MS-DEFCON 4: The gift of patching

By Susan Bradley

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house and office, not a creature was stirring — except yours truly, because I was checking my systems to see whether they were all fully up to date.

Seriously, I always find that the time around the holidays is a good moment to do your patching. After the holiday dinner has been served and everyone is in their holiday ham or turkey coma, I can sneak away to review my technology. The end of the year is just a week away, and as I always say, you should start the new year with everything polished and shiny. Therefore, I’m lowering the MS-DEFCON level to 4.

Despite occasional reports, I’m not tracking anything widespread. The December updates will protect you from a zero day in the form of CVE-2024-49138, but Microsoft is still not being clear about exactly who (or what) was targeted or how widespread the attacks were. Based on the fact that the vendor CrowdStrike reported the exploit, clearly this attack was targeted at businesses.

I’m more concerned about the forced “shove” to Outlook (new) and its impact on small businesses as we turn over the calendar. If you haven’t already done so, check out Peter Deegan’s column Stopping the migration to Outlook (new) (AskWoody, 2024-12-16) and the excellent and extensive follow-up comments in the forum. The article is available to everyone.

I still consider Windows 11 24H2 rough around the edges and not ready for wide use — especially for gamers. Although Microsoft indicates that Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are no longer affected by this issue due to temporary hotfixes deployed by Ubisoft, it also admits that “players might still experience some performance issues.”

Consumers

If Santa brings you a brand-new Apple iPhone or iPad for Christmas, know that I’m dropping my partial hold on iOS 18.2. I held back because of my concern regarding the Photo app — one which many users shared. Go ahead and update.

You’ll notice a striking update to the user interface in the mail app (left). It’s a bit jolting, quite a departure from the previous design. Good or bad? Hard to know for sure, but tell us in the forums about your experience with this or any other hanges in Apple’s UI for any of its devices.

Also note that Apple has taken a page out of Outlook’s playbook, with additional filtering of email. You may find this helpful or annoying depending on your point of view. The app’s additional filtering of mail places things into buckets Apple thinks are helpful to you. If you don’t need the categories “Primary,” “Transactions,” “Updates,” or “Promotions,” just swipe the filter buttons on the right to show all mail.

You can also permanently disable this filtered view. Open the Mail app and then an Inbox view of messages. Tap the three-dot (•••) button in the upper-right corner. Select List View. The filters will now disappear, and all your emails will be shown in a single list.

If you do use Apple’s new filtered view, you’ll discover that counts can be wrong. When looking at the count of unread messages on the mail app’s icon, you’ll get one number. But if you look at the counts inside the app and total them, you’ll get a different number. Those of you who always mark everything as read or who delete unwanted messages won’t notice a thing. But those of us (well, mostly me) who ignore junk messages or don’t delete them, will find the mistaken counts a bit weird.

If you want the Photos app to be more like it was before iOS 18, navigate to the Photos app, scroll to the bottom, and select Customize and Reorder. Deselect all collections, with the exception of Media Types and Utilities, then click the X icon symbol in the upper right to confirm.

Businesses

For businesses, January 1 starts the 10-month countdown to the October end of support for Windows 10. I’ll be having some special articles on how to isolate such PCs if you opt not to purchase the extended-support plans; I’ll also cover how to obtain those extended support offerings. I will still be tracking post-release issues after the October end of life.

For those of you tracking CVE-2024-49112 for Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability, this is the vulnerability that I’m most concerned about. I have not seen anyone reporting side effects in their Active Directory networks as a result of this update, so I’ll urge you to update at this time. But I’m also looking at taking more proactive protection, such as restricting RPC to trusted machines only. As with many things in security, we’ll have to test this for any the side effects.

If you’ve seen Excel 2016 freeze or pause and you are on the perpetual version, as opposed to Microsoft 365, install either the December update for Excel or KB4484305.

Resources

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