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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The security protocol that isvused to protect the vast majority of wifi connections has been broken, potentially exposing wireless internet traffic to malicious eavesdroppers and attacks, according to the researcher who discovered the weakness.
Mathy Vanhoef, a security expert at Belgian university KU Leuven, discovered the weakness in the wireless security protocol WPA2, and published details of the flaw on Monday morning.
“Attackers can use this novel attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted,” Vanhoef’s report said. “This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos and so on.
Vanhoef emphasised that “the attack works against all modern protected wifi networks. Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites.”
The vulnerability affects a number of operating systems and devices, the report said, including Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, OpenBSD, MediaTek, Linksys and others.
“If your device supports wifi, it is most likely affected,” Vanhoef wrote. “In general, any data or information that the victim transmits can be decrypted … Additionally, depending on the device being used and the network setup, it is also possible to decrypt data sent towards the victim (e.g. the content of a website).”
Vanhoef gave the weakness the codename Krack, short for Key Reinstallation AttaCK.
Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre said in a statement it was examining the vulnerability. “Research has been published today into potential global weaknesses to wifi systems. The attacker would have to be physically close to the target and the potential weaknesses would not compromise connections to secure websites, such as banking services or online shopping.
“We are examining the research and will be providing guidance if required. Internet security is a key NCSC priority and we continuously update our advice on issues such as wifi safety, device management and browser security.”
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Cert) issued a warning on Sunday in response to the vulnerability.
“The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection and others,” the alert says, detailing a number of potential attacks. It adds that, since the vulnerability is in the protocol itself, rather than any specific device or software, “most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected”.
The development is significant because the compromised security protocol is the most secure in general use to encrypt wifi connections. Older security standards have been broken in the past, but on those occasions a successor was available and in widespread use.
Crucially, the attack is unlikely to affect the security of information sent over the network that is protected in addition to the standard WPA2 encryption. This means connections to secure websites are still safe, as are other encrypted connections such as virtual private networks (VPN) and SSH communications.
However, insecure connections to websites – those which do not display a padlock icon in the address bar, indicating their support for HTTPS – should be considered public, and viewable to any other user on the network, until the vulnerability is fixed.
Equally, home internet connections will remain difficult to fully secure for quite some time. Many wireless routers are infrequently if ever updated, meaning that they will continue to communicate in an insecure manner. However, Vanhoef says, if the fix is installed on a phone or computer, that device will still be able to communicate with an insecure router. That means even users with an unpatched router should still fix as many devices as they can, to ensure security on other networks.
Alex Hudson, the chief technical officer of subscription service Iron, said that it is important to “keep calm”.
“There is a limited amount of physical security already on offer by wifi: an attack needs to be in proximity,” Hudson wrote. “So, you’re not suddenly vulnerable to everyone on the internet. It’s very weak protection, but this is important when reviewing your threat level.
“Additionally, it’s likely that you don’t have too many protocols relying on WPA2 security. Every time you access an HTTPS site … your browser is negotiating a separate layer of encryption. Accessing secure websites over wifi is still totally safe. Hopefully – but there is no guarantee – you don’t have much information going over your network that requires the encryption WPA2 provides.”
There’s likely to be a delay before the vulnerability is used to actually attack networks in the wild, says Symantec researcher Candid Wuest. “It’s quite a complex attack to carry out in practice, but we’ve seen similar before, so we know it’s possible to automate.
“Small businesses and people at home should be concerned, but not too worried,” Wuest added, advising most users to simply apply the updates to their software as and when it becomes available.
The most important lesson from the weakness, he said, was that relying on any one security feature is risky. “You shouldn’t be trusting one single point of failure for all your security. Don’t rely on just your wifi, use a VPN or secure connection for anything important.”
Different devices and operating systems are impacted to differing degrees based on how they implement the WPA2 protocol. Among the worst hit are Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and Linux, due to a further bug that results in the encryption key being rewritten to all-zeros; iOS and Windows, meanwhile, are among the most secure, since they don’t fully implement the WPA2 protocol. No tested device or piece of software was fully immune to the weakness, however.
