All news with #microsoft tag

Microsoft Sep 2025 Patch Tuesday: 81 fixes, two zero-days

🔒 Microsoft released its September 2025 Patch Tuesday addressing 81 vulnerabilities, including two publicly disclosed zero-days affecting Windows SMB Server and the Newtonsoft.Json library bundled with SQL Server. The update bundle contains nine Critical fixes — five remote code execution issues — and a total of 41 elevation-of-privilege vulnerabilities across Windows, Azure, and related components. Administrators are advised to apply patches promptly, enable and test SMB Server signing and Extended Protection for Authentication, enable auditing to check compatibility, and ensure SQL Server receives the patched Newtonsoft.Json to mitigate the disclosed flaws.

Windows 11 September 2025 Updates KB5065426 & KB5065431

🔒 Microsoft has released cumulative updates KB5065426 (24H2) and KB5065431 (23H2) as the September 2025 Patch Tuesday rollup; these mandatory updates address security vulnerabilities and multiple reliability and UX issues. Install via Start > Settings > Windows Update or download from the Microsoft Update Catalog; Enterprise/Hotpatch systems receive KB5065474 reporting build 26100.6508. After updating, 24H2 moves to build 26100.6584 and 23H2 to build 226x1.5909, and Microsoft warns that support for 23H2 ends on November 11, 2025.

Ask Ralph: Conversational AI Brings Personalized Styling

🤖 Ask Ralph is a conversational AI styling companion built on Azure OpenAI, available in the Ralph Lauren app in the US. It uses natural-language prompts to interpret open-ended requests, asks clarifying questions, and returns curated, fully stylized, visually presented and shoppable outfit recommendations drawn from real-time inventory. Powered by agentic AI capabilities, the experience plans, reasons, and acts to deliver personalized looks at scale. Microsoft positions this as part of broader Azure AI solutions for retail innovation.

Axios Abuse and Salty 2FA Kits Fuel Direct Send Phishing

🔒 ReliaQuest reports threat actors increasingly abusing the HTTP client Axios alongside Microsoft's Direct Send to create a highly efficient phishing pipeline that intercepts and replays authentication flows. Campaigns beginning in July 2025 targeted executives in finance, healthcare, and manufacturing and expanded to all users, achieving up to a 70% success rate when pairing Axios with Direct Send. Attackers also use PDF lures with malicious QR codes, Google Firebase hosting, and advanced MFA-bypass kits such as Salty2FA to simulate multiple 2FA methods and steal credentials.

AWS Managed Microsoft AD Adds LDAPS and Smart Card CA

🔐 AWS Managed Microsoft AD now supports certificate auto-enrollment for LDAPS and Smart Card authentication by integrating with AWS Private CA through the AWS Private CA Connector for AD. The integration automates issuance, renewal, and lifecycle management of domain controller certificates, removing the need to maintain CA infrastructure on Amazon EC2. This capability is available in all Regions offering the connector and can be configured via the console or API.

Microsoft anti-spam bug blocks URLs in Exchange, Teams

🔒 Microsoft is addressing a known anti-spam issue that has caused its service to incorrectly block URLs in Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams, and to quarantine some messages. The engine erroneously flags URLs embedded inside other URLs as malicious, creating alerts and preventing users from opening links that were already confirmed safe. Engineers deployed a fix to stop further quarantines and are unblocking over 6,000 affected URLs, but additional impacted links and residual message recovery remain under active remediation while a root cause analysis continues.

Axios User Agent Enables Mass Automated Phishing Campaigns

🔍 ReliaQuest reports a sharp rise in automated phishing campaigns leveraging the Axios user agent and Microsoft's Direct Send feature, observing a 241% increase between June and August 2025. Attacks using Axios represented 24% of malicious user-agent activity and had a 58% success rate versus 9% for other incidents. When paired with Direct Send, success rose to 70%, prompting guidance to restrict Direct Send, enforce anti-spoofing, scan inbound messages for QR codes/URLs/PDFs, train users including executives, and block uncommon TLDs.

Microsoft Tests AI Actions in Windows 11 File Explorer

🤖 Microsoft is testing new AI actions in Windows 11 File Explorer that let users manipulate images and interact with files without opening them. Currently supported edits for JPG, JPEG, and PNG files include background removal, object erasure, background blur, and a reverse image search via Bing. Insiders on Canary Channel Build 27938 can access these tools from the right-click contextual menu. A new privacy control also shows which third-party apps have used Windows' generative AI models and lets users manage access.

How CISOs Are Experimenting with AI for Security Operations

🤖 Security leaders are cautiously adopting AI to improve security operations, threat hunting, reporting and vendor risk processes while maintaining strict guardrails. Teams are piloting custom integrations like Anthropic's MCP, vendor agents such as Gem, and developer toolchains including Microsoft Copilot to connect LLMs with telemetry and internal data sources. Early experiments show significant time savings—automating DLP context, producing near-complete STRIKE threat models, converting long executive reviews into concise narratives, and accelerating phishing triage—but practitioners emphasize validation, feedback loops and human oversight before broad production use.

September 2025 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Vulnerabilities

🔔 Microsoft’s September 2025 update addresses 84 vulnerabilities, including two publicly disclosed zero-days and eight Critical issues. CrowdStrike’s analysis identifies elevation of privilege, remote code execution and information disclosure as the top exploitation vectors and notes many critical flaws require some user interaction. Key affected components include Windows, Extended Security Updates (ESU) and Microsoft Office, with notable CVEs in SMB, NTLM, Hyper-V and graphics subsystems. Organizations should prioritize patching, apply mitigations for unpatchable issues, and plan for Windows 10 end of support in October 2025.

