By Manuel Faust I need to say something that might make CS leaders uncomfortable: most of what your team does before a renewal is valuable, but it’s listening to only one channel. Your EBRs, your health scores, your stakeholder maps. They capture what your customer is willing to tell you directly. What they don’t capture is the conversation […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, creator of the viral OpenClaw AI assistant, to spearhead development of what CEO Sam Altman describes as “the next generation of personal agents.”

The move comes weeks after OpenClaw, previously known as Clawdbot and then Moltbot, achieved explosive popularity despite security researchers warning of serious vulnerabilities in the open-source tool.

Steinberger will join OpenAI full-time to drive the company’s personal agent strategy. OpenClaw will operate as an open source project under an independent foundation that OpenAI will support, Altman said on X.

“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” Altman wrote.

The appointment is significant because OpenClaw demonstrated strong market demand for agents that can execute tasks autonomously, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. The project accumulated over 145,000 GitHub stars in weeks despite security concerns.

“The hiring matters because OpenClaw sits at the edge where conversational AI becomes actionable AI,” Gogia said. “It moves from drafting to doing.”

In a blog post, Steinberger said the opportunity to build agents at scale convinced him to join a large organization after years of entrepreneurship. “The vision of truly useful personal agents — ones that can help with real work, not just answer questions — requires resources and infrastructure that only a handful of companies can provide,” he wrote.

He said OpenClaw will continue evolving as an open-source project. “This isn’t an acqui-hire where a project gets shut down. I’ll still be involved in guiding its direction, just with significantly more resources behind it.”

OpenClaw gives AI models the ability to interact with desktop environments, executing actions like clicking buttons, filling forms, and navigating between applications. Unlike traditional robotic process automation tools relying on pre-programmed scripts, OpenClaw-powered agents can adapt to interface changes and make contextual decisions.

Steinberger, who founded and sold PDF toolkit company PSPDFKit to Nutrient in 2024, began OpenClaw as a weekend project in November 2025.

Orchestration over intelligence

Altman’s emphasis on multi-agent systems reflects a broader competitive shift in AI, according to analysts. The race is moving from model intelligence to runtime orchestration.

That orchestration layer, encompassing model coordination, tool invocation, persistent context management, connector standards, identity enforcement, policy controls, and human override mechanisms, is becoming the competitive battleground, Gogia said.

“What differentiates vendors now is not the existence of agents, but how they structure control,” Gogia added.

Anthropic has advanced computer use patterns in Claude, Microsoft has invested heavily in multi-agent orchestration through AutoGen and Copilot, and Google’s Project Astra points toward ambient multimodal assistance.

Deployment lags hype

Despite the competitive rush, enterprise deployment remains limited. According to Gartner research, only 8% of organizations have AI agents in production. Success rates drop sharply as agent workflows scale, with compound reliability falling below 50% after just thirteen sequential steps, even assuming 95% per-step reliability.

“It will still take a few years for AI agents to handle complex, multistep workflows,” said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Organizations would essentially need ‘an agentic brain’, something that can create, run, and manage workflows.”

Security poses another challenge. Prompt injection becomes more dangerous when agents can take actions, and agents require governance similar to privileged user accounts—including role-based permissions, audit logging, and human checkpoints for critical actions.

Currently, agents are seeing success in bounded use cases like IT ticket triage and data extraction, but struggle with cross-system workflows involving financial commitments or regulated decisions.

Open-source commitment

OpenAI’s decision to maintain OpenClaw as an open source project could help address some enterprise security concerns by allowing organizations to audit code and customize implementations. However, open-source transparency alone doesn’t eliminate enterprise requirements around security controls, support models, and accountability, according to Gogia.

Neither Altman nor Steinberger provided specifics about when agent capabilities might appear in OpenAI’s commercial products, though Altman indicated the technology would “quickly become core to our product offerings.”

Questions remain about how OpenClaw’s framework will integrate with OpenAI’s existing products and whether OpenAI will address security concerns that affected the open-source version.

Source:: Computer World

By Omair Khaliq Sultan If you’ve been hanging onto an older Apple Watch and telling yourself “it still works,” this is the kind of deal that makes upgrading feel simple. Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS) is $299, down from a $399 retail value, saving you $100. The other reason it matters: this price is tied to a deal countdown, […] The post Apple Watch Series 11 hits $299 in a fast-ending deal, a great excuse to finally upgrade appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nadeem Sarwar Gemini 3 Deep Think is focused on scientific and engineering work, and it’s now now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app.
The post Google boosts Gemini 3 Deep Think AI and it’s a huge milestone for 3D printing appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc The 62nd Munich Security Conference opened on 13 February 2026 in Munich, Germany, and this year’s gathering feels different from past editions. For decades, Munich was about jets, troops, and treaties. Today, cyber and AI are no longer peripheral; they are part of the architecture of security itself. Cyber risks, digital infrastructure, and emerging technologies […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

With a new Gartner report suggesting that AI problems will “shut down national critical infrastructure” in a major country by 2028, CIOs need to rethink industrial controls that are very quickly being turned over to autonomous agents.

Gartner embraces the term Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) for these technologies, which it defines as “engineered systems that orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world (including humans). CPS is the umbrella term to encompass operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), industrial automation and control systems (IACS), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robots, drones, or Industry 4.0.”

