Monthly Archives: September 2021

Apple has released security updates for a vulnerability that affects every iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

Citizen Lab, which discovered the vulnerability and was credited with the find, urges users to immediately update their devices.

Apple has said iOS 14.8 for iPhones and iPads, as well as new updates for Apple Watch and macOS, will fix at least one vulnerability that it said “may have been actively exploited.”

Citizen Lab first revealed details in August as part of an investigation into the use of a zero-day vulnerability that was used to silently hack into iPhones belonging to at least one Bahraini activist. They said the zero-day flaw — named as such since it gives companies zero days to roll out a fix — took advantage of a flaw in Apple’s iMessage, which was exploited to push the Pegasus spyware (developed by Israeli firm NSO Group) to the activist’s phone. Pegasus gives its government customers near-complete access to a target’s device, including their personal data, photos, messages and location.

The breach is significant because the flaws exploited the latest iPhone software at the time, both iOS 14.4 and later iOS 14.6, which Apple released in May. But also the exploit broke through new iPhone defenses that Apple had baked into iOS 14, which were supposed to prevent silent attacks by filtering potentially malicious code. The researchers said the exploit takes advantage of a weakness in how Apple devices render images on the display.

In a brief statement, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić confirmed the fix:
“After identifying the vulnerability used by this exploit for iMessage, Apple rapidly developed and deployed a fix in iOS 14.8 to protect our users. We’d like to commend Citizen Lab for successfully completing the very difficult work of obtaining a sample of this exploit so we could develop this fix quickly. Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”

We are quickly approaching the November 1st deadline when the minimum version requirements for connecting Outlook (on Windows) to Office 365/Microsoft 365 services will change.

After 1 November 2021, only Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 and newer will be able to connect to Office 365/Microsoft 365 services. Outlook 2007, 2010, and Office 2013 versions earlier than 15.0.4971.1000 are no longer supported by Microsoft, and will stop connecting from this date.

Microsoft is enforcing this blocking of old versions as they are incompatible with upcoming service changes, which include both security and performance improvements (e.g. adding support for HTTP/2).

The solution is to upgrade your version of Office (and thereby Outlook) – Office is available as part of Microsoft 365 or as a standalone purchase of Office 2019.

You can read Microsoft’s full statement here.

Google is releasing new features for Gmail, as part of Google Workspace.

Google is adding new features to Gmail which will allow users to customise their inbox based on personalised themes, settings, and layouts.

Also, new Chat and Rooms boxes have been added directly to the Inbox view. Chat for direct messaging and Rooms for group conversations and collaboration. This offers Workspace users similar functionality to the extremely popular Microsoft Teams.

New features also include:

• Malicious Document Detection – Google has for a long time provided malicious file detection as part of Gmail, however they are now adding a new ‘Deep Learning Algorithm’ to provide higher security.
• Brand Customisation – Set up your brand logo, font and colour for easy reuse within emails.
• Email Layouts – Create styled layouts directly from your Inbox to send to contacts and clients.

For more information on how to use new features in Gmail, read more from Google here.