MS-DEFCON 4: Holiday patching

By Susan Bradley

Thanksgiving in America is a mere two days away. I often use the holiday to multitask while the turkey is roasting.

One task for you is applying updates. I’m lowering the MS-DEFCON level to 4; other than my recommendation to avoid Windows 11 24H2 for now, patching should be safe.

Thanksgiving signals the approaching end of year. For both home and office, it’s a great time to reflect on the challenges of the past year and develop a technology plan for the upcoming year. In my case, I’ll be looking at retiring some devices that I no longer need or use, upgrading some existing equipment, replacing aging devices with new ones, and looking for simplifications wherever I can find them.

One of my holiday tasks is learning more about the technology issues that are bugging my family members and friends. You can do the same! Encourage them to share. What tech do they use? What do they like? What do they hate? What issues in tech annoy them the most? In the spirit of sharing, try to help them with your best advice.

I have a few thoughts about how you can best help.

Encourage openness to change

We all have a natural tendency to stick with what we know. But that brings up a problem that many deal with when a new device is acquired — trying to use really old software. Among the most common desires is to hang on to that ancient Office suite. Sure, it doesn’t have artificial intelligence built into it, but getting it to work with modern email servers is nearly impossible. I have personally had to move to various third-party email clients such as Thunderbird or eM Client  to find one that was not only pleasing to me but also supported and worked with the mail server.

Another problem I’ve noticed is that some folks apply updates but defer rebooting the system. Encourage your family and friends not to do that. Suggest to them that updates should be deferred until necessary or safe, but reboots should be done right after updating, even if the updates don’t force a reboot (many do). Even if you don’t use any of the BlockAPatch.com tools for Windows, encourage your friends and family members to defer updates and let them know when it’s safe to do so.

Recommendation for Android devices

Review the Android devices your friends and family use; discuss whether they should be replaced. Over time, they start to get slower, and some apps can stop working. Even so, they may be kept in service, even in a diminished state. Sometimes, you won’t notice that a device is no longer supported — until you discover that you haven’t received updates for a while, and some of your apps no longer work or have no further updates. So I’ll encourage you to review not only your own devices and phones, but those of your family and friends. Devices and phones are the computer you always have in your pocket. Especially for phones that are always connected to the Internet, always ensure that they are supported.

Support for Android devices depends very much upon the vendor that sold them. It’s often hard to determine what support is actually available. The best way to know is to get into the Settings app on the device to find the Android version number. Then search online to determine whether the device is still supported. Often, vendors will offer you a trade-in, even for unsupported devices. So if you have one of these barely working tablets or phones, review your options for upgrades and trade-ins.

Recommendation for Apple devices

Apple released its new devices this fall. But if you are like me, most of my Apple devices still work and are still fully supported. Whether you upgrade to iOS 18.1.1 or stay on 17.7.2 is entirely up to you. If you have an older phone that does not support Apple’s new AI, I see no compelling reason to upgrade.

Apple is urging those on Mac Sequoia to upgrade immediately to 15.1.1. There is a zero-day vulnerability under active attacks. As the company noted, “Processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to a cross site scripting attack. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited on Intel-based Mac systems.”

These attacks are documented as CVE-2024-44308 and CVE-2024-44309, both of which were last updated on November 21.

Ensure you review websites and your actions until you install the update.

Recall

Last Friday, Microsoft posted to the Windows Insiders blog Previewing Recall with Click to Do on Copilot+ PCs with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. Here’s the opening:

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2415 (KB5046723) to the Dev Channel. With this update, we welcome Windows Insiders with Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs to join the Dev Channel to try out Recall (Preview) with Click to Do (Preview).

The post is worth reading to get a sense of Microsoft’s plans. Note that the mention of both Recall and Click to Do are qualified by the word “Preview,” and that only those with a Copilot+ PC can participate.

Consumers

In an election year, politics often comes up once all the stuffing and gravy are gone. That can get nasty, but I have something even more divisive that you can discuss instead: Windows 10.

What do your guests plan to do when Windows reaches its “official” end of life next October? Will they stay on Windows 10? Will they pay for Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) plan, or perhaps 0Patch? Or will they decide to repurpose the hardware by installing a Linux variant, such as Mint? Will their PCs run Windows 11, or are they looking for new hardware?

For those of us still on supported Windows 10 and 11 machines, I’m recommending that you update your Windows 10 22H2 with KB5046613, and Windows 11 23H2 with KB5046633. But I still do not recommend that you install 24H2. Even Microsoft is demonstrating that it’s still a work in progress. As noted by Microsoft regarding Windows gaming systems, “When you use an external USB digital audio converter (DAC) sound system, you might experience the sound level increasing to 100 percent.”

Microsoft is working on a fix. I’m not tracking any other major issues with Windows patches and recommend that you install them at this time.

If you’ve had issues with Microsoft Store applications such as Skype, be aware the problem is not with Windows update but rather with the WinAppSdk that inadvertently triggered the condition. As Microsoft noted, a fix is available in the preview update KB5046714 that you can install if you were impacted.

Microsoft is taking its annual break for the holidays and will be offering only security updates in December. It will not release preview updates and will return to its normal preview process in January. (Many Microsoft employees take several weeks off before the end of the year.)

Businesses

Although I urged you to be open to change, the key point is to be open to change on your schedule, not on Microsoft’s. Be aware that Microsoft is wanting to force a bit of change on Microsoft 365 Business plan users. If you have users who don’t use Outlook add-ins or don’t use automation, then Outlook (new) will be a change but will still work for their needs. But if you are like me and still use third-party Outlook add-ins from vendors such as Sperry Software, ensure you check with your vendors. In January, Microsoft will be pushing the new version of Outlook to all Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium customers.

If you do not want this new version of Outlook, you can proactively block it by inserting a registry key. I’ve documented this on the forum:

You can also download the registry key from this link. Microsoft indicates that it will also be providing group policy information at a later date.

If you are in the unlucky position of patching Exchange, the November updates for Exchange are still missing in action. Even if they are released in the near future, ensure you have a plan to uninstall updates — or have alternative transport methods to get email delivered.

Source

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