Another day, another data leak.

This time, it comes courtesy of a popular development platform called Power Apps. This Microsoft web tool allows organizations to quickly create web apps and has an abundance of tools for public facing websites and back-end data management. In spite of the tool's usefulness, it comes with its dangers: incorrectly configuring the product can leave huge segments of private data visible to the public. 

Cybersecurity firm UpGuard recently discovered that as many as 47 entities have misconfigured their Power Apps in a way that left data exposed. Those with data breaches included several large companies, government entities, and even Microsoft itself. Some very large entities like the states of Maryland and Indiana's governments are included in this data breach. 

According to researchers at UpGuard, the leaked data includes plenty of sensitive information, including “personal information used for COVID-19 contact tracing, COVID-19 vaccination appointments, social security numbers for job applicants, employee IDs, and millions of names and email addresses.”

Microsoft's leaks include a collection of 332,000 email addresses and employee IDs that are used for payroll purposes. Due to UpGuard's report, Microsoft shifted its permissions and adjusted PowerApps to make it more secure to use. Hopefully, this fixes the issue and clears up this particular breach.

Have you been personally affected by a data breach before?

One of my favorite things about using animated wallpapers with DeskScapes is the relaxing scenes I can have right on my Windows desktop. My personal favorite types are the triggered .dreams that change on the time of day, and animated wallpapers with very subtle animations. A quick example would be snow slowly falling on a winter scene, or subtle movement of water that doesn't distract you from anything.

The best thing is we have a ton of those types of animated wallpapers here on WinCustomize. Here's five of my favorites to check out!

Calm Lagoon Waterfall

Canopy on the Beach

Autumn Leaves in the Breeze

Spring Falls

Wind Blowing in a Wheat Field

One of the most requested features for Fences has been target-based rules, which we added in the latest Fences update. There's a variety of uses for target-based rules, but the one we'll talk about today is using these rules to make Steam desktop shortcuts go directly to a fence of your choosing.

For example, I have a fence called 'Steam Games' on my desktop that I only want Steam shortcuts to be in. I want them to be automatically sorted into that fence when I download a new game from Steam.

Open the Fences configuration and open the 'Sorting & organizing' window. Now, look for the "target-based rules" section.

Clicking the text there will give you some options on how you want to create this rule. For this example, we'll use the 'Link's target contains...' rule.

Now, a new window comes up where we can add the parameters for our new rule. Selecting the drop-down menus will give you several options to choose from. For the Steam links we'll start off with defining them like this: target starts with steam://.

Click 'Add additional criteria' to add another entry.

For this one, we'll select the icon type and set it as a shortcut (link) as that is what a Steam shortcut is. Click OK and we can now set which fence we want these icons to be placed in. Here I chose my Steam Games fence.

You can choose to run the rules right now to organize your desktop, and you can set Fences to always apply these rules.

Now all your Steam shortcuts should be organized into your selected folder!

We're just over a month away until the fall/autumn season arrives, and I am so ready for some hopefully cooler weather. Fall is a wonderful time to base some desktop themes on as we have many types of skins that fit perfectly with the season. We have an excellent selection of wallpapers, WindowBlinds skins, animated wallpapers for DeskScapes, and much more to choose from!

We'll be featuring plenty of themes over the next few weeks, but here are some of our favorites to get started with. Let us know if you have any seasonal favorites that you'll be using.

Scenic IV (WindowBlinds)

Fall Color (WindowBlinds)

Autumn Leaves in the Breeze (Animated Wallpaper for DeskScapes)

Candy Corn (CursorFX)

Fall leaves in Kolob Canyon (Wallpaper)

Stardock Restores Classic Start Menu in Windows 11
Beta version of Start11 is live today

Stardock announced Start11, a program that allows users to customize the Windows Start menu. As with previous editions of the StartX products, Start11 allows users to restore the Start menu to appears as it does in previous versions of Windows as well as customize it to their liking. The beta version is now available at Stardock’s homepage. 

“This first beta is designed to regain some of the lost functionality in the current Windows 11 Start menu,” said Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO. “We have a lot of exciting new features planned to make the Start menu not just more accessible but also more useful to companies and power users.” 

The first beta of Start11 is compatible with Windows 11 and Windows 10, supports moving the start button to the middle or to the left, makes visible many subtle Windows features, and provides a new configuration UI that allows extensive customization. 

“The new UI has been designed to support future Start menu designs,” said Wardell. “Start8 and Start10 focused on restoring previous versions of the Start menu. Start11 will be extending this to support a host of new Start menu ideas such as the concept of pages, tabs, minimalism, and features for our enterprise customers.” 

