Security News

Microsoft has fixed a bug where the Microsoft Rewards accounts of customers who redeemed points would get suspended without warning. The bug was addressed following a stream of user reports worldwide saying that they received messages their accounts got banned after redeeming points earned via Microsoft Rewards.

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit last week disclosed that it had taken legal proceedings against an Iranian threat actor dubbed Bohrium in connection with a spear-phishing operation. "Bohrium actors create fake social media profiles, often posing as recruiters," Amy Hogan-Burney of the DCU said in a tweet.

Microsoft said this week that Windows Autopatch, a service to automatically keep Windows and Microsoft 365 software up to date in enterprise environments, has now reached public preview.Windows Autopatch automatically manages the deployment of Windows 10 and Windows 11 quality and feature updates, drivers, firmware, and Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise updates.

Microsoft on Thursday said it took steps to disable malicious activity stemming from abuse of OneDrive by a previously undocumented threat actor it tracks under the chemical element-themed moniker Polonium. In addition to removing the offending accounts created by the Lebanon-based activity group, the tech giant's Threat Intelligence Center said it suspended over 20 malicious OneDrive applications created and that it notified affected organizations.

The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has disrupted a spear-phishing operation linked to an Iranian threat actor tracked as Bohrium that targeted customers in the U.S., Middle East, and India. Bohrium has targeted organizations from a wide range of industry sectors, including tech, transportation, government, and education, according to Amy Hogan-Burney, the General Manager of Microsoft DCU. Microsoft has taken down 41 domains used in this campaign to establish a command and control infrastructure that enabled the attackers to deploy malicious tools designed to help them gain access to targets' devices and exfiltrate stolen information from compromised systems.

Microsoft said it blocked a Lebanon-based hacking group it tracks as Polonium from using the OneDrive cloud storage platform for data exfiltration and command and control while targeting and compromising Israelian organizations. Throughout the attacks that mainly targeted Israel's critical manufacturing, IT, and defense industry sectors since February 2022, Polonium operators have also likely coordinated their hacking attempts with multiple Iran-linked threat actors, according to Redmond's analysis.

Follina abuses Microsoft Office to execute remote code. CVE-2022-30190, also known as "Follina", is a remote code execution vulnerability that affects Microsoft Office, reported on May 27, 2022.

Microsoft Office apps - including Outlook and Teams - are vulnerable to homograph attacks based on internationalized domain names. "Users, who are trained to validate a link in an email client before they click it, will be susceptible to click on it because it has not yet been translated to a real domain name in their browser. The real domain name would only be seen after the page has started to open," Bitdefender researchers warned.

BeyondTrust's recent 2022 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report includes the latest annual breakdown of Microsoft vulnerabilities by category and product, as well as a six-year trend analysis, providing a holistic understanding of the evolving threat landscape. In this video for Help Net Security, Morey Haber, Chief Strategy Officer at Beyond Trust, talks about this report, which analyzes data from security bulletins publicly issued by Microsoft throughout the previous year.

A new Windows Search zero-day vulnerability can be used to automatically open a search window containing remotely-hosted malware executables simply by launching a Word document. While most Windows searches will look on the local device's index, it is also possible to force Windows Search to query file shares on remote hosts and use a custom title for the search window.