Many Windows users don’t even bother looking at Microsoft’s Windows release notes, but those who do often pay close attention. 
For those users who do rely on information about Microsoft’s operating system, the company is preparing improvements to Windows release notes, the Windows update history pages, and informational articles. 

Windows 10

Reflecting Microsoft’s shift to the Microsoft 365 bundle for Windows 10, Office 365 and management tools, Microsoft is now merging the support.office.com and support.microsoft.com sites into a unified support site. 
Users should be able to find support and troubleshooting resources for Microsoft 365 more easily when using a search engine, according to Microsoft. Additionally, consolidating the two sites helps Microsoft quickly publish new articles and update existing ones. 
These changes will be rolling out in the coming weeks, the company says.    
Microsoft is also reformatting the structure of its URLs for Windows 10 release notes, giving the KB (knowledge base) article number a more prominent position in the URL and on the page itself. 
This change is designed to help users distinguish between two pages with similar-looking titles and make it easier to search for support articles by KB ID number. 
As Microsoft notes, the existing URL structure also includes the KB ID that users can copy from the address bar and append to the root URL, https://support.microsoft.com/help. However, sometimes KB IDs aren’t listed in the article and can only be seen in the URL. In these situations, it’s harder to use search engines to find an article by KB ID. 
“For greater consistency and to support improved search indexing, the URL structure moving forward will include both the GUID and the KB ID. Since many are familiar with appending the KB ID to the URL, we will continue to support this approach and use automatic redirects to ensure you land on the appropriate article,” Microsoft explains.   
The Windows 10 release notes pages currently only support sharing articles by email. Microsoft is updating sharing options to include Facebook and LinkedIn. The share controls will be at the bottom of each page.
There’s no change to Microsoft’s current release note content strategy, which includes Monthly security updates (B week releases), non-security updates (Preview releases), and out-of-band updates (OOB releases). 
It’s also tweaking the formatting, user interface and the type of metadata available, which may affect tools that admins use to organize Microsoft’s support and release notes. 
Articles on support.microsoft.com will no longer serve articles in a JSON format, which are then rendered on the client, but will rather render the articles in HTML. Also, metadata from each article won’t be served as JSON anymore and will instead be rendered in a block of meta tags.  
Microsoft is also paring back the metadata available in the page’s source and has provided a table of changes affecting KB numbers, release dates, last updated details, Windows versions the article applies to, heading details, and the locale of the article. More

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The White House has denied reports that it is considering a range of cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure in response to the invasion of Ukraine. 

Ukraine Crisis

The denials came after NBC News reported US President Joe Biden was offered options that included the use of American cyberweapons “on a scale never before contemplated.”Reporters for NBC News claimed they were told by two US intelligence officials, one Western intelligence official, and another person briefed on the matter that Biden was given options such as shutting off electric power in Russia, disrupting the country’s internet connectivity, and damaging railroad switches.One official claimed the US could “do everything from slow the trains down to have them fall off the tracks.” Within an hour of the story being published, multiple White House officials came out against it, denying its accuracy. White House spokesperson Emily Horne called the story “wildly off base.””This report on cyber options being presented to [the President] is off base and does not reflect what is actually being discussed in any shape or form,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

This report on cyber options being presented to @POTUS is off base and does not reflect what is actually being discussed in any shape or form.— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) February 24, 2022