The issue it cites is not so much one of AI systems making mistakes along the lines of hallucinations, although that is certainly a concern, but that the systems won’t notice subtle changes that experienced operational managers would detect. And when it comes to directly controlling critical infrastructure, relatively small errors can mushroom into disasters.

“The next great infrastructure failure may not be caused by hackers or natural disasters, but rather by a well-intentioned engineer, a flawed update script, or a misplaced decimal,” said Wam Voster, VP Analyst at Gartner. “A secure ‘kill-switch’ or override mode accessible only to authorized operators is essential for safeguarding national infrastructure from unintended shutdowns caused by an AI misconfiguration.”

“Modern AI models are so complex they often resemble black boxes. Even developers cannot always predict how small configuration changes will impact the emergent behavior of the model. The more opaque these systems become, the greater the risk posed by misconfiguration. Hence, it is even more important that humans can intervene when needed,” Voster added.

Enterprise CIOs and other IT leaders have been aware of the industrial AI risks for years, and have had guidance on how to mitigate those critical infrastructure risks. But as autonomous AI has exponentially expanded its system controls, the dangers have also expanded. 

Matt Morris, founder of Ghostline Strategies, said one challenge with industrial AI controls is that they can be weak at detecting model drift. 

“Let’s say I tell it ‘I want you to monitor this pressure valve.’ And then, slowly, the normal readings start to drift over time,” Morris said. Will the system consider that change just background noise, given that it might think all systems change a bit during operations? Or will it know that this is a hint of a potentially massive problem, as an experienced human manager would? 

Despite these and other questions, “companies are implementing AI super fast, faster than they realize,” Morris said. 

Industrial AI moving too fast

Flavio Villanustre, CISO for the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, said he has also seen indicators that AI might be taking over too much too fast.

“When AI is controlling environment systems or power generators, the combination of complexity and non-deterministic behaviors can create consequences that can be quite dire,” he said. Boards and CEOs think, “’AI is going to give me this productivity boost and reduce my costs.’ But the risks that they are acquiring can be far larger than the potential gains.”

Villanustre fears that boards and CEOs may not apply the brakes on industrial autonomous AI until after their enterprise suffers a catastrophe. “[But] I don’t think that [board members] are evil, just incredibly reckless,” he said.

Cybersecurity consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, agreed that the risks are extreme: extremely dangerous and extremely likely.

“Critical infrastructure runs on brittle layers of automation stitched together over decades. Add autonomous AI agents on top of that, and you’ve built a Jenga tower in a hurricane,” Levine said. “It is helpful for organizations, especially those operating critical infrastructure, to adopt and measure their maturity, using respected frameworks for AI safety and security.”

Bob Wilson, cybersecurity advisor at the Info-Tech Research Group, also worries about the near inevitability of a serious industrial AI mishap.

“The plausibility of a disaster that results from a bad AI decision is quite strong. With AI becoming embedded in enterprise strategies faster than governance frameworks can keep up, AI systems are advancing faster and outpacing risk controls,” Wilson said. “We can see the leading indicators of rapid AI deployment and limited governance increase potential exposure, and those indicators justify investments in governance and operational controls.”

Wilson noted that companies must explore new ways of looking at industrial AI controls. 

“AI can almost be seen as an insider, and governance should be in place to manage that AI entity as a potential accidental insider threat,” he said. “Prevention in this case begins with tight governance over who can make changes to AI settings and configurations, how those changes are tested, how the rollout of those changes is managed, and how quickly those changes can be rolled back. We do see that this kind of risk is amplified by a widening gap between AI adoption and governance maturity, where organizations deploy AI faster than they establish the controls needed to manage its operational and safety impact.”

Thus, he said, companies should set up a business risk program with a governing body that defines and manages those risks, monitoring AI for behavior changes.

Reframe how AI is managed

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said addressing this problem requires executives to first reframe the structural questions. 

“Most enterprises still talk about AI inside operational environments as if it were an analytics layer, something clever sitting on top of infrastructure. That framing is already outdated,” he said. “The moment an AI system influences a physical process, even indirectly, it stops being an analytics tool, it becomes part of the control system. And once it becomes part of the control system, it inherits the responsibilities of safety engineering.”

He noted that the consequences of misconfiguration in cyber physical environments differ from those in traditional IT estates, where outages or instability may result.

“In cyber physical environments, misconfiguration interacts with physics. A badly tuned threshold in a predictive model, a configuration tweak that alters sensitivity to anomaly detection, a smoothing algorithm that unintentionally filters weak signals, or a quiet shift in telemetry scaling can all change how the system behaves,” he said. “Not catastrophically at first. Subtly. And in tightly coupled infrastructure, subtle is often how cascade begins.”

He added: “Organizations should require explicit articulation of worst-case behavioral scenarios for every AI-enabled operational component. If demand signals are misinterpreted, what happens? If telemetry shifts gradually, how does sensitivity change? If thresholds are misaligned, what boundary condition prevents runaway behavior? When teams cannot answer these questions clearly, governance maturity is incomplete.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Source:: Computer World

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seems to be doubling down on its investigation of Microsoft and the tech giant’s potentially shady bundling and licensing practices.

