News, Reviews & Betas which includes large community peer support While this week was relatively slow due to the holiday season, we do have some notable items to recap including Active Directory woes, a couple of acquisitions, and what almost became Cortana’s name.
We are at the end of the week and while it was a relatively slow due to the holiday season, there is still some stuff that is worthwhile to recap in case you haven’t been keeping up with our daily coverage. This week, we learned some more about Active Directory (AD) troubles, one of Microsoft’s name considerations when christening Cortana, and some interesting stuff about Windows 11 too. Find out more in our recap for December 18 – December 24. Earlier this week, Microsoft issued an advisory about some vulnerabilities reported in AD a few weeks ago. Although the company released patches back in November, it is once again asking customers to immediately apply the fix on domain controllers because a proof-of-concept tool that exploits the issues has now been publicly released and can be used by malicious actors. Threat actors can now fairly easily gain Domain Admin privileges in AD as long as they can compromise a regular user account, which means that its essential that organizations update their domain controllers as soon as possible. There are two notable acquisitions to talk about in this week’s digest. The first is Microsoft’s purchase of Nuance, that has finally been approved by the European Union (EU). Nuance is a company that develops transcription software, and the EU has provided unconditional approval for the deal, reportedly valued at $16 billion.
