CISA Report Only Scratches Surface of Securing Office 365

The CISA report titled “Microsoft Office 365 Security Observations” makes five recommendations to improve security of an Office 365 tenant. The recommendations are valid, but competent administrators won’t take long to implement them. In fact, the worst thing is that consultants brought in to help organizations didn’t seem to have much expertise in securing Office 365.

Configuring PowerShell for Office 365

If you work with Office 365 through PowerShell, you probably have your own script to connect to the various services. If you don’t want to write your own script, you can download one from GitHub or the TechNet Gallery. This article covers two that you might like to try, including one with a GUI to choose which Office 365 services it should connect to.

Azure Active Directory Still a Weakness for Office 365

The January 24-25 Azure Active Directory outage demonstrated once again how important AAD is to Office 365. Microsoft’s Post Incident Report tells us what happened to deprive 1% of the users in Europe of service. That doesn’t sound a lot, but you’d be mad if you were affected.

Teams Compliance Records Focused on by New Report

A new report commissioned by Microsoft explains how Exchange Online and the Security and Compliance Center meet the electronic records requirements of regulatory bodies like the SEC and FINRA. Within the report, there’s some news about changes to the way that Office 365 handles Teams compliance records stored in Exchange Online. And after all that, we consider how some backup vendors treat Teams compliance records as equivalent to the data stored in the Teams Azure services.

Azure Active Directory Feature Bans Custom Words from User Passwords

Making sure that Office 365 user (and administrator) accounts have good passwords is a never-ending task. A new preview feature in Azure Active Directory helps by ensuring that users can’t include common words specific to the organization (like its name) in a password. It’s another piece in the puzzle to frustrate potential attackers.

Office 365 Privileged Access Management: Too Flawed and Too Exchange?

Microsoft has launched Privileged Access Management (PAM) for Office 365. The name’s incorrect because PAM only works for Exchange Online right now. PAM is based on RBAC, which is good, but is the implementation too Exchange-centric?

Check Your Azure AD Accounts Before Adding Org-Wide Teams

Org-Wide Teams are a nice feature, but calculating their membership can be puzzling, as in the case of some perfectly valid accounts that were not added to a team. As it turns out, the error lies in Azure Active Directory.

What that BOXServiceAccount Does in Office 365

Records featuring an account called BOXServiceAccount appear in the Office 365 audit log. Not much information is available about the account, but it’s all OK because it’s used to assign administrative roles to Office 365 accounts.