According to a Bloomberg report, the federal agency has been issuing civil investigative demands (CIDs) to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets.

CIDs are powerful, subpoena-like mandates used by government agencies to investigate potential violations of civil law, typically before a formal complaint or lawsuit is filed.

According to inside sources, at least a half-dozen companies have received these requests, which ask a range of questions around Microsoft’s licensing and other business practices, the report said. The FTC is also seeking information on Microsoft’s bundling of AI, security, and identity software into other products, including Windows and Office.

This development is the latest in an ongoing, nearly year-and-a-half-long probe into whether the company is illegally monopolizing several markets critical to modern enterprises. It also seems to indicate that the federal government is seeking evidence that Microsoft makes it difficult, more expensive, or near-impossible for companies to use Windows, Office, or other of its products on competitors’ cloud services.

“To say MSFT is a serial offender with regard to stretching the limits of anti-trust law would be the understatement of the century,” said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group. “Microsoft embodies the mantra of ‘beg forgiveness vs asking permission’ and leverages its scale to force bundled products upon its customer base.”

Licensing and bundling tactics could crowd out competitors

The FTC launched its wide-ranging investigation into Microsoft in November 2024, issuing a CID compelling the company to turn over roughly a decade’s worth of data about its operations (from 2016 to 2025).

The agency is closely examining the tech giant’s age-old practice of bundling its Office productivity and security software in with its cloud services. This could potentially violate antitrust laws if the company is exploiting its dominance in the productivity space to gain unfair advantages in cloud computing and cybersecurity markets.

Notably, the FTC is looking into how Microsoft structures licensing in a way that impedes customers from switching to rival offerings. This would constitute unfair practice and put competitors at a disadvantage.

Microsoft has fought back against the claims, and, following complaints across global markets, made some changes intended to loosen its policies. For instance, recent decisions in the EU forced the unbundling of Teams from the Office suite. However, this “ironically resulted in net higher pricing for EU consumers,” said Info-Tech’s Bickley.

Additionally, the CISPE consortium of European cloud providers reached an agreement with Microsoft in mid-2025; the cloud giant agreed to pay €20 million ($23.7 million today) to smaller cloud providers excluded from offering Microsoft services under a hosted model, and to update its software licensing terms to allow European providers to run Microsoft software on their own platforms at prices equal to Microsoft’s.

However, Bickley pointed out, recent complaints allege that the company has not delivered on this promise.

It’s important to note that these “half-hearted measures” in the EU do not apply to US-based Microsoft customers, he pointed out. Allegations around product tying, notably with Microsoft 365, continue to arise regularly in the US.

For instance, Microsoft’s Listed Providers program does not allow Microsoft on-premises software to be deployed on certain dedicated hosted cloud services, including rivals Amazon, Google, and Alibaba, without mobility rights and Software Assurance (SA), its volume licensing support add-on. Bickley pointed out that Microsoft “strategically” excludes products from its License Mobility program which allows customers to move workloads to other clouds.

Some of these excluded products and applications include Windows Server, Visual Studio, Windows desktop OS, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft 365. Previously, such products could be deployed in a dedicated cloud environment, but Microsoft changed the rules in October 2019, restricting this option to licenses purchased with SA and mobility rights. Bickley pointed out that this only applies to Listed Providers and excludes traditional outsourcing services.

In other questionable commercial practices, Microsoft also makes the purchase of its Microsoft 365 E5 top-tier subscription plan the “only viable short-term economic choice” compared to cheaper options like Microsoft 365 E3, even where the purchase results in a “material amount of shelfware,” said Bickley. 

“Licensing of several security products is obscure, and upon audit, Microsoft frequently forces customers to upgrade their entire suite to E5 in order to attain compliance,” he noted.

Future concerns will likely center around potential bundling or integration of AI services such as Microsoft Copilot, “for which the consumption metrics will be ambiguous and [the services will be] difficult, if not impossible, to disable for IT administrators,” said Bickley.

Relationship with OpenAI

While much of the initial query, and subsequent ones, have focused on licensing and bundling, the FTC is also looking into the company’s relationship with OpenAI, and raising questions about Microsoft’s data centers, capacity constraints, and AI spending and research.

Notably, the tech giant’s initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI has grown into a multi-billion-dollar partnership, with Microsoft rolling out ChatGPT-powered features across its product line in 2023. The FTC is examining whether the relationship is an undisclosed merger that should have been subject to antitrust review.

Further, the federal agency is scrutinizing Microsoft’s alleged decision to scale back its own AI research following the OpenAI investment, potentially reducing competition.

Tactics ‘remarkably the same’

Ultimately, all of this recalls the industry-shaping 1990s US federal investigation into Microsoft’s monopoly of desktop software and web browsers. A federal judge ruled at the time that the company deliberately built the Internet Explorer (IE) browser into Windows to edge out rivals like the now-defunct Netscape.

And, analysts note, it’s an indication that Microsoft hasn’t learned from those past lessons.

“While technology and trends may have evolved since Microsoft’s first anti-trust case in 1998, where they were forced to unbundle IE from Windows OS, their tactics have stayed remarkably the same,” Bickley noted.

