03Apr 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

15 percent or less are fully confident of recovering data in a disaster

News Items
15 percent or less are fully confident of recovering data in a disaster In a new survey data protection specialist Arcserve reveals that while downtime is a top concern, many businesses lack confidence in their ability to recover data. The study indicates that IT decision makers across America, Europe and Japan, 57 percent of respondents say they aren't confident in their ability to recover their business data in the event of a downtime or disaster event. Only just over 14 percent say they feel very confident they could recover their data. It was also reveal that over half at 56 percent that their customers don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place. Of those customers that do have a plan in place, 59 percent test it, at most, once a year. This is…
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01Apr 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Meltdown Patch Opened Bigger Security Hole on Windows 7

Microsoft Development, Software Events
Meltdown Patch Opened Bigger Security Hole on Windows 7 Microsoft's Meltdown patch has opened an even bigger security hole on Windows 7, allowing any user-level application to read content from the operating system's kernel, and even write data to kernel memory. Swedish IT security expert Ulf Frisk made the discovery earlier this month while working on PCILeech, a device he created a few years back for carrying out Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks and dumping protected OS memory. Frisk says that Microsoft's Meltdown patch (for CVE-2017-5754) —released in the January 2018 Patch Tuesday— accidentally flipped a bit that controls the access permission for kernel memory. Frisk explains: In short - the User/Supervisor permission bit was set to User in the PML4 self-referencing entry. This made the page tables available to user mode…
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