OWIN and Microsoft Account Authentication Bug

5th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

When accessing the email claims using OWIN and a Microsoft Account, you might encounter situations where your application does not receive a email claim, when you expect. We’ve experienced this issue most commonly with hotmail.com and outlook.com logins. Note below where the email claim is not completed in the left screen (a hotmail.com account) but is available for my kloud.com.au email address.

In this situation, there is a bug in the Owin Microsoft Account identity provider where a value isn’t correctly being checked for null.… [Keep reading] “OWIN and Microsoft Account Authentication Bug”

Exchange Online – Mapi over Http Transition

1st of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft has announced that from 31st October 2017, outlook clients using RPC over Http protocol to connect to Office 365 will be no longer supported. Only Mapi over Http clients will be in action onwards. This announcement has left many administrators thinking, What exactly does that mean for my organization? What actions are required to avoid any business impact? Is it time to update outlook clients and upto what level? And last but not the least how can I verify if all necessary steps have been taken to ensure business as usual.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online – Mapi over Http Transition”

Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager

8th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Update: An element of this solution details checking passwords online (using the Have I Been Pwned API). Troy explains succinctly in his blog-post announcing the pwned passwords list why this is a bad idea. If you are looking to implement the concept I detail in this post then WE STRONGLY recommend using a local copy of the pwned password list.
THIS POST HERE details using a local SQL Database to hold the Pwned Passwords Datasets and the change to the Management Agent to query the SQL DB instead of the HIBP API.  … [Keep reading] “Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager”

Don’t Make This Cloud Storage Mistake

20th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

In recent months a number of large profile data leaks have occurred which have made millions of customers’ personal details easily available to anyone on the internet. Three recent cases GOP, Verizon and WWE involved incorrectly configured Amazon S3 buckets (Amazon was not at fault in any way).
Even though it is unlikely you will ever find the URLs to Public Cloud storage such as Amazon S3 or Azure Storage Accounts, they are surprisingly easy to find using the search engine SHODAN which scours the internet for hidden URLs.… [Keep reading] “Don’t Make This Cloud Storage Mistake”

Brisbane O365 Saturday

19th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

On the weekend I had a pleasure of presenting to the O365 Saturday Brisbane event. Link below
http://o365saturdayaustralia.com/
In my presentation I demonstrated a new feature within Azure AD that allows the automatic assigment of licences to any of your Azure subscriptions using Dynamic Groups. So what’s cool about this feature?
Well, if you have a well established organisational structure within your on-premise AD and you are synchronising any of the attributes that you need to identity this structure, then you can have your users automatically assigned licences based on their job type, department or even location.… [Keep reading] “Brisbane O365 Saturday”

Cloud Security Research: Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics

12th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

Newly published research from security firm Rapid7 is painting a worrying picture of hackers and malicious actors increasingly looking for new vectors against organizations with resources hosted in public cloud infrastructure environments.
Some highlights of Rapid7’s report:

  • The six cloud providers in our study make up nearly 15% of available IPv4 addresses on the internet.
  • 22% of Softlayer nodes expose database services (MySQL & SQL Server) directly to the internet.
  • Web services are prolific, with 53-80% of nodes in each provider exposing some type of web service.
… [Keep reading] “Cloud Security Research: Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics”

Windows Information Protection – enabling BYO

11th of July, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Windows 7 has entered the extended support phase of its lifecycle.  What’s this mean? Well Microsoft won’t end security updates for your Windows 7 PC ‘s until the 14th of January 2020, so security should be covered.  However, feature updates (bug fixes), free phone and online support have already ended.  At the same time as Windows 7 leaves extended support Office 365 connection policies are changing to only allow Office clients in mainstream support to connect (that will be Microsoft Office 2016 or later and Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus)[i]. … [Keep reading] “Windows Information Protection – enabling BYO”

Implementing Bootstrap and Font-awesome in SharePoint Framework solutions using React

6th of July, 2017 / / 8 Comments

Responsive Design has been the biggest driving factor for SharePoint framework (SPFx) solutions. In a recent SPFx project for a customer, we developed a component using React, Bootstrap and Font-awesome icons for a responsive look and feel. While building the UI piece, we encountered many issues during the initial set up, so I am writing this blog with detail steps for future reference. One of the key fixes mentioned in this post, is for the WOFF2 font-type file which is a component in font-awesome and bootstrap.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Bootstrap and Font-awesome in SharePoint Framework solutions using React”

Cloud PABX

4th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

Are you looking at a Skype for Business Cloud solution and somewhat perplexed by the many options available? It is confusing choosing from the types of Skype For Business licensing and topologies however you will need to contemplate the following concepts to help you make a decision on the migration path to Skype for Business Cloud PABX.
Cloud PBX
is your phone system in the cloud, it is tightly integrated with Office 365. With the E5 license users get the voice capabilities they need—make, receive, and manage calls from anywhere, using any device.… [Keep reading] “Cloud PABX”