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Source:: Computer World

By Varun Mirchandani OpenAI is retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and other older models in ChatGPT to focus development on newer, improved GPT versions.
The post Your favorite old ChatGPT models are going away appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

Each month, the team at Readiness analyzes the latest Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance. The company’s Patch Tuesday release for February addresses 59 CVEs across the company’s product family — roughly half the volume of January’s 159 patches.

Six vulnerabilities, affecting Windows Shell, MSHTML, Desktop Window Manager, Remote Desktop, Remote Access, and Microsoft Word, are already being actively exploited. (All five Critical-rated CVEs target Azure services rather than Windows, however.) 

Both Windows and Office get a “Patch Now “recommendation, with CISA setting a March 3 enforcement deadline for all six exploited vulnerabilities. Two new enforcement timelines also take effect in April: Kerberos RC4 deprecation (CVE-2026-20833) and Windows Deployment Services hardening (CVE-2026-0386).

(More information about recent Patch Tuesday releases is available here.)

Known issues

February is a notably clean month for known issues. All three desktop KB articles — KB5077181 (Windows 11 25H2/24H2), KB5075941 (Windows 11 23H2), and KB5075912 (Windows 10 22H2) — explicitly state that Microsoft is not currently aware of any issues. This is a welcome contrast to January, which was one of the rougher months in recent memory.

Two ongoing known issues remain:

CVE-2025-59287:  Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) — Error reporting intentionally disabled since October 2025 to mitigate this critical CVSS 9.8 unauthenticated RCE. Synchronization error details remain suppressed and Microsoft has not yet posted a fix or remediation strategy.

Windows Update Standalone Installer (WUSA) — Fails to install .msu packages from network shares containing multiple .msu files (ERROR_BAD_PATHNAME). This vulnerability has been mitigated via a Known Issue Rollback policy.

Issues resolved this month

February’s cumulative updates resolve several issues from January’s less-than-glorious cycle:

Windows Secure Launch — VSM shutdown and hibernation failure on Intel processors; devices restarted instead of powering off. Fixed in KB5077181, KB5075941, and KB5075912.

Microsoft OneDrive / Microsoft Outlook — Cloud storage integrations caused applications to hang when opening or saving files. (Now included in this month’s cumulative updates.)

These issues were originally addressed through three separate emergency out-of-band releases: (KB5077744 on Jan. 17, KB5078127 on Jan. 24, and the Jan. 29 preview). Organizations that deferred those updates will receive the fixes in this month’s cumulative package. But the operational regressions were only part of January’s disruption; Microsoft also shipped an emergency security patch for an actively exploited Office zero-day on Jan. 26.

Major revisions and mitigations

That emergency out-of-band security update for Office vulnerability was  the only major inter-cycle security revision this month:

CVE-2026-21509 (Microsoft Office) — Security feature bypass that circumvents OLE mitigations, exposing users to vulnerable COM/OLE controls via malicious documents. CVSS 7.8; the Preview Pane is not an attack vector. Added to the CISA KEV catalog with a federal remediation deadline of Feb. 16 (this coming Monday), no further action is needed if the out-of-band update was already applied.

Windows lifecycle and enforcement updates

Two new enforcement timelines were introduced with the January updates, alongside several ongoing transitions that enterprise teams should be tracking. As we noted in January, the Secure Boot certificate deadlines remain the most time-sensitive:

CVE-2026-20833 — Windows Kerberos — RC4 encryption is being phased out for service account ticket issuance. In April: default changes to AES-SHA1 for accounts without an explicit msds-SupportedEncryptionTypes attribute. In July: enforcement phase removes the RC4DefaultDisablementPhase registry override entirely. Action: Audit service accounts for explicit encryption type attributes before April; to ensure no dependencies on RC4-only authentication.

CVE-2026-0386 — Windows Deployment Services (WDS) — Hands-free deployment hardening. April: disabled by default with a secure-by-default posture, it can be re-enabled via registry settings (with an understanding of the associated security risks). Action: Organizations using WDS for unattended OS deployment should plan for registry overrides or migrate to alternative deployment tooling before April.

CVE-2023-24932 — Windows Secure Boot — As we explained in January, the enforcement phase remains scheduled for “not before January 2026” with at least six months advance notice. When enforced, the Windows Production PCA 2011 certificate will be automatically revoked and added to the Secure Boot UEFI Forbidden List (DBX) on capable devices. This will be programmatic with no option to disable. Action: Verify that managed devices are receiving the updated 2023 certificates through Windows quality updates, and review Microsoft’s Secure Boot playbook.

As a reminder, the Secure Boot certificates issued in 2011 begin expiring this year. Devices that do not receive the updated 2023 certificates might fail to boot securely. We covered this in detail in our January post;  admins must verify certificate status on managed devices and install the 2023 CAs before June

Six vulnerabilities are being actively exploited, spanning the Desktop Window Manager, Windows Shell, Remote Desktop Services, Internet Explorer mode, Remote Access, and Microsoft Word. One cumulative update component has been flagged as high risk, affecting Secure Boot and system power state transitions. And Microsoft has introduced a functional change to LDAP that restricts unauthenticated queries on Windows Server 2025. 

