Security

Late last night — on a Monday, mind you — Microsoft released its second big cumulative update for Win10 version 1709. This completes the triumvirate of second cumulative updates, since last week, on the third Tuesday of the month, Microsoft released second cumulative updates for Win10 1703 and 1607. 

There’s a pattern emerging. Microsoft is now showering Win10 customers with two (sometimes more) cumulative updates a month, and they’re big. The first cumulative update contains security patches and a big hodgepodge of additional bug fixes. The first one is (usually) released on the second Tuesday of the month. The second cumulative update arrives, uh, whenever, and it contains massive amounts of bug fixes in addition to those in the first — including, if we’re lucky, fixes for the bugs introduced by the month’s first cumulative update.

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Reports of tech support scams jumped by 24% last year, Microsoft said, with loses by the bilked averaging between $200 and $400 each.

“Scammers continue to capitalize on the proven effectiveness of social engineering to perpetrate tech support scams,” Erik Wahlstrom, Windows Defender research project manager, wrote in a post last week to a Microsoft blog. “These scams are designed to trick users into believing their devices are compromised or broken. They do this to scare or coerce victims into purchasing unnecessary support services.”

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