Collaboration in Office 365–The Possibilities

Posted out on Microsoft’s TechNet blog I found an article discussing things that you can do to within the Office 365 environment that allows for different kinds of data sharing with both internal users (those users who are part of your Microsoft Office 365 tenant) and external users (those that belong to other Office 365 tenants).

What is an Office 365 tenant?

The term “tenant” is purely technical. In an ideal scenario, a single company would sign up for a single Office 365 tenant. Imagine a tenant as an equivalent of a closed on premise setup within which you have all your services running.

A single tenant will have all your users, groups, resources, data, subscriptions, licenses etc.

But we have also seen companies going for multiple tenants – especially if they have entities that are (or need to be) “separate” either from an IT or legal perspective.

Even then we would normally recommend having a single tenant for a single company, wherever possible. Why? Because tenant boundaries limit collaboration capabilities and bring in (IT) barriers between two users that you would normally expect to have between users in two separate companies (or organizations). Your global IT administrator’s credentials are effective only within the tenant boundaries. And, if you own a vanity domain name (like “Microsoft.com”) – you can only use it in a single tenant of Office 365, i.e. users in two separate tenants cannot have email addresses or login addresses ending with the same domain name.

The article provides a lot of insight and ideas on how to use your Office 365 account, and if you haven’t taken the leap yet, this may provide some ideas of why you should.

Ransomware that’s 100% pure JavaScript, no download required

SophosLabs just alerted us to an intriguing new ransomware sample dubbed RAA.

This one is blocked by Sophos as JS/Ransom-DDL, and even though it’s not widespread, it’s an interesting development in the ransomware scene.

Here’s why.

Ransomware, like any sort of malware, can get into your organisation in many different ways: buried inside email attachments, via poisoned websites, through exploit kits, on infected USB devices and occasionally even as part of a self-spreading network worm.

But email attachments seem to work best for the cybercrooks, with fake invoices and made-up court cases amongst the topics used by the criminals to make you think you’d better open the attachment, just in case.

In 2015, most ransomware arrived in Word documents containing what are known as macros: script programs that can be embedded in documents to adapt their content in real time, usually as part of your company’s workflow.

The problem with macros, however, is that they aren’t limited to adapting and modifying just the document that contains them.

Macros can be full-blown programs as powerful as any standalone application, and they can not only read and write files on your C: drive and your local network, but also download and run other files from the internet.

In other words, once you authorize a macro to run, you effectively authorize it to install and launch any other software it likes, including malware, without popping up any further warnings or download dialogs.

You can see why cybercrooks love macros!

Click here to read more…