Organizations should prioritize patching for the actively exploited vulnerabilities and validate power management changes before broad deployment.

Secure Boot and Power Management (High Risk)

Updates to the Secure Kernel and SecureBootAI components have been flagged as high risk by Microsoft. These changes affect how Windows handles power state transitions on Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 10 22H2 systems. Given the potential for boot and resume failures, thorough testing is essential before rolling out to production:

Initiate system shutdown using the Start menu and verify the system fully powers off; leave powered down for at least five minutes before restarting

Initiate system shutdown via command line (shutdown /s /t 0) and verify full power-off

Test system hibernation and confirm it resumes to the same state after at least five minutes, with previously open windows and applications restored

Test system sleep and wake, confirming the system returns to its prior state

Verify BitLocker-protected devices boot without recovery key prompts after applying the update

Windows Shell and Internet Explorer (actively exploited)

Two actively exploited security feature bypass flaws affect the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer MSHTML platform this month. The Shell vulnerability (CVE-2026-21510) carries a CVSS score of 8.8 and could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions. The Internet Explorer vulnerability (CVE-2026-21513), also scored at 8.8, affects the MSHTML rendering engine that remains active in Windows — even when IE is not the default browser — including IE mode in Microsoft Edge:

Verify that Mark of the Web warnings appear correctly when opening files downloaded from the internet.

Test SmartScreen protection for downloaded executables and scripts.

If IE mode is enabled in Microsoft Edge, test that enterprise intranet sites load correctly and security zone restrictions are enforced.

Verify that UAC prompts and security dialogs display properly when executing downloaded content.

Remote Desktop and Remote Access (actively exploited)

Windows Remote Desktop Services and the Remote Access Connection Manager each received patches for actively exploited vulnerabilities. The Remote Desktop vulnerability (CVE-2026-21533) is an elevation of privilege issue scored at 7.8, while the Remote Access Connection Manager vulnerability (CVE-2026-21525) is a denial of service issue scored at 6.2. 

Organizations that rely on RDP for administration or remote work should prioritize testing:

Test Remote Desktop connections to both server and client machines, verifying session establishment, credential handling, and session disconnect and reconnect.

Verify that Remote Desktop Gateway connections function correctly if used in your environment.

Test VPN and DirectAccess connections through the Remote Access Connection Manager.

Validate that remote access services remain stable under sustained connection load.

Networking and connectivity

Several core networking components received updates, including the Ancillary Function Driver (afd.sys), Connected Devices Platform (cdpsvc.dll), HTTP protocol stack (http.sys), and WLAN service (wlansvc.dll). None are flagged as high risk, but the breadth of changes across network subsystems warrants attention from enterprise teams managing diverse connectivity scenarios:

Send and receive packets over the network, including large file transfers over IPv6.

Test network connectivity through web browsing, messaging programs such as Microsoft Teams, and file upload and download.

Validate Nearby sharing and VPN connectivity, ensuring file transfers complete successfully.

Test web services that send responses with trailing headers under both normal and high-load conditions; look for response corruption, missing trailers, or unexpected connection drops.

Run WinHTTP and HTTP.sys QUIC client tests to verify SSL certificate handling.

Test Wi-Fi connectivity including enterprise and private networks, network discovery, automatic reconnection, and roaming behavior.

Validate Wi-Fi power management scenarios such as sleep during active connection, confirming connectivity resumes after wake.

Virtualization

Hyper-V core components (computecore.dll, vmcompute.dll, vmwp.exe) and the hypervisor binaries (hvax64.exe, hvix64.exe) have both been updated. These affect virtual machine lifecycle operations across Windows 11 24H2/25H2 and all server editions:

Enable the Hyper-V role and create a virtual machine.

Validate VM lifecycle operations: start, shutdown, reboot, pause, resume, save, and restore.

Test VM export and import scenarios.

Verify that existing VMs start and operate correctly after applying the update.

Graphics and DirectComposition

The Desktop Window Manager core (dwmcore.dll) received updates affecting visual composition on Windows 11 24H2/25H2 and Windows 10 1607. This includes a patch for an actively exploited elevation of privilege vulnerability (CVE-2026-21519) scored at 7.8, alongside updates to the GDI+ and Graphics Component. Applications using the Microsoft DirectComposition API should be validated:

Test applications that use the Microsoft DirectComposition API.

Verify that desktop animations, transparency effects, and window transitions render correctly.

Test multi-monitor configurations with different DPI scaling.

Server components

Several server-specific components received updates. Most notably, a functional change to the LDAP client library (wldap32.dll) on Server 2025 now restricts the number of values returned in a multi-value property during unauthenticated LDAP searches to 10,000 values. This is the only behavioral change in this release. Authenticated connections are not affected, but organizations with directory synchronization workflows should validate:

LDAP (Server 2025): Confirm that directory synchronization for groups exceeding 10,000 users succeeds over authenticated connections and is correctly restricted over unauthenticated connections.

System Events: Open a PowerShell window without admin privileges and run Get-WinEvent -ListLog “Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-ShimEngine/Operational” to confirm an insufficient permissions error appears.

