Microsoft pulls security update after reports of issues affecting some PCs

ZDNet ^ | Feb 15, 2020 | Ed Bott

[dayglored]

A standalone security update released as part of the February Patch Tuesday cycle has created headaches for some owners of PCs running Windows 10. After investigating reports of those issues, Microsoft has yanked KB4524244 from its update servers.

Update 15-Feb-2020: The mess gets messier: Judging from a series of cryptic tweets by security experts, this update and its revocation are tied to a situation involving Kaspersky Rescue Disk and a signed bootloader that can circumvent the Secure Boot feature that is the bedrock of security on modern PCs. I'm still trying to figure out the sequence of events here. Stay tuned,

Microsoft has removed a standalone security update from its Windows Update servers and enterprise update channels after acknowledging reports of "an issue affecting a sub-set of devices." The company says it's "working on an improved version of this update in coordination with our partners and will release it in a future update."

The security update, KB4524244, was released on February 11, 2020, as part of the normal Patch Tuesday release cycle, and was targeted for all Windows 10 versions via Windows Update. It was intended to address a security vulnerability affecting third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot managers.

In its documentation for the update, Microsoft says its engineers have confirmed at least two known issues:

• You might encounter issues trying to install or after installing KB4524244.
• Using the "Reset this PC" feature, also called "Push Button Reset" or PBR, might fail. You might restart into recovery with "Choose an option" at the top of the screen with various options or you might restart to desktop and receive the error "There was a problem resetting your PC."

According to reports from users on Microsoft's support forums, some users encountered problems restarting after the update attempted to install, while others were signed in using a temporary user profile.

[I want the USA back]

Hoping the people who work on MS software aren’t the ones who will create “artificial intelligence” programs that will determine our destiny.

If they keep trying, maybe one day they’ll get it right. Problem is, they won’t know.

[Bob434]

i don’;t know much about this stuff, but just a thought, wouldn’t the source code for 7 be almost that of 10 too? if so, they likely wouldn’t want to divulge it-

[Bob434]

you may wanna get macrium reflect which is free, and do a complete system backup now that you have windows 10 working after the reformat- just incase something fubars in the future- I’ve had to use it a few times, and it’s worked nicely- course i lost all the stuff i hadn’t backed up since my initial full system backup- but it was a lot easier than the whole reformat reinstall, update update update-

[minnesota_bound]

I use EaseUS Todo Backup Home 11.5 on my Windows 7 desktop pc.
The laptop with Windows 10 does not have this but does have a separate 2.5” hard drive where I backup my files to using FreeFileSync.

I used Windows-ISO-Downloader to get a later copy of Windows 10 that I had but yeah there were many updates.