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  The Hacker News A malvertising campaign is leveraging trojanized installers for popular software such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Teams to drop a backdoor called Oyster (aka Broomstick and CleanUpLoader). That's according to findings from Rapid7, which identified lookalike websites hosting the malicious payloads that users are redirected to after searching for them on search engines like Google and Bing. The threat actors are luring unsuspecting users to fake websites purporting to contain legitimate software. But attempting to download the setup binary launches a malware infection chain instead. Specifically, the executable serves as a pathway for a backdoor called Oyster, which is capable of gathering information about the compromised host, communicating with a hard-coded command-and-control (C2) address, and supporting remote code execution. While Oyster has been observed in the past being delivered by means of a dedicated loader component known as Broomstick Loader (aka ...

By Sergiu Gatlan,  Bleeping Computer In a preliminary post-incident report, Microsoft has revealed that this week's 5-hour-long Microsoft 365 worldwide outage was triggered by a faulty Enterprise Configuration Service (ECS) deployment that led to cascading failures and availability impact across multiple regions. ECS is an internal central configuration repository designed to enable Microsoft services to make wide-scope dynamic changes across multiple services and features, as well as targeted ones such as specific configurations per tenant or user. What initially started like a minor Microsoft Teams outage ended up expanding downstream to multiple Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration that also leverage ECS, including Exchange Online, Windows 365, and Office Online. As a result, users worldwide began reporting that they could not use Microsoft Teams and multiple Microsoft 365 services or features. "This issue affected the users' ability to connect to the Microsoft...