Microsoft Office applications

Microsoft released security updates for Excel 2016 (KB5002837), Word 2016 (KB5002839), and Office 2016 (KB5002713), alongside updates for SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, Subscription Edition, and Office Online Server. The Word update addresses an actively exploited security feature bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-21514) scored at 7.8. An Outlook vulnerability (CVE-2026-21511) rated as “exploitation more likely” was also patched. These updates are for MSI-based installations only and will not apply to Click-to-Run deployments such as Microsoft 365.

Open and edit complex Excel workbooks with formulas, macros, and external data connections.

Test Word document formatting, embedded objects, and mail merge scenarios.

Validate SharePoint document library operations, co-authoring, and workflow execution.

Verify that Office add-ins continue to function after applying updates.

Test Outlook email rendering, attachment handling, and security prompts when opening messages with embedded content.

Microsoft .NET Framework

February’s release includes updated SDK and runtime packages for .NET 8.0 (8.0.418), .NET 9.0 (9.0.114 and 9.0.311), and .NET 10.0 (10.0.103), available in both x64 and x86 variants. No application rebuilds or configuration changes are expected.

Confirm that existing .NET applications start and execute correctly after installing the update.

Test runtime initialization, common framework functionality including file I/O, networking, cryptography, and threading.

Validate ASP.NET Core workloads where applicable.

Test COSE message signature verification scenarios if your applications use the CoseMessage.DecodeSign1 method.

With six vulnerabilities actively exploited, patching urgency is high despite the lighter overall volume. Prioritize the Windows Shell, Internet Explorer/MSHTML, Remote Desktop, Remote Access, Desktop Window Manager, and Word patches first. Organizations using IE mode in Edge or relying on RDP for remote access should treat these as critical.

The Secure Boot and power management changes are flagged as high risk by Microsoft and should be validated next, as boot and power state failures can render devices unusable. The LDAP functional change on Server 2025 is the only behavioral change this month and could impact directory synchronization workflows that rely on unauthenticated queries returning large result sets. Server administrators should verify that their synchronization pipelines remain functional after patching.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings: 

Browsers (Microsoft IE and Edge) 

Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server) 

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Developer Tools (Visual Studio and .NET)

Adobe (if you get this far) 

Microsoft Windows

None of this month’s five Critical-rated CVEs affect Windows directly — all target Azure services. However, five of the six actively exploited zero-days are Windows components:

CVE-2026-21510 — Windows Shell — Security feature bypass (CVSS 8.8); circumvents SmartScreen and Shell warnings via malicious link or shortcut file. Publicly disclosed and actively exploited.

CVE-2026-21513 — MSHTML Framework — Security feature bypass (CVSS 8.8); the MSHTML rendering engine remains active in Windows, even when IE is not the default browser, including through IE mode in Edge. Publicly disclosed and actively exploited.

CVE-2026-21519 — Desktop Window Manager — Elevation of privilege (CVSS 7.8); type confusion allowing SYSTEM escalation. Actively exploited.

CVE-2026-21533 — Windows Remote Desktop Services — Elevation of privilege (CVSS 7.8); improper privilege management allowing SYSTEM escalation. Actively exploited.

CVE-2026-21525 — Windows Remote Access Connection Manager — Denial of service (CVSS 6.2); null pointer dereference. Actively exploited.

CISA has added all six actively exploited vulnerabilities to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with an enforcement deadline of March 3. Additional Windows components receiving updates include the Ancillary Function Driver (afd.sys), HTTP protocol stack (http.sys), Hyper-V, Secure Boot, LDAP, and GDI+ — none critical or actively exploited, but the breadth of changes warrants testing before broad deployment.

With actively exploited vulnerabilities and a CISA deadline of March 3, this is a Patch Now release for Windows; confirmed in-the-wild exploitation across Shell, MSHTML, DWM, Remote Desktop, and Remote Access leaves little room for delay.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft released security updates for Word 2016 (KB5002839), Excel 2016 (KB5002837), and Office 2016 (KB5002713), alongside updates for SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, Subscription Edition, and Office Online Server. These updates apply to MSI-based installations only and don’t apply to Click-to-Run deployments such as Microsoft 365:

CVE-2026-21514 — Microsoft Word — Security feature bypass (CVSS 7.8) is the sixth actively exploited zero-day in this release. It requires a user to open a malicious Office document; the Preview Pane is not an attack vector. The CISA KEV enforcement deadline is March 3.

CVE-2026-21511 — Microsoft Outlook — Spoofing vulnerability (CVSS 7.5) resulting from untrusted data deserialization via crafted email. Rated “Exploitation More Likely” by Microsoft.

Combined with the emergency out-of-band patch for CVE-2026-21509 (covered in Major Revisions above), Office has seen two actively exploited vulnerabilities in a single cycle. This is a Patch Now release for Office. Organizations running MSI-based Office 2016 or 2019 should ensure both the February cumulative updates and the Jan. 26 out-of-band update have been applied.

Microsoft Edge and Chromium

Microsoft Edge 144.0.3719.115, released Feb. 5, incorporates the latest upstream Chromium security fixes. As of Feb. 11, Microsoft has confirmed awareness of additional Chromium fixes and is actively working on a further Edge security release. On the Chromium side, Google shipped Chrome 145 on Feb. 10, addressing 11 security vulnerabilities:

CVE-2026-2313 — Chromium CSS — Use-after-free (High severity).

