Emily Long is simply a freelance writer based successful Salt Lake City.
After graduating from Duke University, she spent respective years reporting connected the national workforce for Government Executive, a publication of Atlantic Media Company, successful Washington, D.C. She has astir a decade of acquisition arsenic a freelancer covering tech (including issues related to security, privacy, and streaming) arsenic good arsenic individual finance and travel.
In summation to Lifehacker, her activity has been featured connected Wirecutter, Tom’s Guide, and ZDNET. Emily has besides worked arsenic a recreation guideline astir the U.S. and arsenic a contented editor. She has a masters successful societal activity and is simply a licensed therapist successful Utah.
If you're a Windows user, you've hopefully installed regular Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft, which reside captious information vulnerabilities crossed the company's software. The past fewer months' worthy of fixes person been particularly important, arsenic they've included a grounds number of bugs and a swath of zero-days that person been actively exploited aliases publically disclosed.
The August Patch Tuesday release this week is nary different: The update fixes 400 flaws, including 3 zero-days. Compare that to March, erstwhile Microsoft issued patches for conscionable 83 bugs successful full (two of which were publically disclosed zero-days). The seemingly abrupt uptick successful vulnerabilities and information fixes is due, successful ample part, to AI.
AI is creating vulnerabilities (and discovering them)
AI is playing some sides of the section erstwhile it comes to security. Threat actors are utilizing AI to create and deploy hacking devices much quickly and astatine scale, truthful much flaws whitethorn beryllium much exploitable than before. This forces tech companies to respond much quickly arsenic well. As ZDNET notes, companies that spot vulnerabilities during regular update cycles (like Patch Tuesday) now person to unreserved to reside bugs sooner and whitethorn statesman to shorten the clip betwixt updates, as Apple did earlier this summer.
While AI is helping to utilization vulnerabilities, it is besides uncovering them truthful they tin beryllium fixed. Last month, Microsoft announced that AI has allowed its engineering teams to find and analyse a larger measurement of imaginable flaws earlier they tin beryllium exploited. (The institution noted that this besides straight contributes to the summation successful information updates included successful Patch Tuesday). Google, too, is utilizing AI to discover, triage, and hole information flaws successful Chrome. It's worthy noting that while AI is bully astatine identifying vulnerabilities, it is far little effective astatine really patching them—and whitethorn present much bugs on the way.
As always, update your Windows instrumentality ASAP
Windows users should guarantee information updates are installed arsenic soon arsenic they're disposable to minimize the consequence of progressive exploits. Patch Tuesday is released astir 10 a.m. connected the 2nd Tuesday of the month, and you should person them automatically. However, you tin cheque the position nether Start > Settings > Windows Update > Check for Windows updates.
As BleepingComputer reports, the August information update addresses flaws crossed the pursuing categories: 176 elevation-of-privilege vulnerabilities, 11 information characteristic bypass vulnerabilities, 110 remote-code-execution vulnerabilities, 86 accusation disclosure vulnerabilities, 21 spoofing vulnerabilities, and 12 denial-of-service vulnerabilities. Forty-two of the bugs are rated "critical" and see distant codification execution and elevation of privilege flaws.
Emily Long is simply a freelance writer based successful Salt Lake City.
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