The international Cert group, based at Carnegie Mellon University, informed technology companies of the flaw on 28 August, meaning that most have had around a month and a half to implement a fix. The Guardian has asked Apple, Google, Microsoft and Linksys the status of their patches. Google said: “We’re aware of the issue, and we will be patching any affected devices in the coming weeks.” Microsoft said: “We have released a security update to address this issue. Customers who apply the update, or have automatic updates enabled, will be protected.” No other vendor has replied at press time.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Last month a preview of the Azure Analysis Services web designer was released. This new browser-based experience will allow developers to start creating and managing Azure Analysis Services (AAS) semantic models quickly and easily. While SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are still the primary tools for development, this new experience is intended to make modeling fast and easy. It is great for getting started on a new model or to do things such as adding a new measure to an existing model.
With this round of updates, we are adding the most significant modeling feature yet, the ability to edit your model visually with the new diagram editor.
This new diagram editor was designed for making changes on models with a large number of tables in mind. To make the best use of screen space, you are not required to make all the tables visible on the diagram at once. Tables can be dragged into the diagram from the table list and can be closed from view by clicking the three dots at the top right of the table.
New measures can also be added to a table by clicking on the same three dots and then clicking measures to bring up the measure editor. When you want to change the properties of a table, measure or column, you no longer need to do this one object at a time. With multi select, you can select as many objects as you want at one time and update the properties for all of them in one batch.
By dragging a column from one table to another, a relationship will be created between those tables. You can edit the relationship by clicking on the relationship line which will bring up the relationship editor.
While the new diagram editor is a great way to easily understand and make bulk changes to your model, you still have all of the power of the existing JSON editor. You can switch between the editors by changing the view at the top of the screen.
As you enhance your model, you can continuously test it out by switching to the query view at the top of the screen.
The query view will give you a preview of what your model will look like when used in tools like the Power BI desktop, and it will also let you run sample queries against your model so that you can check your data.
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Through the use of Azure Active Directory (AD) Privileged Identity Management, you can manage, control, and monitor access within your organization to resources in Azure AD, as well as other Microsoft online services such as Office 365 or Microsoft Intune.
Organizations aim to minimize the number of people who have access to secure information and resources in order to decrease the chances of a malicious user gaining access. However, users still need to carry out privileged operations in Azure, Office 365, or SaaS apps. As a result, organizations give users privileged access in Azure AD without monitoring what those users are doing with their admin privileges. Azure AD Privileged Identity Management helps to resolve the risk created by this dilemma.
Azure AD Privileged Identity Management helps you:
Azure AD Privileged Identity Management can manage the built-in Azure AD organizational roles, including (but not limited to):
Historically, users could be assigned to an admin role through the Azure classic portal or Windows PowerShell. As a result, that user becomes a permanent admin, always active in the assigned role. Azure AD Privileged Identity Management introduces the concept of an eligible admin. Eligible admins should be users that need privileged access every now and then, but not all of the time. The role is inactive until the user needs access, then they complete an activation process and become an active admin for a predetermined amount of time.
You can start using Azure AD Privileged Identity Management in the Azure portal. (NOTE: You must be a global administrator with an organizational account, for example, @yourdomain.com, not a Microsoft account - for example, @outlook.com - to enable Azure AD Privileged Identity Management for a directory)
If you're the first person to use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management in your directory, then the security wizard walks you through the initial assignment experience. After that you automatically become the first Security administrator and Privileged role administrator of the directory.
Only a privileged role administrator can manage access for other administrators. You can give other users the ability to manage in PIM.
Azure AD Privileged Identity Manager provides an admin dashboard that gives you important information such as:
With Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, you can manage the administrators by adding or removing permanent or eligible administrators to each role.
