield now gain full-stack visibility to detect threats out of the box with no need for IT configuration. The scale of this CPU-based threat detection rollout across customer systems is unmatched and helps close gaps in corporate defenses," said Michael Nordquist, senior director of Strategic Planning and Architecture in the Business Client Group at Intel.

NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU, its next-generation data processing unit, to deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities available for data centers.

The first DPU built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField-3 lets every enterprise deliver applications at any scale with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimized for multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at data-center scale.

Addressing the demands of the modern data center, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced a range of new data center products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.

Today's most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

The security of PCs has been an issue in the past few years as cyber-attack methods have been undergoing a transformation to hardware-specific malware that exploits different vulnerabilities of CPUs. That is why Microsoft, the developer of the most popular operating system, Windows 10, decided to engineer a hardware processor that will protect the OS and its user by having a specific job of maintaining the platform security. In collaboration with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, Microsoft is today introducing the Pluton security processor. The collaborator companies are going to integrate the new Pluton processor inside their CPUs and thus embed a new level of security in their PCs.

MicrosoftOur vision for the future of Windows PCs is security at the very core, built into the CPU, where hardware and software are tightly integrated in a unified approach designed to eliminate entire vectors of attack. This revolutionary security processor design will make it significantly more difficult for attackers to hide beneath the operating system, and improve our ability to guard against physical attacks, prevent the theft of credential and encryption keys, and provide the ability to recover from software bugs.