Using Cortana? Update soon or your Windows 10 PC can get hacked

Rank 7 | Satya Nadella | Company: Microsoft, a technology company | Country: United States (Image: Reuters)

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Cortana on Windows 10 machines may be helpful and sufficient digital assistant, however, it seems it is not that great at keeping your PC secure from hackers.

Personal digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana have become extremely common today. However, sometimes the risk involved in using such digital assistants can be far more than you would have imagined.

As per a research by McAfee, Cortana has a code execution vulnerability that could allow hackers to use it to hack your Windows 10 PC. It can trick your PC into opening up a contextual menu which can be used for code execution. These codes can deploy malicious software or even reset a Windows account password.

This vulnerability comes from Cortana's ability to listen for commands even while the PC is locked and combined with regular indexing that makes files accessible in the search function that Cortana uses, it becomes extremely risky. Even though potential hackers would need physical access to your PC to do any damage, that can be easily accomplished in an office or some shared environment.

Microsoft dealt with this vulnerability in their "Patch Tuesday" update, however many machines don't have that yet. In that case, McAfee suggested their users turn off Cortana on the lock screen to prevent any attacks.

Microsoft's digital assistant which helps its users accomplish various tasks like making a shopping list, providing definitions, looking up corporations artists, and doing quick calculations using voice assistance.