Amazon RDS Adds Latest Microsoft SQL Server GDR Updates

🔒 Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Microsoft SQL Server now supports the latest General Distribution Release (GDR) updates for SQL Server 2016 SP3, 2017 CU31, 2019 CU32, and 2022 CU20. The supported RDS engine versions map to KB5063762, KB5063759, KB5063757, and KB5063814 respectively. These GDRs address vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2025-49758, CVE-2025-24999, CVE-2025-49759, CVE-2025-53727, and CVE-2025-47954. We recommend that customers upgrade their RDS instances via the RDS Management Console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI and follow the RDS SQL Server upgrade guidance.

Microsoft Enforces MFA for Azure Portal Sign-ins Globally

🔐 Microsoft has completed a global rollout enforcing multifactor authentication (MFA) for Azure Portal sign-ins across 100% of tenants as of March 2025. The rollout follows an initial enforcement announcement in May 2024 and prior warnings to Entra global admins to enable MFA to avoid access disruptions. Microsoft says this step strengthens account defenses and will be followed by mandatory MFA for Azure CLI, PowerShell, SDKs, and APIs in October 2025. The company cites internal research showing MFA dramatically reduces account takeover risk.

Azure Phase 2: Mandatory MFA for Resource Management

🔒 Microsoft is starting Phase 2 of mandatory multi-factor authentication for Azure resource management operations on October 1, 2025. Enforcement at the Azure Resource Manager layer will be applied gradually via Azure Policy, requiring users to complete MFA before performing management actions. Workload identities (managed identities and service principals) are not affected. Administrators should enable MFA, test policy in audit mode, and ensure Azure CLI 2.76 and Azure PowerShell 14.3 or later are in use for best compatibility.

Microsoft Gives Free One-Year 365 to U.S. Students

🎓 Microsoft is offering a free 12-month subscription to Microsoft 365 Personal for U.S. college students, including community college attendees, with the offer available through October 31, 2025. The subscription includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook with the Copilot AI assistant, plus 1 TB of OneDrive storage and ransomware protection. Students must verify enrollment via a school email or documentation, and a 50% discount is available if they keep the plan after the first year. Microsoft also announced educator grants, community college certifications, AI training, and expanded Copilot access for U.S. schools.

Latest Social Engineering Trends Targeting Enterprises

🛡️Social engineering remains the favoured vector as attackers combine psychological manipulation with accessible AI tools to target high-value corporate roles. Recent incidents show sophisticated pretexting, voice cloning and mass email flooding used to create urgency and extract funds or credentials. Fraudsters increasingly exploit collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and legitimate utilities like Quick Assist to appear trustworthy and gain remote control. Organizations should harden collaboration settings, enforce conditional access and MFA, and reduce privilege scope to limit the blast radius of any compromise.

APT28 Deploys NotDoor: Outlook VBA Backdoor in NATO

🔒 NotDoor is a newly reported Outlook VBA backdoor attributed to the Russian state-sponsored actor APT28 that monitors incoming mail for a trigger phrase and enables data exfiltration, file drops, and remote command execution. S2 Grupo's LAB52 describes deployment via DLL side-loading of onedrive.exe, which loads a malicious SSPICLI.dll, disables macro protections, and runs Base64-encoded PowerShell to establish persistence. The implant watches for a trigger such as "Daily Report" and supports four commands — cmd, cmdno, dwn and upl — sending stolen files via Proton Mail.

From Summer Camp to Grind Season — Threat Source Recap

📰 This week’s Threat Source newsletter highlights three significant vulnerabilities Talos researchers uncovered and helped remediate: a Dell firmware persistence flaw (Revault), an Office for macOS permissions bypass, and router compromises that blend malicious traffic with legitimate ISP flows. The author, William Largent, also emphasizes mental health and recommends a paper on AI behavioral pathologies to help anticipate malicious or errant AI-driven activity. Top headlines include a 4.4M-record TransUnion breach, a Salesloft Drift AI token compromise, a Passwordstate high-severity fix, an Azure AD credential leak, and a WhatsApp zero-day. Watch the Talos Threat Perspective episode and read the Dell write-up for mitigation guidance.

GhostRedirector: China-aligned IIS SEO Fraud Campaign

🔍 ESET researchers identified GhostRedirector, a China-aligned threat group active since at least August 2024 that has compromised at least 65 Windows servers across multiple countries, notably Brazil, Thailand and Vietnam. The group deployed two novel tools: a C++ backdoor Rungan for remote command execution and a malicious IIS module Gamshen that manipulates search rankings to boost targeted sites. Operators also leveraged known privilege escalation exploits like BadPotato and EfsPotato to obtain administrator access and create persistent accounts. Organizations are advised to monitor IIS modules, patch promptly and audit high-privilege accounts and PowerShell activity.

Microsoft Cost Management: July-August 2025 Product Updates

💡 Microsoft Cost Management released a set of July–August 2025 updates to help organizations monitor and reduce Azure spend. The release adds service principal support for the Partner Admin Reader role, enabling EA indirect partners to programmatically access cost data without interactive accounts. Other highlights include a Pricing Calculator user tip, new cost-saving offers such as Azure Firewall ingestion-time transformation (GA) and the Azure Storage Mover preview, updated documentation on billing and reservations, and new instructional videos on cost allocation and Copilot for cost insights.

Unauthorized TLS Certificates Issued for 1.1.1.1 by Fina CA

🔒 Cloudflare reported that Fina CA issued twelve unauthorized TLS certificates for the public DNS IP 1.1.1.1 between February 2024 and August 2025. All certificates have been revoked and Cloudflare found no evidence they were used maliciously, noting that successful impersonation would also require client trust in Fina and interception of traffic. The misissuance was detected via Certificate Transparency logs, and Cloudflare is improving alerts, monitoring, and triage to prevent similar lapses.