forensics

The Justice Department’s latest insider‑threat prosecution reads like a cautionary tale written for IT managers, security teams, and anyone responsible for protecting federal data: two former contractors allegedly used lingering privileged access to delete nearly 100 government databases within...

If you use Windows and haven’t installed the Sysinternals toolkit yet, you’re missing some of the most powerful, low‑level utilities available to troubleshoot, analyze, and harden your PC — and a recent roundup highlighted five of them that deliver immediate, practical benefits for power users...

In a late‑night operation that reads like a crime thriller rewritten for cyber‑era law enforcement, Cyberabad police arrested Immadi (reported as Immadhi/Emmadi) Ravi — the alleged operator behind the notorious piracy network known as iBomma — the moment he stepped off a flight into Hyderabad...

Federal agencies and many private organizations received a blunt reminder this week that the Cisco ASA and Firepower remediation effort is far from over: CISA’s November 12 update to its implementation guidance for Emergency Directive ED 25‑03 stresses that numerous organizations believed they...

If you manage Windows Server, the three quickest and most reliable ways to answer the simple-but-critical question “When did this machine last reboot?” are the Command Prompt (systeminfo), PowerShell (Win32_OperatingSystem / Get-CimInstance), and Event Viewer (System log Event IDs). Each method...

NTDEV’s new Nano11 Builder takes the Windows‑11 debloat movement from pragmatic trimming to experimental minimalism, producing bootable ISOs and installed images measured in single‑digit gigabytes by surgically removing inbox apps, servicing infrastructure, and even parts of the Windows...

Microsoft’s security advisory confirms a use‑after‑free defect in the BitLocker stack that can be triggered by an authorized local user to escalate privileges on affected Windows systems — administrators must treat CVE‑2025‑54912 as an urgent patching priority and assume a high‑impact threat...

A use‑after‑free vulnerability in the Windows Connected Devices Platform Service (CDPSvc) has been cataloged by Microsoft as an elevation‑of‑privilege issue that can let an authorized, local attacker escalate to SYSTEM, and administrators should treat it as a high‑priority patching item while...

Windows 11 users faced a sudden and alarming data‑integrity scare when an August cumulative update was linked to a reproducible failure mode that can make certain SSDs “vanish” from the operating system during sustained, large writes — a problem that can truncate files, corrupt partitions, and...

A sudden wave of reports last month that solid‑state drives were vanishing from both File Explorer and UEFI/BIOS left Windows 11 users alarmed — but the truth, based on community forensics and vendor testing, is more complicated than a simple “bad Windows update” narrative. Background / Overview...

Square Enix will run a second closed beta test (CBT 2) for KILLER INN on Steam from October 3–13, 2025, giving players another window to test the 24‑player multiplayer murder‑mystery action title, try balance and feature changes introduced after the July test, and help shape the game ahead of...

A fresh line of forensic work from community labs suggests the wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs that alarmed Windows users in August may not be a mass Windows regression at all, but instead a narrower supply‑chain and firmware‑provenance problem: pre‑release (engineering)...

Phison has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by...

Phison’s latest public testing and fresh community forensics have changed the tone of an urgent story that began as “Windows 11 is killing SSDs” and quickly morphed into a complex investigation at the intersection of OS updates, controller firmware, and supply‑chain quirks — with no single party...

Microsoft says its August Windows 11 security update (KB5063878) is not behind the recent wave of reports alleging SSDs and HDDs have been rendered inaccessible or corrupted, but the episode has exposed gaps in forensic clarity and left many users mistrustful of a conclusion drawn without a...

Title: CVE-2025-55242 — "Xbox Certification Bug / Copilot Django" Information-Disclosure: what admins need to know and do now TL;DR Microsoft has published a Security Update Guide entry for CVE-2025-55242 describing an information‑disclosure bug that can cause the exposure of sensitive...

Microsoft’s audit of the August Windows 11 cumulative update has closed one chapter of an unusually noisy storage scare, but it has left behind a tangle of reproducible community tests, partial vendor confirmations, and unanswered forensic questions that IT teams and power users should still...

Microsoft and Phison have pushed back hard against a wave of social-media claims that the latest Windows 11 cumulative update is “bricking” NVMe SSDs — but the episode exposes a brittle edge case in modern storage stacks, a gap between telemetry and forensic proof, and practical steps every...

Microsoft’s follow‑up investigation insists the August Windows 11 cumulative patch did not “brick” SSDs, but the story is far from a tidy conclusion: community test benches produced a repeatable failure fingerprint, controller vendor lab work failed to reproduce the fault, and Microsoft’s...

Microsoft’s latest position is unambiguous: after an internal review and partner-assisted testing, the company reports it “found no connection” between the August 2025 Windows 11 security update and the series of SSD disappearances and failures circulating on social media — but the empirical...