windows security

Microsoft’s Build 2026 Windows announcements changed the near-term job for IT and security teams: Windows is being positioned as a place where AI agents run under containment, not just a place where people use apps. The concrete news is that Microsoft introduced the early-preview Microsoft...

UNC3753, a financially motivated extortion cluster also known as Luna Moth, Chatty Spider, and Silent Ransom Group, is actively targeting U.S. legal, financial, and professional-services organizations in a campaign disclosed by Google’s Mandiant team and echoed by a recent FBI warning. The story...

Microsoft has quietly removed an April 2026 Windows Learning Center article that said most Windows 11 users do not need third-party antivirus software, replacing a blunt pro-Defender message with older, more cautious guidance that frames built-in protection as strong but not universal. The...

Ad Age’s June 5, 2026 Agency Brief covers a small but revealing cluster of advertising-industry moves: Fortnight Collective’s creative hiring, The One Club’s student challenge, and OpenAI’s widening work with independent agencies as AI becomes part of the marketing supply chain. The details are...

Hiding your IP address in 2026 usually means routing traffic through an intermediary such as a proxy, VPN, Tor, Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, a different network, or browser-level tracker masking, each of which changes who sees your address and how much of your traffic is protected. The trick is...

Nvidia and Microsoft are preparing RTX Spark Windows PCs, announced around Computex and Build 2026, to run personal AI agents locally with a Grace Blackwell-derived superchip, up to 128GB of unified memory, and new Windows security plumbing for agent access. The pitch is not merely a faster AI...

Microsoft announced Microsoft Execution Containers at Build 2026 as a preview execution layer for AI agents across Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux, giving developers and administrators a way to declare what an agent may touch and letting the operating system enforce those boundaries at...

Windows Sandbox is a built-in Windows 10 and Windows 11 feature for Pro, Enterprise, and Education editions that runs untrusted applications inside a temporary, hypervisor-isolated desktop environment, then discards the environment when the session is closed. That makes it one of the most useful...

Microsoft used Build 2026 on June 2, 2026, to frame Windows, GitHub, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Foundry, Rayfin, HorizonDB and its IQ context layers as one operating platform for building, running and governing agentic AI systems. The pitch was not merely that Microsoft has more AI features. It was...

Windows users asking whether they still need antivirus software in 2025 are really asking whether Microsoft Defender, built into Windows 10 and Windows 11, is good enough for ordinary malware protection without a paid third-party suite. The honest answer is yes for many home PCs, but that answer...

Microsoft announced Scout at Build on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, as an always-on workplace AI agent for Teams, email, calendars, and Microsoft 365 tasks, initially launching with a small customer group and a Frontier-access desktop app tied to GitHub Copilot. That makes Scout less a chatbot than a...

CVE-2026-7168 is a medium-severity libcurl vulnerability disclosed by the curl project on April 29, 2026, in which applications reusing a libcurl handle across two different HTTP proxies can leak a Digest Proxy-Authorization header from the first proxy to the second. It is not a Windows...

Microsoft’s Security Update Guide lists CVE-2026-43896 as a jq denial-of-service vulnerability disclosed in May 2026, affecting jq 1.8.1 and earlier when recursive object merges can trigger unbounded recursion and crash the process. That sounds narrow until you remember where jq lives: in shell...

Microsoft announced Microsoft Execution Containers at Build 2026 on June 2 in San Francisco and online, positioning the Windows feature as an operating-system-enforced containment layer for AI agents that can access files, networks, applications, and local tools under declared runtime policy...

Microsoft used Build 2026 in San Francisco and online on June 2 to make Microsoft IQ generally available across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, and Copilot Studio, positioning it as an enterprise intelligence layer for data, context, agents, and governance. The announcement is not just...

Microsoft on June 2, 2026 announced an early preview of Microsoft Execution Containers, a cross-platform SDK meant to contain AI agents on Windows and WSL while tying local agent activity into Agent 365, Defender, Intune, and Windows 365 for Agents. The move is not just another developer-tooling...

Palo Alto Networks disclosed CVE-2026-0257 on May 13, 2026, then updated the advisory on May 29 after exploitation attempts were observed against unpatched PAN-OS devices running GlobalProtect portal or gateway configurations without mitigations. For WindowsForum’s sysadmin and IT-pro audience...

Microsoft’s most useful Windows security planning signal is increasingly the Security Update Guide revision stream, not just the Patch Tuesday release itself, because Microsoft uses that guide and its notification service to surface re-released updates, newly published CVEs, republished CVEs...

Sophos X-Ops says it observed a threat actor using AI-assisted development tools, including Cursor and Claude Opus agents, to build and test an EDR-evasion framework inside a Windows-heavy lab tied to post-exploitation tooling, ransomware deployment, and data theft operations. The important part...

Microsoft Defender Offline Scan in Windows 11 and Windows 10 is launched from Windows Security under Virus & threat protection > Scan options, where choosing Microsoft Defender Antivirus offline scan restarts the PC and scans before normal Windows loads. That simple path matters because the...