Technology

I&ve been working remotely for more than 15 years. I thought that with so many people working remotely in response to the novel coronavirus it may be useful to share some of the things I&ve learned that help me make remote working productive and useful.

First step: Define your time

It is way too easy to end up working too hard when you work from home. In part this is because it is also too easy to let your thoughts drift during the day, only to find you need to work all night to reach that morning deadline.

You need to be hard on yourself and make sure to define your time, creating clear and consistent boundaries between working and domestic time.

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This pilot fish works as a Linux sysadmin at a small software-as-a-service company. &I come in early in the mornings, while the tech that does most of our Windows and desktop work comes in later and stays later,& fish says.

&One night, she does a scheduled migration of one of our accounting personnel to a new desktop and sends the user an email that the switch was complete and everything looks good.&

But next morning itfish who gets a panicked call from the user, who tells fish that nothing is working and can he please come right over to take a look?

Fish knows henot up on the latest Windows issues, so he heads to the userdesk with a bit of trepidation.

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Microsoft is sugar-coating the news, but in the next upgrade to Windows, due this spring, Cortana as we know it will all but cease to exist. The digital assistant will no longer be easily accessible in Windows 10, and it will lose the ability to do many of the things it was designed to do, such as control smart devices in your home or play music. It won&t compete with AmazonAlexa, AppleSiri or Google Assistant — not that it ever really did. It won&t be built into smart speakers — not that it ever got incorporated into many.

Cortana isn&t being killed off outright. Not yet anyway. But it may be at the beginning of one of those long deathbed watches that Microsoft is prone to make failed products endure. Cortana will live on for now, in a much more limited way. I&ll explain it all, but first lettake a look at Cortanacheckered history and why Microsoft has decided ittime to drastically curtail what it can do.

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Although containers emerged from the land of Linux, Microsoft has wholeheartedly embraced them. Beginning with Windows Server 2016, the company began offering two types of Docker-compatible containers: Windows Server containers and Hyper-V containers. And six years after that fateful day whenMicrosoft announced it loved Linux, developers today routinely plug apps in Docker containers on any Linux distro supported by the Windows Linux Subsystem or the Azure cloud.

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Italways a good idea to pause Windows updates just before they hit the rollout chute. This month, we&re facing two extraordinary issues that you need to take into account. Wouldn&t hurt if you told your friends and family, too.

Take last monthWindows patches. Please. We had one patch, KB 4524244, that slid out on Patch Tuesday, clobbered an unknown number of machines (HP PCs with Ryzen processors got hit hard), then remained in &automatic download& status until it was finally pulled on Friday. We had another patch, KB 4532693, that gobbled desktop icons and moved files while performing a nifty trick with temporary user profiles. Microsoft never did fix that one.

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A newly discovered malware campaign suggests that hackers have themselves become the targets of other hackers, who are infecting and repackaging popular hacking tools with malware.

Cybereason Amit Serper found that the attackers in this years-long campaign are taking existing hacking tools — some of which are designed to exfiltrate data from a database through to cracks and product key generators that unlock full versions of trial software — and injecting a powerful remote-access trojan. When the tools are opened, the hackers gain full access to the targetcomputer.

Serper said the attackers are &baiting& other hackers byposting the repackaged tools on hacking forums.

But itnot just a case of hackers targeting other hackers, Serper told TechCrunch. These maliciously repackaged tools are not only opening a backdoor to the hackersystems, but also any system that the hacker has already breached.

&If hackers are targeting you or your business and they are using these trojanized tools it means that whoever is hacking the hackers will have access to your assets as well,& Serper said.

That includes offensive security researchers working on red team engagements, he said.

Serper found that these as-yet-unknown attackers are injecting and repackaging the hacking tools with njRat, a powerful trojan, which gives the attacker full access to the targetdesktop, including files, passwords, and even access to their webcam and microphone. The trojan dates back to at least 2013 when it was used frequently against targets in the Middle East. njRat often spreads through phishing emails and infected flash drives, but more recently hackers have injected the malware on dormant or insecure websites in an effort to evade detection. In 2017, hackers used this same tactic to host malware on the website for the so-called Islamic Statepropaganda unit.

Serper found the attackers were using that same website-hacking technique to host njRat in this most recent campaign.

According to his findings, the attackers compromised several websites — unbeknownst to their owners — to host hundreds of njRat malware samples, as well as the infrastructure used by the attackers to command and control the malware. Serper said that the process of injecting the njRat trojan into the hacking tools occurs almost daily and may be automated, suggesting that the attacks are run largely without direct human interaction.

Itunclear for what reason this campaign exists or who is behind it.