Security News

A quick shift toward Microsoft Office 365 and Azure AD in the cloud has expanded the attack surface for many organizations, says Vectra AI. The coronavirus pandemic has forced many organizations to transition their applications and other assets to the cloud. This increased reliance on Office 365 has naturally caught the eye of cybercriminals who have been ramping up their attacks against Microsoft's cloud-based Office environment for many customers.

The USA's Office of National Intelligence today released its previously classified assessment of "Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections" and found "Some successful compromises of state and local government networks prior to Election Day-as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts". It's described as the intelligence community's collective assessment of attempts to disrupt the 2020 election and to contain "Analytic judgments identical to those in the classified version" but without "Full supporting information" or information on "Specific intelligence reports, sources , or methods."

Microsoft has addressed a known issue causing memory or disk space errors when opening some documents using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or other Microsoft Office apps. This known issue only affects customers who have installed Microsoft Office apps from the Microsoft Store and are trying to open an Office document that triggers the Protected View feature.

At the 1 year mark of quarantine, 85% of office workers are looking forward to returning to the office in some capacity, according to Eden Workplace. The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research and involved 1,000 nationally representative U.S. full- and part-time office workers ages 18+ between February 9th and February 17th 2021.

The systems of SEPE, the Spanish government agency for labor, were taken down following a ransomware attack that hit more than 700 agency offices across Spain. SEPE director Gerado Guitérrez confirmed that the agency's network systems were encrypted by Ryuk ransomware operators after the incident.

CybelAngel announced its major UK expansion with a five-fold investment increase, a series of new hires to its sales and marketing team as well as a new UK office. CybelAngel's decision to expand in the UK follows a series of growth milestones and new additions to its portfolio less than a year after the company's $51 million total funding.

Microsoft users are being targeted with thousands of phishing emails, in an ongoing attack aiming to steal their Office 365 credentials. The attackers add an air of legitimacy to the campaign by leveraging a fake Google reCAPTCHA system and top-level domain landing pages that include the logos of victims' companies.

Microsoft has added XLM macro protection for Microsoft 365 customers by expanding the runtime defense provided by Office 365's integration with Antimalware Scan Interface to include Excel 4.0 macro scanning. Microsoft first extended support for its Antimalware Scan Interface to Office 365 client applications in 2018 to defend customers against attacks using VBA macros.

For the brave - or perhaps foolhardy - senior IT jobs hunters there is an opening at the UK Home Office for a Deputy Director of IT Operations in a lovely '70s era highrise in Croydon. In September, as chief digital, data and technology officer at the Home Office, Joanna Davinson told Parliamentary spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee that delays to the troubled Emergency Services Network would create additional annual costs "In the ballpark" of £550m "Across the whole of the legacy estate".

Designed as cloud-native software, BitDam ATP+ is the only solution that protects Office 365 users from unknown threats at first sight. Office 365 ATP, which is considered to have high detections rates, misses more than 25% of the unknown content-borne threats each day.