Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 Gets Easier; Chinese AI DeepSeek Shocks U.S. Developers; Google Warns of Legit VPN Apps Spreading Malware.. and more!
Every day, we scan the tech world for interesting news, sometimes from outside the tech world. Every Thursday, we feature news articles that grabbed our attention over the past week. We hope you find this week’s ‘Thursday Newsbytes’ informative and interesting!
Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 for free just got even easier
Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 24H2 to eligible Windows 10 PCs, free of charge.
Microsoft has just made Windows 10 users an offer they (almost) can’t refuse: a free update to Windows 11 version 24H2. Details can be found on this support page, where Microsoft writes:
“Windows 11, version 24H2, also known as the Windows 11 2024 Update, is now broadly available.
Starting this week, we are expanding this latest Windows version’s phased rollout. We are gradually offering this update also to eligible devices running Windows 10, version 22H2.”
Clearly, Microsoft wants Windows 10 users to transition to Windows 11, and they’re doing everything they can to make the process as easy and enticing as possible. The company also wants users to hop aboard Windows 11 24H2 — so much so that they recently made the update mandatory — so they’re killing two birds with one stone here.
How to claim the Windows 11 24H2 update
The rollout of this offer is only going out to Windows 10 PCs that are eligible for Windows 11. That means you’ll need to meet some minimum hardware requirements, like a TPM 2.0 chip in your system…
A shocking Chinese AI advancement called DeepSeek is sending US stocks plunging
US stocks dropped sharply Monday — and chipmaker Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion in market value — after a surprise advancement from a Chinese artificial intelligence company, DeepSeek, threatened the aura of invincibility surrounding America’s technology industry.
DeepSeek, a one-year-old startup, revealed a stunning capability last week: It presented a ChatGPT-like AI model called R1, which has all the familiar abilities, operating at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s, Google’s or Meta’s popular AI models. The company said it had spent just $5.6 million on computing power for its base model, compared with the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars US companies spend on their AI technologies.
That sent shockwaves through markets, in particular the tech sector, on Monday.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq plunged by 3.1% and the broader S&P 500 fell 1.5%. The Dow, boosted by health care and consumer companies that could be hurt by AI, was up 289 points, or about 0.7% higher. Stock market losses were far deeper at the beginning of the day.
Meta last week said it would spend upward of $65 billion this year on AI development. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, last year said the AI industry would need trillions of dollars in investment to support the development of in-demand chips needed to power the electricity-hungry data centers that run the sector’s complex models….
Google warns of legit VPN apps being used to infect devices with malware
So-called Playfulghost attackers use both SEO poisoning and phishing tacticsAttackers are reportedly using popular VPN applications as a backdoor to inject malware and gain remote control of infected devices.
This is the worrying finding coming from Google’s Managed Defense team, which shed light on how malicious actors employ SEO poisoning tactics to spread what’s known as Playfulghost malware.
“The malware is bundled with popular applications, like LetsVPN, and distributed through SEO poisoning,” wrote the expert. “This involves manipulating search engine results to make the bundled software appear at the top of searches, making it seem like a legitimate download.”
Phishing attacks, meaning malicious emails that trick users into clicking on dangerous links to download malware, are another known distribution method.
The dangers of the Playfulghost backdoor
As Google’s expert explains in a blog post, Playfulghost is “a backdoor that shares functionality with Gh0st RAT.” The latter is a remote administration tool that has been known among the security community since 2008.
Playfulghost, however, has distinct traffic patterns and encryption that differentiate it from the known threat…
UnitedHealth cyberattack exposes 190 million in largest US healthcare data breach
What you need to know to stay safe
UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare unit suffered a data breach in February 2024, the news of which surfaced Feb. 21.
Initially reported to have affected around 100 million individuals, the U.S. health insurance giant has now revealed that the actual number is significantly higher: 190 million. This makes it the largest breach of medical data in U.S. history, affecting nearly half the country’s population.
A breach of this magnitude can have devastating consequences for the American people as malicious actors could exploit the data for a range of attacks if it finds its way to the dark web.
The updated impact assessment
UnitedHealth confirmed on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025, that the ransomware attack on its Change Healthcare unit affected approximately 190 million people in the United States. The company had previously estimated the number of affected individuals to be around 100 million…
Hackers Hide Malware in Images to Deploy VIP Keylogger and 0bj3ctivity Stealer
Threat actors have been observed concealing malicious code in images to deliver malware such as VIP Keylogger and 0bj3ctivity Stealer as part of separate campaigns.
“In both campaigns, attackers hid malicious code in images they uploaded to archive[.]org, a file-hosting website, and used the same .NET loader to install their final payloads,” HP Wolf Security said in its Threat Insights Report for Q3 2024 shared with The Hacker News.
The starting point is a phishing email that masquerades as invoices and purchase orders to trick recipients into opening malicious attachments, such as Microsoft Excel documents, that, when opened, exploits a known security flaw in Equation Editor (CVE-2017-11882) to download a VBScript file…
Thanks for reading this week’s Thursday Newbytes. We hope these articles were informative, interesting, fun, and helpful.
