Exchange 2010

This post was Sponsored by Stellar, you can learn more about their EDB Recovery Tool here. Exchange Server is Microsoft’s enterprise email, calendaring, contact, scheduling, and collaboration platform. It is an enterprise-class server that is primarily focused on sending, receiving, and storing email messages for all of the users in the organization. The current version…

Microsoft has a new tool that will make installing a temporary patch much easier to block known HANFIUM attacks.

In a surprise development, Microsoft has released the source code for the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) on GitHub. Fans of the non-SQL database engine, which has powered every version of Exchange since the initial 4.0 release twenty-five years ago, now have the chance to peruse the ESE code. Although Microsoft isn’t accepting suggestions to improve…

The revelations that Exchange Server has had a vulnerability in the Exchange Control Panel since Exchange 2010 shocked some. Microsoft has patched CVE-2020-0688, but the problem gives on-premises administrators something to think about as they look to the long-term future of their email service. Staying on-premises is an option, but going to the cloud might be more secure.

In a surprising but welcome announcement, Microsoft moved the end of extended support for Exchange 2010 to October 2020. This version of Exchange was the most technology-rich and significant in the product’s history, which might be the reason why so many organizations still depend on Exchange 2010 for email. Better options exist, and Exchange Online is the natural place to go… if your network and applications allow the move.

The recent exposure of a privilege elevation vulnerability that exists in the control Exchange has over Active Directory and EWS push notifications is fixed by cumulative updates for Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, and Exchange 2019 and a roll-up update for Exchange 2010 SP3. These changes mark an architectural modification for Exchange, something that Microsoft is loathe to do outside major releases. Install the updates now!

No fix is available yet for the Exchange vulnerability reported by Dirk-jan Mollema and described in CVE-2018-8581. Apart from deploying a split permissions model, no out-of-the-box mitigation exists today. Microsoft is working actively to fix the problem and in the meantime, the brains of the Exchange community are hard at work to come up with possible solutions.

A newly-discovered vulnerability in Exchange potentially allows attackers to gain control over Active Directory. Since Exchange 2000, Exchange has been a highly-privileged server that’s tightly connected to Active Directory. Add in some NTLM weakness, Exchange Web Services push notifications, and everything comes together for the bad guys.

Exchange 2010 will become unsupported on January 14, 2020. It’s time to decide whether to move to Office 365 or Exchange 2016/2019. Exchange 2010 was a really big and important release in the 23-year history of the product, so it’s sad to see it heading to the software scrapyard.