Patch Lady – the Office 365 admin center

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Patch Lady here – for those of you that are admins in Office 365 I would highly recommend bookmarking the Office 365 admin center and especially to ma
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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NetDef, JSTechGeek, abbodi86, warrenrumak, woody, Fred

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+1.

If you are an Office 365 admin this should be one of your first “stops” every day. Lots of very good information.

--Joe

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JSTechGeek

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This is interesting. According to some forensics geeks, last summer for a few days you were apparently able to access per-mailbox audit data via some secret REST API call but MS swiftly took that access away. The data was allegedly available regardless of whether you had enabled auditing on a given mailbox.

I’ve been doing things with some of the current unified audit logs around compromised Office365 accounts and it’s worth noting that you can already get events around Inbox rules and mailbox permission changes via these more system-level unified audit logs.

I suppose there may be occasions where having events for every tiny action taken in a mailbox is useful, but I’m struggling to see much practical mileage in knowing that some logon via an IP address in a far-away land read a specific mail at a specific time. What do you do with that info unless it happens to be a mail containing some secret that can be changed e.g. some kind of credentials?

If you’re a corporate employing in-house security analysts then you’re almost certainly capable and dealing with most of this now. MS turning on per-mailbox auditing is just one thing your existing 365 mailbox configuration tools won’t need to do now, but you’ll probably keep them doing it to ensure it stays enabled. Or disabled if you don’t want it.

For everyone else, the Bad Guys tend to set about doing things like making rules to intercept and modify incoming invoices with their bank details etc. and you can see that in the current unified audit logs without resorting to per-mailbox audit logs. You do need to ensure unified audit logs are turned on first though.

MS making even reasonable security features (not just advanced ones) here cost additional money is beginning to annoy me a lot. The default level is not enough and I think asking for money to fix that is immoral, especially when it’s education/charity Office 365 tenants.

 

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Anyone doing any sort of breech investigation, in regards to PII or PHI or whatever other data hackers are after these days such as SSN or CC#s etc, this information is VITAL.  You can’t do a proper investigation and reporting unless you know what they read.

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