January 2018

Welcome to the first Microsoft Patch Day review of the year 2018. Microsoft released security updates for all supported versions of Windows and other company products on January 9, 2018.

This overview offers information on the release. It covers all security updates and non-security updates that Microsoft released since the last Patch Day in December.

VirusTotal Graph is a new feature of the popular virus scanning service that visualizes the relationship between files, URLs, domains and IP addresses of analyzed data sets.

Virustotal is a handy service as it lets anyone upload files to scan them using more than 60 different antivirus engines. The service is not without criticism though; software developers have criticized it in the past for including engines that are prone to false positives.

The Wi-Fi Alliance announced the WPA3 standard officially on Monday. The new wireless network security standard will replace WPA2 eventually.

WPA2, which stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, is the current security standard for wireless networks.

Microsoft released an out-of-band security update for Windows on January 4, 2018, to fix vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown.

Nvidia released the Nvidia GeForce Game Reader 390.65 WHQL driver for GeForce graphics cards on January 8th, 2018.

The update improves support for specific games, includes fixes, and patches The Spectre variant 2 security issue.

The CVE ID of the issue is CVE-2017-5753; Nvidia’s issue number is 1975134.

Microsoft published security updates for all supported versions of Windows recently that protect systems running Windows from Meltdown and Spectre attacks.

The company released updates for Windows 10 via Windows Update. Cumulative update patches for all supported operating systems are available on the Microsoft Update Catalog website as well.

At today’s CES 2018, Nvidia revealed what the company calls Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGD). Nvidia calls it the “world’s first big-screen PC gaming display” that is optimized for PC gaming.

YSP Dermatology Image Database is a free cross-platform program that provides you with imagery and information of various skin conditions.

The program is designed for patients and regular people, and not intended for doctors, pharmacists or nurses. It may be used for educational purposes in most countries though.

The program’s main purpose is to provide patients with accurate dermatology images and information. The images can be useful for monitoring skin conditions and range from insect bites and burns to various types of cancer.

Ghacks published the article Microsoft Edge Annoyances back in mid-2016. Edge was about a year at that time, and it was still largely unusable (for me) then and there.

The article that you read right now looks back at the annoyances to find out if Microsoft resolved them. I will mention other issues that I have with Edge that I did not mention back then.

I use Edge on my Surface Pro 4 laptop almost exclusively to get a feel for the browser. Things have gotten better in the past year as far as I can tell.

Waterfox 56.0.2 is out. The new version of the web browser patches security issues that made the round recently.

In short: security researchers found flaws in processors that attackers can use to read data in memory that they should not have access to.