Category: Security

Client

Adopting OneDrive for Business

OneDrive for Business is, from my perspective, one of the most under-utilized but benefit-rich parts of the Office 365 platform, allowing organizations (especially organizations that subscribe to the E3 or higher SKU) virtually unlimited storage, versioning, and recovery capability for their file-based storage.… [ Continue reading ]

Identity

Update to PwnCheck script

This afternoon, while working with a colleague, I was alerted to a customer that appears to have the same 6-character password set for every user, which honestly, I feel like violates the very notion of a password.  They’re not currently in Office 365 (or even Active Directory), but the risk is the same:

Users tend to use the same passwords everywhere.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

DLP for Bitcoin Addresses

One of the up-and-coming combination phish-ransom attacks is to trick the mark into thinking that you’ve got access to their data, and then get them to send money to a Bitcoin address to protect them from data leakage.  You can create a DLP rule in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center (or an Exchange Online transport rule) to try to combat this.… [ Continue reading ]

Scripting

Searching the Office 365 Unified Audit Log for Specific Activities, Sites, and Users

Last week, I was working with a large government customer in a consolidated tenant (read: all agencies in a single, centrally-managed tenant).  One of the questions that was presented was how to search and filter the audit log for entries relating to the following categories:

  • Files shared by an agency or department’s users
  • Files accessed in an agency’s SharePoint site collection

To that end, I based together this script. … [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Migrating from Exchange Online eDiscovery and In-Place Hold to the Security & Compliance Center

One of the issues that some of my larger customers have been dealing with is the lack of tooling and planning around moving legacy Exchange Online In-Place eDiscovery & Holds to the new(ish) Security & Compliance Center.  Our direction has been to either let them age out or manually recreate them the Security & Compliance Center.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Alerting on OneDrive Deleted Item Activity

I had a customer recently raise some questions about how to provide further enhancements and protections around their OneDrive for Business deployments.  Suppose this scenario exists:

  • Users are site collection administrators over their OneDrive for Business sites (default configuration)
  • Retention policies are configured, but may only be configured to provide a very minimal amount of data protection (such as 90 days from creation or last modification of data) due to organizational legal compliance
  • No retention policies are in effect for the target data (as all the data we’re concerned with is technically older than 90 day creation or last modified date)
  • Malicious or disgruntled user deletes OneDrive data
    • Deletes data in OneDrive
    • Empties recycle bin
    • Empties second stage recycle bin

At this point, for any data older than 90 days, it is lost.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Custom Sharing Controls

Today, we’re going to explore two relatively new sharing controls in SharePoint Online (and, by extension, OneDrive for Business).  The two options we’re going to look at are located inside the SharePoint Admin Center (https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com) under Sharing:

Overview

To test both of these functions out (as well as how other users are affected), I’m going to work with 3 test users and two security groups.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Thanks for playing!

I was so excited to see this notification in the TechNet Gallery today when I logged in:

Thanks to everyone for making this one of the most downloaded OneDrive tools in the Gallery! As a thanks for your support, feel free to download it as many times as you like!… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Creating Scoped DLP rules with Custom Sensitive Information Types

A few weeks ago, I put out a series of posts on creating and using custom sensitive information types (https://www.undocumented-features.com/tag/sensitive-information-types/).  The blog, posts, however, focus on using the DLP configuration options available in the Security & Compliance Center.

Rules created via the DLP wizard in the Security & Compliance Center have the benefit of being able to be applied globally across your organization and its content sources. … [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Looky, looky! Custom sensitive information types with even more customitivity!

So, of course, as soon as I finish up posting a few entries (here and here), we go and release a new UI to help you get it done on your own!

You can do most of the effort of creating a data classification here, although if you want to use any of our built in functions (such as credit card Luhn check), you’ll need to export/modify/import, use the sensitive information type package that I created (referenced earlier) or use one of our native DLP classifications.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Sensitive Information Types–now with more sensitivity!

UPDATE: The TechNet Gallery link for this post has been updated.

So, this is an entry that has been long in the making.  I have had several customers over the last few years give feedback about our Data Loss Prevention’s (DLP) matching requirements, mostly around how they require too much corroborating evidence (in the form of patterns or keywords) to meet their organization’s very restrictive policies.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

ATP: Safe Attachments, Safe Links, and Anti-Phishing Policies or “All the policies you can shake a stick at”


With the advent of scammers, spammers, phishers, and other types of baddies, and the complementary rise in anti-malware, anti-spam, domain and sender verification techniques, we’re in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game.  I’ve had several customers over the past few weeks ask me about best practices for configuring some of the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) features.… [ Continue reading ]

Configuration

Connecting Splunk to Office 365 – Part 2: Microsoft Office 365 Reporting Add-On for Splunk

In Part 1 of this blog series, I went through the setup of the Splunk Add-On for Microsoft Cloud Services, which you can use to extract, query, and analyze data provided by the Office 365 Management Activity API.  In this particular post, we’re going to explore the Microsoft Office 365 Reporting Add-On for Splunk, which you can use to review message trace data from Office 365.… [ Continue reading ]