CVE-2026-2314 — Chromium Codecs — Heap buffer overflow (High severity).

CVE-2026-2315 — WebGPU — Inappropriate implementation (High severity).

The remaining eight fixes address medium and low severity issues across Frames, Animation, PictureInPicture, DevTools, File input, Ozone, and Downloads. These Chromium fixes will flow into a future Edge stable release. Enterprise teams managing Edge deployments can track updates via the Edge Security Release Notes.

Developer tools

A single security vulnerability was addressed across .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, and .NET 10.0:

CVE-2026-21218 — .NET Runtime — Security feature bypass (CVSS 7.5). Updated runtime and SDK packages: .NET 8.0.24, .NET 9.0.13, and .NET 10.0.3, available in both x64 and x86 variants.

Microsoft .NET Framework received no updates this month, and no application rebuilds or configuration changes are expected. Add these updates to your standard deployment schedule.

Adobe and third-party updates

February is a welcome reprieve from the (patching) challenges of January — a clean month for known issues, half the CVE volume, and no critical Windows vulnerabilities. 

That said, six actively exploited zero-days and an emergency OOB Office patch between cycles is hardly an easy life for IT administrators. With the Secure Boot and power management changes flagged as high risk, and printing and Win32 rendering components targeted for future updates, enterprise teams would be wise to keep their out-of-band response playbooks close at hand over the coming weeks.

Source:: Computer World

By Moinak Pal Meta is reportedly working on adding facial recognition to its smart glasses, allowing wearers to identify people through an AI-powered feature called “Name Tag.”
The post Meta’s smart glasses could soon identify people in real time appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc London-based deep tech startup Stanhope AI has closed a €6.7 million ($8 million) Seed funding round to advance what it calls a new class of adaptive artificial intelligence designed to power autonomous systems in the physical world. The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Paladin Capital Group, Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, UCL […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc Anthropic has just closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, pushing its valuation to $380 billion and catapulting it into the rarefied ranks of the most valuable private tech companies in the world. The financing was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue, with backing from a long list of […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Manisha Priyadarshini Diesel’s new wired earphones lean hard into Y2K style that they feel more like a denim accessory than audio gear, complete with a heavy chain design inspired by classic wallet chains.
The post Diesel’s new wired earphones look better suited for denims than your ears appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Deepti Pathak Panasonic has launched its 2026 Residential Smart AC series in the Indian market. The series is…
The post Panasonic Introduces 57 New Smart AC Models in India: Prices Start at ₹32,490 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

A blind spot in Microsoft’s app and add-in marketplace security allowed an eagle-eyed hacker to hijack an abandoned Outlook add-in to carry out phishing attacks that compromised 4,000 users, researchers have discovered.

The app in question, AgreeTo, is, or was, a meeting scheduling tool that first appeared in 2022 but was abandoned at some point after that by its developer. Despite this, the add-in continued to be listed on Microsoft’s site.

A hacker noticed the change in its status and hijacked the dead add-in and its 4.71-star rating to conduct a phishing campaign that the company which uncovered the attack, plug-in security company Koi Security, later discovered had successfully stolen thousands of Microsoft account credentials.

Was it a clever takeover by a sophisticated attacker? In fact, according to Koi Security, the hijack was easy, thanks to weaknesses in the process through which developers submit add-ins to Microsoft’s marketplace.

Submitting an add-in to Microsoft merely involves sending a simple XML manifest that lists the add-in’s name and description, the URL from which it is downloaded, and any permissions it needs.

No code is uploaded for assessment. AgreeTo’s manifest simply linked to a subdomain URL, outlook-one.vercel.app, hosted on the Vercel development platform, from which users download the software.

“Microsoft reviews the manifest, signs it, and lists the add-in in their store. But the actual content – the UI, the logic, everything the user interacts with – is fetched live from the developer’s server every time the add-in opens,” said Koi Security’s researchers.

Orphaned URL

By grabbing the abandoned subdomain, the attacker gained control of whatever the URL in the original manifest pointed to. This content was replaced with a new URL pointing to a phishing kit comprising a fake Microsoft sign-in page for password collection, an exfiltration script, and a redirect. The original manifest also granted the attacker permission to read and modify emails.

“They didn’t submit anything to Microsoft. They weren’t required to pass any review. They didn’t create a store listing. The listing already existed – Microsoft-reviewed, Microsoft-signed, Microsoft-distributed. The attacker just claimed an orphaned URL, and Microsoft’s infrastructure did the rest,” said Koi Security.

Phished credentials and victim IP addresses were automatically sent to the attacker via a simple Telegram bot, without the need for complex command & control, Koi Security said.

The researchers were able to get inside this infrastructure, discovering that 4,000 victims had fallen into the attacker’s phishing trap; all were later contacted by Koi Security to warn that their credentials had been compromised.

The same attacker was found to be operating 12 different phishing kits impersonating a variety of banks and webmail providers, Koi Security added. Data stolen from these sites included credit card numbers, CVVs, PINs, and banking security answers used by recipients to receive payments made via the Interac e-Transfer system, as well as password credentials.