Join the Start11 Beta Today for $4.99
Users who buy into the beta will get the full release free.

Own Start8 or Start10?  We've got special upgrade pricing just for you.

If you are looking for a new desktop wallpaper, then you have some great choices from the past month in the WinCustomize gallery. It's also fun that we can get these through DeskScapes 11 without even leaving the app, which is what I've been doing on a couple of my PCs.

There's plenty to choose from in the gallery here, and new ones come in just about daily. Check them all out here.

Here are five of the top wallpapers on WinCustomize. Check them out!

Futuristic Neon Cityscape

Stormy weather_4K

Palm on the Left_4K

BPG

Silhouette of Palm Trees

I am! Bring on the pumpkins!

The Internet can be a tricky place to navigate.

I talked a little bit about keeping your PC secure in a blog last week, but to be honest I barely scratched the surface when talking about all the different ways hackers and malware are clamoring to get to your personal information. ArsTechnica reported this week that some hackers impersonated the site Brave.com and pushed malware to unsuspecting users. Their technique was so sneaky that the faux site was capable of fooling even the most security-savvy users.

Brave, a privacy-focused web browser, has become a popular alternative for plenty of people looking to surf the 'net a little more safely. Cybercriminals registered the domain xn--brav-yva[.]com which used punycode to represent brave(dot)com. The phony domain appears quite similar to Brave's own website to an undiscerning eye because of a tiny little accent that was placed over the 'e'. Users who visited the fake site would have a difficult time differentiating between what's real and fake since the cybercriminals were adept at mimicking the look and feel of Brave's legitimate website. 

When a user would click the "download brave" button on the fake site, a malware known as both ArechClient and SectopRat would download instead of the browser. 

The cybercriminals drove traffic to their fake site by purchasing Google ads that were then shown when users would search for browsers. While the ads themselves didn't look dangerous, they came from a domain other than Brave's and would send users to several different domains before eventually landing on the imposter site.

A quote from the ArsTechnica article says, "The malware detected goes under several names, including ArechClient and SectopRat. A 2019 analysis from security firm G Data found that it was a remote access trojan that was capable of streaming a user’s current desktop or creating a second invisible desktop that attackers could use to browse the Internet.

In a follow-on analysis published in February, G Data said the malware had been updated to add new features and capabilities, including encrypted communications with attacker-controlled command and control servers. A separate analysis found it had “capabilities like connecting to C2 Server, Profiling the System, Steal Browser History From Browsers like Chrome and Firefox.”"

Unfortunately, with threats like this, there isn't really an automatic way to protect yourself from them. It just takes being eagle-eyed and carefully assessing every domain you visit. It stinks that there are plenty of jerks out there who are looking to mess up your computer or steal your personal information, thus making these steps necessary, but that's just the age of the Internet and we're going to have to get used to it.

What are some of your tricks for browsing online safely? Have you had any experience having to deal with malware? Share with us!

We are getting into the final stretches of summer, and I for one am looking forward to fall. We still have some weeks of summer left, so let's take a few minutes and show off those hot August desktops to our community! 

Post your desktops to the monthly thread here: https://forums.wincustomize.com/506171/

(This is a news thread and will be locked. Screenshot taken by LightStar)

I use CNC and laser engravers in my workshop, so PCs are also a big part of my workshop, not just my office. I have my main PC in my home office, and I have a Fusion5 tablet in my workshop that I use to control the machines. It's a great tablet for running the few applications I need. I previously had a cheap laptop but having a touch screen is so much easier when using these apps.

So, my workflow for my shop is that I design the files in my main PC in the home office, then I move them to a OneDrive folder. I'm using OneDrive because that's the cloud service I use and it's easy to setup a folder that I can access from just about anywhere. I have a CNC folder on OneDrive that I put all my projects and relevant files into. That way I can get the files from my tablet in the workshop without having to use thumb drives.

This is where Fences comes in and make it even easier to use. I want access to these folders as fast as I can, so I setup folder portals on each desktop using Fences. I set the portal to have access to each project folder I use in the workshop. That way, I can simply drag a file into the folder portal on my office desktop, and then walk into the workshop and have that folder portal on my tablet point to the same folder. That way I have access to those files right on the desktop and I know right where I need to find them.

Here's my home office desktop.

And here's an image of the Fusion5 tablet in my workshop. 

It's a straightforward process, but it helps tremendously in my workflow. Just remember that I'm not "sharing" this folder through Fences, I'm just using the folder portal feature in Fences to have direct access to these OneDrive folders directly from a fence on my desktop on multiple PCs.

Do you use folder portals in Fences? Have you tried a similar setup or have another setup that you find useful? Let us know in the comments below.