The Tech Beat

At the February Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance user group, Eric Woodruff (@msft_hiker), author of Eric On Identity, gave an excellent presentation on the topic of passwordless authentication. This struck a chord with my recent experience in the field, particularly in terms of the new Authentication Strengths feature in Azure AD. This post is based on my Q&A with Eric and feedback I submitted to the Azure AD team (thanks to the brilliant @merill for that) and sets it in a wider picture, namely that we’re making better technology than we’re using; there seems to be a gap in terms of getting the security we know we need into widespread practice....

I’ve put this post together as an update for a number of schools who have asked me how we’re going on our Private Preview of MCC and will try to keep it generally updated on our progress. I’ll start with a bit of background though, for anyone new to this. You had me at DOINC The best product acronym Microsoft ever devised was DOINC, for the Delivery Optimisation In-Network Cache. This was a service that would store local copies of Windows and Office apps and updates so that client devices could access a fast, consistently-connected local copy rather than downloading from peers or over the Internet....

Microsoft made a decision to force what they consider to be insecure certificate bindings out of use, placing my great little workaround for modernising NPS onto life support. When their planned changes kick in, my own fleet of Azure AD-joined devices will be kicked out. Third-party products exist which solve this problem by operating independently of AD, however in a cash-strapped education context they aren’t financially viable against the negligible cost of running NPS....

I’ve been tacking in the direction of cybersecurity in recent years and specifically within the Microsoft 365 suite. I took the Security Administrator track on my Enterprise Admin certification and didn’t find that too difficult as it was grounded in my day-to-day. This one was pushing the boat out as it’s more Azure-based and honestly I wasn’t expecting to pass first time, but it fairly soaked up these dull days between Christmas and New Year!...

In a couple of weeks I’m leaving this vast, beautiful island and my home for the last decade to return to the substantially smaller, wetter and greener one of my birth. This is for family reasons (lots of missed time over the covid years) and is thankfully not goodbye; my role has changed to accommodate remote work until next year and I’ll hopefully retain a stake thereafter pending my eventual return down the track....

Schools can hardly be the only organisations with legacy applications in regular use for vital ’line-of-business’ functions. Hopefully for the most part these are visible to IT, securely contained and have an end-of-life date with a succession plan rather than being adopted through choice into a modern desktop environment. A while ago I encountered a nasty and unavoidable case of the latter and had to figure out a solution. The application I was tasked to deploy was for processing sensitive financial data on our most heavily-secured devices and relied on Internet Explorer and Java....

By most estimates, Chromium browsers have a 70-80% market share and are deployed in academic and enterprise environments across the globe. Policy-based management is vital to ensure a uniform user experience and enforce security controls, yet on Windows bypassing some aspects of this as a restricted, non-admin user is trivial. This is concerning because schools may rely on these settings for duty of care and student protection. Enter Extensions In recent posts I’ve outlined why Internet security is important for schools and how network-based monitoring and filtering solutions are no longer sufficiently comprehensive to be viable in isolation....

HTTPS inspection is a function provided by many Internet security vendors marketed at schools and businesses since it promises to remove encryption from web traffic and ensure that everything is visible to the filtering system where it can be checked for malware or flagged for inappropriate content. This worked fairly well a decade ago but in the post-Snowden era of pervasive encryption and advancing Internet security standards, this cannot deliver what it once promised and instead puts us and our networks at risk....

I’ve been working in the education sector for almost a decade and after so long a great many things that inform my thinking become assumed, unacknowledged. Some of my greatest revelations have come from describing the things we do, the problems we have and the ways we fix them to folk outside of our wheelhouse. That’s what this post is; it’s a primer on attitudes to technology in schools through the lens of cybersafety....

I’d love to see current global stats comparing use of Exchange on-prem vs cloud. Surely given the number of recent security disasters, any notion of physical ownership of mailboxes equating to their safety has been well and truly dispelled and only the bravest or most prodigiously-resourced organisations would attempt hosting it themselves. Exchange Online is doubtless the most popular version and would most often be deployed alongside an on-prem Active Directory, yet as soon as AD is in the mix the assumption is that Exchange is on-prem or hybrid....