The weakness revealed by the AgreeTo hijack is Microsoft’s add-in delivery architecture; it just distributes a simple, and potentially unreliable, URL. Because of this, Koi Security pointed out, “an add-in that’s clean on Monday can serve a phishing page on Tuesday – or, as in this case, years later. Microsoft reviews the manifest at submission, but the actual content can change at any time without further review.”

Ironically, the weakness was identified as long ago as 2019 by another security company, MDSec. AgreeTo is believed to be the first malicious Outlook add-in ever discovered on the Microsoft Marketplace, which might explain why deeper URL checking wasn’t implemented after this research.

As of February 12, the AgreeTo add-in is no longer available from Microsoft Marketplace. Anyone still using AgreeTo is advised to remove it as soon as possible, and to reset their Microsoft account passwords.

A separate AgreeTo extension for Chrome stopped working in 2024; Google removed it in February 2025.

Source:: Computer World

By Krittika Owary According to an engineering psychology expert, autonomous car drivers have come to face a vigilance task, raising questions on the convenience of self-driving cars.
The post A key flaw of self-driving cars could just be poor understanding of humans appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Hisan Kidwai Welcome to 2026. It’s the year we all hoped PC hardware would finally get cheaper, so…
The post The HyperX Cloud Jet Dual Wireless Are The Best Budget Gaming Headphones appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Omair Khaliq Sultan Over-ear headphones have basically split into two camps: ultra-premium pairs that cost a fortune, and budget models that cut corners where you’ll notice it most (comfort, noise canceling, or battery). The Nothing Headphone (1) lands in the middle in a way that makes sense, especially with today’s price drop. It’s $239.00 for a limited time, […] The post These new Nothing over-ears are built for long days, and they’re $60 off for a limited time appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source:: Digital Trends

Last-minute problems might have cropped up that will require Apple to slow the rollout of its Google Gemini-boosted Siri; though the improved smart assistant will still ship this year, it might not arrive as expected this spring.

These claims come from the eerily accurate fingers of Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, and mean Apple will have to continue to do its level best to manage the damage of its slow progress in generative AI (genAI). To be fair, the company does have a good story to tell when it comes to machine learning and intelligence and the application of those technologies in its devices, such as Hypertension Warnings on Apple Watch. 

Gurman explains how Apple had originally intended to release the new Gemini-augmented capabilities in iOS 26.4 next month, but will now introduce these improvements across future software updates. He explains that testing has revealed reliability problems, challenges with query processing accuracy, and slow response times. 

The queue at the store

To put this into context, it’s important to remember that Apple only revealed its Gemini deal in January after months of speculation. The company had been working with its own models in advance of this, and it seems it will continue to do so, introducing its own AI services for specific tasks when doing so makes any sense. 

Gurman warns that the contextual Siri, capable of using your personal data to inform useful responses and contextual answers to your queries, will be the last improvement to appear. Voice-based control of in-app actions is also running late, he said. 

That won’t matter much to Apple’s market competitors, critics, and commentators, who will continue to point out that the company originally promised these features would arrive with iOS 18 in 2024. 

That promise turned out to be built on sand. The Information even reported that most of the advanced features Apple originally promised at WWDC had not even been developed at the time the promise was made. (An Apple ad showing these features was removed, though you can still find it online.)

This caused grave concern across Apple’s senior leadership, with major changes and new management all put in place across Apple’s AI teams as a result. Despite the retirement of Apple’s then-AI leader John Giannandrea, reputational damage was done — and news of a further delay will likely tarnish Apple’s shine a bit more.

When it comes to Siri and AI, we’ve grown accustomed to delay and disappointment – something Apple doesn’t want to share with Siri’s millions of users. One in four smartphones are iPhones, and 19% of iPhone users interact with Siri daily.

Snatching victory one improvement at a time

That’s not a good place for Apple to be, but I can see how the company can turn it into something like a victory by doing as Gurman suggests — steadily shipping improved AI services as they are ready. This should make for real usability improvements for Apple’s customers and will also allow Apple the luxury of exploiting the best of these new services within wider launches; it could potentially introduce one or two of these in-development features at WWDC, along with the iPhone 17e and with new Macs, for example. 

For Apple, of course, the secondary risk is that the AI it is hoping to implement across its platforms might already seem outclassed by the capabilities other AI tools have by then achieved. After all, now that we have AI developing itself, the pace of change is accelerating. Can Apple keep up? Or will the company’s strategic approach — in which it provides the world’s best platforms for personal, private AI along with support for all the world’s leading AI services — emerge as the correct one in the long run. 

Right now, we can’t ask Siri about that. And while we’ll be waiting a little longer than expected until we can, it is reassuring to know that Apple is now dealing with challenges in tech it has actively got working in the labs, rather than making promises based on some fantasy wish list written on a desk in Cupertino.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Allison Steffens Herrera Have you ever asked Alexa to remind you to send a WhatsApp message at a determined hour? And then you just wonder, ‘Why can’t Alexa just send the message herself? Or the incredible frustration when you use an app to plan a trip, only to have to jump to your calendar/booking website/tour/bank account instead of your AI assistant doing it all? Well, exactly this gap between AI automation and human action is what the agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol aims to address. With the introduction of AI Agents, the next step of evolution seemed to be communication. But when communication between machines…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web