Amaya Toman The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many things. These include the way hackers and other attackers target owners of computers and other electronic devices. While earlier these attacks mainly targeted company computers and networks, with the mass transition of users to home offices, there was also a change in this direction. According to the security firm SonicWal, devices that fall under the category of smart home equipment became the target of these attacks more than ever last year. We will stay with security for a while - but this time we will talk about the security of Tinder users, which the company Match is going to increase in the foreseeable future thanks to cooperation with the non-profit platform Garbo. The last topic of our today's roundup will be the Xbox game consoles and how Microsoft decided to relieve their owners from suffering with too slow download speeds.
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Vratislav Holub More security on Tinder
Match, which owns the popular dating app Tinder, will be rolling out new features. One of them will be the support of Garbo - a non-profit platform that Match wants to integrate into the systems of its dating applications in the foreseeable future. Tinder will be testing this platform over the coming months. The Garbo platform is used to collect records and reports of harassment, violence and related actions, such as various court orders, criminal records and the like. However, the creators of Tinder have not yet revealed how the cooperation of this application with the mentioned platform will take place. It is not yet certain whether it will be a paid service, but in any case, the cooperation of the two entities should lead to higher security for users of Tinder and other dating applications from the workshop of the company Match.
Malicious Office documents
The latest report from security firm SonicWal revealed that the incidence of malicious Office format files has increased by 67% in the past year. According to experts, this rise is mainly driven by the increasingly high intensity of Office document sharing, which for a change is related to the growing necessity of working from home in connection with anti-epidemic measures. According to experts, however, there has been a decrease in the occurrence of malicious documents in PDF format - in this direction, there was a 22% decrease during the past year. There was also a sharp increase in the number of new types of malware - in the course of 2020, experts recorded a total of 268 thousand types of malicious files that had never been detected before. Since last year a significant part of the population moved to their homes, from which they work, attackers in significantly higher numbers focused on the distribution of malicious software, which primarily targets Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including various elements of smart equipment households. SonicWall experts said in the report that they saw a 68% increase in attacks on IoT devices. The number of attacks of this type totaled 56,9 million last year.
New Xbox feature for faster downloads
Microsoft is about to introduce a new feature to its Xbox game consoles that should finally significantly reduce the problem of extremely slow download speeds. A number of Xbox console owners have complained in the past that whenever a game was running in the background on their Xbox One or Xbox Series X or S, the download speed dropped significantly and in some cases even crashes. The only way to get back to normal download speed was to completely quit the game running in the background, but this bothered many players. Fortunately, this problem will soon be put to rest. Microsoft announced this week that it is currently testing a feature that will allow users to leave a game running in the background without necessarily having to decrease the download speed. It should be a button labeled "Suspend My Game" that will allow users to download at full speed.
Hey Xbox Insiders! Did you notice these changes rolling out now? Suspend in the queue will let you download at full speed while making sure your game remains resumable (or quick resume-able on Series X|S). New banners in the Full Library will take you to more useful categories! pic.twitter.com/L49winRpM0
- Eden Marie (@neonepiphany) March 16, 2021
Wait, it's been like who knows how long it's been impossible to properly download games and play at the same time on the Xbox, and players seem to have tolerated it? These people are really idiots.