Friday, March 29

Microsoft gives a new way to keep you safe from viruses | Digital Trends Spanish


Microsoft You’ve just taken a vital step to better protect your devices against malware, and it’s one that could stop viruses in their tracks. Curiously, however, the Redmond giant appears to have made no mention of the change, despite its importance.

The new policy may sound minor on the surface: Microsoft’s SharePoint cloud storage service can now apparently scan files that are encrypted or password-protected. Previously, this was not thought to be possible.

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The importance of this move lies in the nefarious tactics of hackers and malware writers. The fact that antivirus applications have had trouble reading password-protected files for so long has made them an attractive attack method. Now that SharePoint can penetrate its dark depths, you should have a much better idea of ​​whether the file you uploaded can be trusted.

The change was noticed by Andrew Brandt, Principal Researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos. Brandt came across the new policy after it affected his own SharePoint directory, which contained an archive of malware strains stored in password-protected zip files.

Unfortunately for Brandt, the update wasn’t entirely welcome. As they explained on their Mastodon page, “A couple of password protected Zips are marked as “Malware Detected” which limits what I can do with those files, they’re basically dead space now.”

“While I totally understand doing this for anyone who isn’t a malware analyst,” Brandt continued, “this kind of nosy and getting into their business of handling this is going to become a huge problem for people like me who need to send malware samples to your colleagues.”

While that’s certainly a frustrating development for malware researchers using SharePoint in this way, it’s surely a good thing for everyday users who can upload infected files without knowing the contents of the encrypted files.

a silent change

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Brandt sheds some light on what SharePoint will do with password-protected files it deems malicious, though it’s not immediately clear from his post how users’ actions are limited by Microsoft.

However, a Microsoft support page explains that its Safe Attachments feature will scan files in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Files that are determined to be malware are “locked,” which means “people can’t open, copy, move, or share them.” However, you can still view and delete the files.

However, the support page does not mention encrypted or password-protected files, and Microsoft has not made any announcement of the policy change in its security blog. That’s a bit surprising given how important the new stance could be.

Still, it’s nice to see Microsoft crack down on password-protected files that have long evaded close inspection due to their locked-down nature. Although it may be a drawback for security researchers, it is certainly a boon for everyday users. Hopefully, Microsoft can quickly come up with a solution that doesn’t impede the researchers’ work.

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