BleepingComputer’s top technology stories for 2022

2022 has come to an end. It’s filled with many stories, from Russia’s invasion in Ukraine to bugs that Microsoft Patch Tuesday Updates for Windows have introduced.

Our readers were most interested in stories that dealt with Windows Updates, which broke multiple features.

Here are the top ten stories on BleepingComputer for 2022.

10

On-premise Microsoft Exchange servers were affected by a bug that caused them to cease delivering email on January 1, 2022.

The FIP-FS antimalware scanner engine used a signed INTL variable to store the date’s value. This bug caused the “Year 2022” bug. It has a maximum of 2,147.483,647.

The minimum date value for 2022 was 2,201,010,001, and this is higher than what’s stored in the signed Int32 variable. This causes the scanning engine not to release mail for delivery.

9

The Transport and Communications Agency of Finland warned about an unusually high level of GPS interference close to the country’s Eastern border. Although the source of interference is unknown, numerous reports indicate that it began over the weekend.

Notifications to Airmen (notices of airmen) were created to raise pilot awareness and help them to take extra precautions in order to ensure safe flight.

8

French father was sentenced to jail and fined for his use of a signal jammer that prevented his children from accessing the internet at night.

This signal jammer accidentally shut down the Internet in his hometown.

7.

The U.S. Department of Justice took over numerous sites for Z-Library, an online eBook repository. This prevented easy access to the books.

Two weeks later, DOJ made the announcement that two Russian citizens were arrested in Argentina for their involvement with the Z-Library e-Book website.

According to Driscoll, the FBI Assistant Director in Charge of Driscoll, “The defendants were alleged have maintained a website that was active for more than a decade and whose principal purpose was to provide stolen intellectual property in violation copyright laws.”

6

Microsoft has released an emergency out-of band (OOB), update to fix numerous issues with Windows Servers and Windows Windows. These updates were made available in response to the February 2022 Patch Tuesday.

This includes VPN connectivity issues, Windows Server Domain Controllers rebooting, Virtual Machines starting failures and ReFS-formatted removable media not mounting.

5.

Microsoft advised that Windows Kerberos authentication had been broken by many domain controllers following the installation of Patch Tuesday, November 20,22.

After the upgrade, this issue was experienced by Domain Controllers on Windows Servers.

This bug was found in almost every Windows Servers and Windows Servers release that is currently supported.

4

Microsoft’s Jan 2022 Patch Tuesday Updates broke LL2TP VPN connections of many Windows users who use the built-in VPN client.

Others reported the same bug to Windows, affecting connections to SonicWall and Cisco Meraki. WatchGuard Firewalls’ client was also affected.

3.

Russian media claimed that Russia was in a serious IT storage crisis following the withdrawal of Western cloud service providers due to sanctions.

Russia was left with two months less data storage than it had for online entertainment providers and mobile operators, as well as streaming services, due to these sanctions.

Russia explored a variety of solutions for this IT storage issue, including leasing domestic data storage and seizing IT resources that were left by companies who had withdrawn from the country.

2.

This article is about January 2022’s updates that caused significant problems for a variety of enterprise features, such as Hyper-V not starting and domain controllers randomly rebooting.

Microsoft addressed these problems by issuing OOB (emergency out-of-band) updates late in the month.

1.

Microsoft also began to use the Windows 11 File Explorer app within Insider builds in order to promote other services such as OneDrive or Microsoft Editor.

Although most ads are harmless and are for Windows/Microsoft services or features, some are annoyed that these advertisements are not being disabled.

Brandon LeBlanc, Senior Product Manager at Windows, told BleepingComputer “this banner was experimental and wasn’t intended to be externally published. It was removed.”