The NBC report noted that some US officials believe if the cyberattacks simply disrupt systems and refrain from the destroying them, they will fall short of being considered “acts of war.” According to the sources that spoke to NBC, the US government would not publicly take credit for the attacks and would most likely make them covertly.  The denials came before Biden spoke to the press and discussed how the US may respond if cyberattacks expand beyond Ukraine and affect US organizations.   “If Russia pursues cyberattacks against our companies, our critical infrastructure, we’re prepared to respond. For months, we’ve been working closely with the private sector to harden our cyber defenses [and] sharpen our response to Russian cyberattacks,” Biden told reporters on Thursday. Ukraine faced a barrage of DDoS incidents and a new form of disk-wiping malware before Russian-backed forces invaded the country on Wednesday. Ukraine has continued to face intermittent DDoS incidents, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik. He noted that the Ukraine State Cyber Protection Center, Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, and another platform that hosts some Ukrainian government sites are facing the most DDoS attacks. Internet access in Ukraine on Thursday. 
Netblocks
“The internet of Ukraine is under severe stress presently. Following the initiation of hostilities last night, we began seeing sporadic outages across the country. At the same time, the DDoS attacks directed against Ukrainian institutions that began last week are continuing,” Madory said. Netblocks has also confirmed a number of outages throughout Ukraine since the invasion began, including ones in major cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol. Madory added that he is also seeing DDoS attacks against Russian government websites. Some online, including Netblocks, confirmed that some Russian government sites were inaccessible but opinions were split on whether access was being intentionally stopped by Russian officials or if DDoS incidents were causing the issues. 

Russia released its own alert about potential cyberattacks, warning that “in the current tense geopolitical situation, we expect an increase in the intensity of computer attacks on Russian information resources, including critical information infrastructure facilities.”Many experts urged restraint on both sides, warning that cyberattacks on infrastructure have been a red line that few countries have crossed. Coalfire Field CISO John Hellickson said launching a cyberattack would set a dangerous precedent going forward. “Would this cyberattack be considered a direct act of war?” Hellickson asked. “Given the challenges in executing strong cybersecurity across critical infrastructure here at home, a retaliation by Russia and/or their sympathetic allies could have devasting impacts on these services that Americans rely upon. I believe we need to avoid crossing the line of such considerations as it’s difficult to predict the impacts of a likely retaliation.” More

This weekend, the Broward Health hospital system notified more than 1.3 million patients and staff members that their personal information was involved in a data breach that started on October 15. 

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In a statement on Saturday, the Florida hospital system said that in addition to names, addresses and phone numbers, Social Security numbers, bank account information and medical history data was included in the breach.  Insurance account information, driver’s license numbers, email addresses and treatments received were also included. The hospital system said it waited months to notify victims because the Department of Justice told them to hold off on sending out breach notification letters. “On October 15, 2021, an intruder gained entry to the Broward Health network through the office of a third-party medical provider permitted to access the system to provide healthcare services. Broward Health discovered the intrusion on October 19, 2021, and promptly contained the incident, notified the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), required a password reset for all employees and engaged an independent cybersecurity firm to conduct an investigation,” the hospital explained.”Broward Health also engaged an experienced data review specialist to conduct an extensive analysis of the data to determine what was impacted, which determined some patient and employee personal information may have been impacted. The DOJ requested the Broward Health briefly delay this notification to ensure that the notification does not compromise the ongoing law enforcement investigation.”The hospital system did not say how many people were involved, but in their submission to the Maine Attorney General’s office, they said 1,357,879 people were affected. The hospital is offering 24 months of identity theft protection services, implemented multifactor authentication for all users of its systems and “minimum-security requirements for devices not managed by Broward Health Information Technology with access to its network.”

The notice warned that people who had their information exposed are now vulnerable to medical identity theft, which is when someone uses a person’s name and information to get medical services or fraudulently bill for medical services. The hospital urged those affected to monitor their benefits statements and financial accounts. Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at ThycoticCentrify, said countries where healthcare is extremely expensive, are the leading targets for cybercriminals to steal and monetize personal health information.  In many instances, personal health information is much more valuable than stolen credit card information, Carson added, noting that it can be sold for up to $500 or more on the dark web because it can easily be abused for fake medical claims, fake prescriptions or fake identities.  “Personal health information can also be used for extortion or blackmail targeting victims who do not want sensitive information disclosed or even to abuse insurance claims and tax refunds,” Carson said. “Unfortunately, for medical records, you cannot change your medical history. Once stolen or disclosed, it is public knowledge, whereas a credit card you can change and get back on track quickly.” More