Microsoft announced that Exchange Online will block old Exchange Servers by throttling and then rejecting their inbound email into Exchange Online. The hope is that this tactic will convince those who operate unsupported versions of Exchange Server to upgrade and use supported software that isn't vulnerable to known attack vectors.
On March 16, Microsoft launched its latest AI-powered innovation in Microsoft 365 CoPilot, aimed at using AI to remove the drudgery of many Office tasks. We don't know when the new capabilities will be available or what they will cost. The demos looked wonderful, but how things work out when exposed to real users is an entirely different manner. Time will tell!
Among the latest set of patches released by Microsoft, a fix for CVE-2023-23397 is available to fix an NTLM vulnerability in Outlook for Windows clients. The update closes a hole where attackers can use specially formatted messages to force NTLM credentials to be sent outside the organization.
Microsoft 365 tenant administrators might want to know when user accounts receive a specific license. Unhappily, Azure AD license assignment dates can mislead, so some interpretation and personal knowledge might be needed to find out just when a user was licensed.
Many Microsoft 365 and Exchange Server logs contain IP addresses. To find out where the IP addresses come from and if they are internal or external, PowerShell developers can use online web-based geolocation services. It's important not to overuse the services because you could be throttled.
Azure AD system-preferred authentication means that users must use their strongest authentication method when they sign-into Azure AD. The change emphasizes the desirability of strong authentication methods over weak. Now in preview, Microsoft plans to make the policy effective for everyone in July 2023.
Sensitivity labels support local language values, meaning that you can translate the display name and tooltip for labels so that they appear in the language chosen by a user. Most people don't both because it's painfully slow to insert the translated strings for multiple languages. However, when you apply a mixture of PowerShell and the Microsoft Translator service, the task becomes so much easier.
You can manage sensitivity label settings through the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, but it's hard to see all the settings for labels in a consumable manner. This article describes how to use PowerShell to extract and report sensitivity label settings, including highlighting rights assignments that might be out of date. It's an example of just how useful PowerShell is to Microsoft 365 administrators.
Microsoft 365 Wiper malware is a category of threat where attackers penetrate a tenant and remove data. In this article, we discuss if Microsoft 365 Wiper malware could remove all the files from SharePoint Online sites and what actions tenant administrators can take to defend against the apps that might wreak such havoc.
Microsoft 365 security is a big topic. Focus is important when it comes to getting things done. In this article, we suggest five areas that administrators could work on during 2023 to improve the security posture of their tenant. You might already have established full control over some of these areas. Even if you have, it's still good to consider if you can improve security.
Dynamic Azure AD administrative units are like dynamic Azure AD groups in that they have a membership rule to calculate their membership. Azure AD uses the rule to find members regularly, so the administrative unit never goes out of date. That is, assuming the properties of Azure AD user accounts are maintained and up to date.
Many commentators got very exercised about the Microsoft 365 outage of 25 January 2023. The root cause was an untested configuration change to a WAN router which shouldn't have happened, but that's no reason to conclude that cloud services are flawed.
