Exchange 2013

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.

Turla, a Russian cyber-espionage group is reported as being behind an attack on Exchange on-premises servers that uses transport agents to capture and process messages for selected users. It’s an attack vector that hasn’t been seen before and raises the question of how often administrators should review transport agents active on their servers. The important point is that unless your network is compromised, hackers cannot install transport agents on Exchange servers and this attack is more theoretical than practical.

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.

Microsoft has new tools to migrate public folders (the “cockroaches of Exchange”) to Office 365 Groups. Sounds good. The good news is that the tools work, even if they need a lot of manual oversight. ISVs offer tools to do the same job with more automation. The choice is yours!

Hardware vendors publish their solutions for Exchange through the Microsoft ESRP. The only thing is that some of the solutions are illogical and unworkable. In fact, some solutions are simply ridiculous. Sure, you could implement them – but at what cost and what level of reliability. But the solutions get your attention and that’s their purpose.

Surprisingly, Microsoft has never included a central method to manage user autosignatures within the cloud or on-premises versions of Exchange. Which means that you must let users manage their signatures, build your own tools, or deploy a commercial solution.