Autopatch | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of a feature called Autopatch that automatically keeps Windows and Office software up-to-date on enrolled endpoints. The launch, which comes a day before Microsoft is expected to release its monthly round of security patches, is available for customers with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses. It, however, doesn't support Windows Education (A3) or Windows Front Line Worker (F3) licenses. "Microsoft will continue to release updates on the second Tuesday of every month and now Autopatch helps streamline updating operations and create new opportunities for IT pros," Lior Bela  said . Autopatch works by  applying security updates  first to devices in what's called the Test ring, which contains a minimum number of representative devices. After a validation period, the updates are pushed to the First (1% devices), Fast (9%), and Broad (90%) rings. The service was first  teased  by the tech giant in April...

Microsoft last week announced that it intends to make generally available a feature called Autopatch as part of Windows Enterprise E3 in July 2022. "This service will keep Windows and Office software on enrolled endpoints up-to-date automatically, at no additional cost,"  said  Lior Bela, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, in a post last week. "The second Tuesday of every month will be 'just another Tuesday.'" Windows Autopatch is intended to work with all supported versions of Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows 365 for Enterprise. Windows Server OS and Windows 365 for Business, however, are not supported. The tech giant said the feature is aimed at tackling the complexity associated with software updates in enterprise IT environments as well as closing security gaps introduced as a result of not applying patches in a timely fashion, thereby opening the door to potential new threats.  The managed service works by applying the updates acro...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...