Using the role settings you can configure the eligible role activation properties including:
Note that in the image, the buttons for Multi-Factor Authentication are disabled. For certain, highly privileged roles, we require MFA for heightened protection.
To activate a role, an eligible admin requests a time-bound "activation" for the role. The activation can be requested using the Activate my role option in Azure AD Privileged Identity Management.
An admin who wants to activate a role needs to initialize Azure AD Privileged Identity Management in the Azure portal.
Role activation is customizable. In the PIM settings, you can determine the length of the activation and what information the admin needs to provide to activate the role.
There are two ways to track how your employees and admins are using privileged roles. The first option is using Directory Roles audit history. The audit history logs track changes in privileged role assignments and role activation history.
The second option is to set up regular access reviews. These access reviews can be performed by and assigned reviewer (like a team manager) or the employees can review themselves. This is the best way to monitor who still requires access, and who no longer does.
Prior to reaching general availability Azure AD PIM was in preview and there were no license checks for a tenant to preview Azure AD PIM. Now that Azure AD PIM has reached general availability, trial or paid licenses must be assigned to the administrators of the tenant to continue using PIM. If your organization does not purchase Azure AD Premium P2 or your trial expires, mostly all of the Azure AD PIM features will no longer be available in your tenant. You can read more in the Azure AD PIM subscription requirements
Whether in reaction to changes coming from IoT devices, in response to user clicks on mobile apps, or for the initiation of business processes from customer requests, most modern applications are built through the use of events. With the growth of event-based programming, there is a larger focus on server-less platforms, such as Azure Functions (a server-less compute engine) or Azure Logic Apps (a server-less workflow orchestration engine), which enable you to spend less time worrying about any infrastructure, provisioning, and scaling, and spend more time focusing on your application.
In an attempt to make building event-based and server-less applications even easier to build on Azure, Microsoft has released Azure Event Grid, a first-of-its-kind fully managed event routing service. Azure Event Grid manages all routing of events from any source, to any destination, for any application, greatly simplifying the development of event-based applications as well as the creation of server-less workflows.
Azure Event Grid makes an event a first-class object in Azure, you can subscribe to any event that is happening across your Azure resources and react using server-less platforms like Functions or Logic Apps. In addition to the built-in publishing support for events, through services such as Blob Storage and Resource Groups, Event Grid gives users flexibility and the ability to create your own custom events to publish directly to the service. On top of having a broad array of Azure services and built-in handlers for events, like Functions, Logic Apps, and Azure Automation, Event Grid allows flexibility in handling events, supporting custom web hooks to publish events to any service, even 3rd-party services outside of Azure. The flexibility that Azure Event Grid offers allows for endless application options and makes this a truly unique service in the public cloud.
Azure Event Grid allows for direct event filtering using event type, prefix or suffix, so you only need to receive the events you care about. Whether you want to handle built-in Azure events, like a file being added to storage, or you want to produce your own custom events and event handlers, Event Grid enables this through the same underlying model. Thus, no matter the service or the use case, the intelligent routing and filtering capabilities apply to every event scenario and ensure that your apps can focus on the core business logic instead of worrying about routing events.
Azure Event Grid is designed to be highly available and to handle massive scale dynamically, ensuring consistent performance and reliability for your critical services.
By allowing server-less endpoints to react to new event sources, Azure Event Grid enables event-based scenarios to span new services with ease, increasing the possibilities for your server-less applications. Both code-focused applications in Functions and visual workflow applications in Logic Apps benefit from Azure Event Grid.
The same unified event management interface enables simpler operational and security automation, including easier policy enforcement with built-in support for Azure Automation to react to VM creations or infrastructure changes.
We are aiming to deliver more event sources and destinations later on this year, including Azure Active Directory, API Management, IoT Hub, Service Bus, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Factory, and Storage Queues.
Azure Event Grid completes the missing half of server-less applications. It simplifies event routing and event handling with unparalleled flexibility.
Go ahead and give it a try. I can’t wait to see what you build. To learn more try the quick start.
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