Information Technology Security

By Sergiu Gatlan,  Bleeping Computer Microsoft says an Azure configuration change caused a major Microsoft 365 outage on Thursday, affecting customers across the Central US region. This massive outage started around 6:00 PM EST and prevented users from accessing various Microsoft 365 apps and services. The list of services impacted by the outage includes Microsoft Defender , Intune, Teams, PowerBI, Fabric, OneNote, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Windows 365, Viva Engage, Microsoft Purview, and the Microsoft 365 admin center. Xbox Support confirmed that the Xbox Live service was also hit by the issue, saying gamers had problems logging into their accounts. Throughout the outage, Downdetector has received tens of thousands of service issue reports, with affected Xbox users experiencing server connection issues and saying they couldn't log in. After acknowledging the outage, Microsoft said, "We're working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to ...

By Sergiu Gatlan, Bleeping Computers Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been tagging Google Chrome updates delivered via Google Update as suspicious activity due to a false positive issue. According to Windows system admins reports, the security solution (formerly known as Microsoft Defender ATP) began marking Chrome updates as suspicious starting last evening. Those who encountered this issue reported seeing "Multi-stage incident involving Execution & Defense evasion" alerts on affected Windows endpoints monitored using Defender for Endpoint. In a Microsoft 365 Defender service advisory issued after reports of these alarming alerts started showing up online, Microsoft revealed that they were erroneously triggered by a false positive and not due to malicious activity. "Admins may receive a false positive alert for Google Update on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint monitored devices," Microsoft said. Roughly one and a half hours later, the advisory was updated, wi...