Foundational Security Controls for Microsoft Teams

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Work-from-home requirements over the past year forced many organizations to rapidly increase adoption of video and collaboration applications like Microsoft Teams and Zoom without thorough security reviews and risk assessments. This large-scale increase in demand also surprised the providers, as numerous security and operational maturity issues arose as usage and attacks skyrocketed. Also, many organizations are employing these solutions in "new usage areas" such as medicine and education, that require specific access control, confidentiality, and financial management conditions.

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Investigating User Account Compromises in Office 365

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Unfortunately, almost every organization at some point will have to manage a situation where a user’s account has been compromised. In this blog post, we present O365 native tools and techniques that organizations can utilize.

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Implementing Foundational Security Controls for Every Office 365 Environment

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In our previous post, we provided an overview of each of the 12 Foundational Security Controls that should be implemented for every Office 365 environment to deter business email compromise (BEC), account takeover (ATO) attacks, and unauthorized data access.

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Foundational Security Controls for Every Office 365 Environment

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As many organizations continue to adjust to an extended and potentially permanent remote workforce, dependency on cloud services has increased rapidly – as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in a recent earnings release – “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” The following post is intended to help organizations that may have recently begun using or have increased their usage of Office 365. 

Please note Microsoft continues to evolve their platform and these recommendations are current as of this posting.

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Microsoft Sentinel: Monitoring Audio/Video Conferencing Software

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This blog expands upon SecureSky’s “Top 10 Audio/Video Conferencing Security Best Practices” blog posted on April 8, 2020. If you have not read that blog yet, we encourage you to do so, as it provides recommendations on settings to harden various audio/video conferencing tools that you may use within your organization.

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Attackers Exploit Gap in Office 365 Best Practice Guidelines

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July 28, 2020 Update: Due to the complexities documented in this blog post, Microsoft is rolling out changes to e-mail forwarding configuration in Office 365. SecureSky is testing the changes that are documented at the following Microsoft URL, and will update this blog post after completion of testing to address these changes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/external-email-forwarding?view=o365-worldwide.

With a six times increase in COVID-19 themed incidents, security professionals need to take advantage of every possible configuration and security control to protect against this growing amount of attacks.  Today we will discuss how attackers are leveraging a gap in Office 365 best practices that allows undetected eavesdropping on victim’s emails.

When attackers gain control of an account in Office 365, one of the first steps they often take is to configure email forwarding in the compromised environment. Attackers configure email forwarding in order to see new emails that arrive in the victim’s inbox – which can be responses to attacker phishing attempts sent to the victim contacts. In order to disguise their presence, the attacker does not want the victim to see those emails. 

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Microsoft Security Defaults – A Step in the Right Direction, but Customers Should Do More

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We understand that managing security for Office 365 can be difficult and complex. As we continue to see common identity-related attacks against authentication like password spray, replay, phishing and malware-based increasing into today’s uncertain world it's imperative that we understand Microsoft’s “Security Defaults”.   

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The Cloud Balancing Act: Improving Business Outcomes without Degrading Your Security Posture

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Who knew that way back in 1964 Bob Dylan would predict the challenges we’re facing with the cloud in 2020. Times they are a-changin’. We’re in the midst of an evolution in IT, led by the rapid adoption of cloud computing, which promises to produce better business outcomes. While most of us have our security posture top-of-mind in the face of these changes, it’s easy to become complacent, think that we have it covered and rely a little too heavily on the out-of-the-box security offered by our cloud providers. In Dylan’s prophetic words, “It’s time to start swimming or sink like a stone.”

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Dudear or Not Dudear – Analyzing A Recent Phishing Attempt

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Following the Tweet from the Microsoft Security Intelligence account January 30, 2020 (https://twitter.com/MsftSecIntel/status/1222995250911703041?s=20), we at SecureSky were a little curious whether we had come across any evidence that phishing attempts against our own organization or our clients were part of this recently revived campaign. Not that we really need a reason to do this kind of research but given this announcement, we decided to put some time into this.

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CIS Microsoft 365 Benchmark v1.1 Released

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I am pleased to have participated in and been named a co-editor of the most recent release (version 1.1) of the Center for Internet Security Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark. Sharing SecureSky’s extensive O365 incident response experience and security controls recommendations to give back to the O365 security community was a great opportunity.

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