Pedro Hernandez

Researchers with security company FireEye are warning Microsoft Office users that Zyklon has resurfaced, and attackers are preying on a recently-discovered vulnerability in the productivity software suite to spread the modular malware. In addition to creating a backdoor to that can be used for password harvesting and keylogging, the malware can conscript infected systems into […]

Amazon, Apple and Google are among the many IT giants that are siding with Microsoft in a closely watched email privacy case that has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The industry heavyweights were among the 288 signatories on 23 amicus, or friend of the court, briefs filed on Jan. 18 in support […]

Microsoft has released a bevy of new updates to Power BI Desktop for January 2018. Power BI Desktop is the companion desktop authoring software to the company’s cloud-based business intelligence and analytics platform. The updates include new reporting functionality, including the ability to hide or show pages within a Power BI report. This option comes […]

Microsoft already has already developed an artificial intelligence application that turns images into descriptive text. For example, the software maker’s Seeing AI app for Apple iOS devices turns images captured by the camera into text that is then spoken aloud to visually impaired users. Now, the company’s researchers have built a new AI system, simply […]

Azure Security Center, Microsoft cloud-based security platform for customer instances, now supports custom assessments, allowing users to tailor the system to their needs. In its standard form, Azure Security Center uses a set of over 150 rules that are used to harden an operating system, spanning firewalls, password policies and other factors that contribute to […]

Microsoft has ditched the SCSI Enclosure Services requirement for Windows Server Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), a set of software-defined storage technologies that ship with the operating system. Server Storage Spaces Direct is a capacity-pooling technology that extends NAS- and SAN-like enterprise-grade storage management capabilities to direct-attached drives. The SCSI Enclosure Services protocol, meanwhile, is used […]

Microsoft has updated its Dynamics 365 for Retail, offering customers new ways to track inventory, fill orders and keep sales associates in the loop. During NRF 2018, the National Retail Federation’s conference in New York City Jan. 14-16, Microsoft, showed off some of the new features the software maker has baked into its cloud-enabled business […]

Microsoft’s researchers in China have crossed a significant artificial intelligence threshold, and their innovations may pave the way for smarter search engines and virtual assistants. A new AI model submitted by Microsoft Research Asia now sits atop the SQuAD leaderboard with a score of 82.650 on the Exact Match portion of the benchmark. SQuAD, short […]

It may be tough to find a library-quiet corner of a bustling office or home to get some work done, but the expanded Quiet Hours feature for Windows 10 can at least help keep the distractions at bay. Presently users can do little more than turn Quiet Hours on and off, similar to the “do […]

Private, end-to-end encrypted conversations are coming to Skype courtesy of Signal, the secure messaging technology and app from Open Whisper Systems. Powered by the open source Signal Protocol, the Signal mobile app fully encrypts data, allowing users to send text-based messages, videos and audio while thwarting third-party attempts to snoop on their communications. The protocol […]