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Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

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Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#191

Post by blurbleblurble »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #87
charles_f wrote: post #80

> CISA advises vulnerable organizations [...] to disconnect affected products from the public-facing Internet until an official patch is available. It's interesting to me that you'd go the hassle of hosting your own SharePoint on prem, but leave it internet facing. I would have assumed a the Venn diagram of these organizations to be entirely contained in orgs forcing you to use a VPN.

Oh CISA... What a pity that CISA has been purged down of effective useful people and turned into another sad selected-for-political-compliance-only force. Arizona recently got attacked from Iranian hackers & didn't even bother trying to get help from CISA. https://archive.is/2025.07.19-143305/https://www.azcentral.c... CISA is so so vital. Investigating incredibly wide ranging attacks like this, or the Salt Typhoon a…

It almost seems like the goal is to hurt people

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#192

Post by gottorf »

conception wrote: post #188
cube00 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't security the number one priority in those spaces? Money changing hands between suitable people who pop up together at the right social occasions is the priority.

This though is also true in the private sector.

In the private sector, there's a slightly more direct link between job underperformance and being fired.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#193

Post by ThunderSizzle »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #51
sega_sai wrote: post #27

It is instructive that we are seeing the results of DOGE's work: "The process took six hours Saturday night — much longer than it otherwise would have, because the threat-intelligence and incident-response teams have been cut by 65 percent as CISA slashed funding, Rose said."

I'm not sure which part pisses me off more: that tons of professionals lost their jobs and will likely not work in public service again because of it, or that through all that, they barely found any actual waste at all. A fucking farce.

There is waste. A God awful amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. You don't rack up a 1.8 trillion deficit and a debt per capita that is 7x the income per capita without waste, fraud, and abuse.

The problem is that while common sense would dictate those nonsensical expenses as such, they were part of the official process, so it was all legalized, so they avoid the FWA labels because the rule writers have made it so.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#194

Post by EvanAnderson »

FormerOfficeGuy wrote: post #163
mschuster91 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private Teams messages are stored in individual Exchange mailboxes. Good lord. It truly is a layer of dung layered upon more layers of dung.

Throwaway account so keep this comment separate from my main account. I used to work within the Office group. The way that data is organized in Exchange is mind-boggling -- and not in a good way, IMO. Its design is from decades ago, and trying to understand how to find something really takes a lot of experience. Without going into any gruesome details of how it works, I'll just say that it is a HUGE hurdle to being p…

> The way that data is organized in Exchange is mind-boggling -- and not in a good way, IMO. Its design is from decades ago, and trying to understand how to find something really takes a lot of experience

I assume you're talking about MAPI, which owes some of its baroque nature to X.400. It definitely comes from another time. It always struck me as over-engineered.

On the other hand, it has also been ridiculously successful.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#195

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #147
p_ing wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SharePoint is primarily written in C# [.NET Framework 4.8] and leverages ASP.NET; there would be no reason to rewrite the majority in another language. There is some C++ in SharePoint Search (and a few other components here and there). IIS which SharePoint runs atop of is written in presumably primarily C. You can decompile most of SharePoint if you ever need to peek at the code. That's a huge advantage to figure out…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#196

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

gkanai wrote: post #166
polarbear67 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/microsoft-stop-using-engine...

That is... crazy. Would the CCP allow their cloud infra to be administrated by US staff in the US? Never.

The US doesn't either. Someone didn't comply with existing law here. I've been on a program where uncleared people from another business unit were used as internal labor loan for export controlled work. One of them was belatedly discovered to be a Canadian citizen and they were retasked the next day. There are strict rules in this domain. It's just that nobody gives a fuck about paying for an IT cost center to do things securely. Chalk up another win for outsourcing and moving to the cloud for cost savings.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#197

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

tacticus wrote: post #189
this_steve_j wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft’s version of “Zero Trust” doesn’t care if things are reachable from the public internet. They have been preaching “identity is the new perimeter” [1] for years, and it doesn’t wash. The NIST Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) implementation guides (SP 1800-35) [2] cut through the nonsense and AI generated marketing smoke. In ZTA, ALL network locations are untrusted. Network connections are created by a Policy En…

> several pillars are missing from their “Zero Trust” marketing materials. TBH several pillars are missing from their entire security posture.

why bother when not a single vulnerability has resulted in any appreciable fines or loss of market share? it's absurd how untouchable their ubiquity has become.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#198

Post by gomicrosoft »

charles_f wrote: post #80

> CISA advises vulnerable organizations [...] to disconnect affected products from the public-facing Internet until an official patch is available. It's interesting to me that you'd go the hassle of hosting your own SharePoint on prem, but leave it internet facing. I would have assumed a the Venn diagram of these organizations to be entirely contained in orgs forcing you to use a VPN.

That’s the whole thing with Azure; it blurs the line between on-prem and cloud “because you can.”

I never remember thinking years ago how nice it would be to have all of our private docs that we only need to access on our private network accessible to the public. I just wasn’t thinking outside the box enough.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#199

Post by galangalalgol »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #193
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which part pisses me off more: that tons of professionals lost their jobs and will likely not work in public service again because of it, or that through all that, they barely found any actual waste at all. A fucking farce.

There is waste. A God awful amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. You don't rack up a 1.8 trillion deficit and a debt per capita that is 7x the income per capita without waste, fraud, and abuse. The problem is that while common sense would dictate those nonsensical expenses as such, they were part of the official process, so it was all legalized, so they avoid the FWA labels because the rule writers have made it so.

There is of course waste. But the budget for everything apart from social security, medicare/caid, and defense is very small in comparison to those. The US could cut everything except for those three and it wouldn't delay the debt bomb's detonation by more than a year. Current projections are around 20 years of current trends. The US has to keep borrowing, or the world economy breaks down with no reserve currency. The trick is that the borrowing needs to keep increasing the gdp at the same rate as the debt. I.E. the loans have to be spent on assets. That is not currently the case.

Re: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

#200

Post by cirgue »

charles_f wrote: post #80

> CISA advises vulnerable organizations [...] to disconnect affected products from the public-facing Internet until an official patch is available. It's interesting to me that you'd go the hassle of hosting your own SharePoint on prem, but leave it internet facing. I would have assumed a the Venn diagram of these organizations to be entirely contained in orgs forcing you to use a VPN.

The answer is contractors and consultants. State agencies routinely work with third parties that need to be able to share files. Obviously this isn’t universal but it isn’t uncommon.
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