[German]Quick note to readers: If you had problems accessing Microsoft's cloud services like OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business, Office for The Web or the complete Microsoft 365 suite this morning (July 21, 2022), you weren't alone. There was a major disruption in the Microsoft Cloud – some readers emailed me to let me know (thanks for that).
[German]There are users who still access Access databases with older applications via ODBC drivers. Sometimes, when switching to newer hardware/Windows versions, access and especially performance problems occur – the database accesses are slow. A blog reader emailed me with such a case and the solution he used. The approach may be of interest to other users.
[German]The high temperatures in Europe suddenly show just how vulnerable our IT infrastructure basically is after all. Cloud services and servers hosted by Google and Oracle in the UK have gone offline due to cooling issues as the country experiences a record-breaking heat wave. That's according to The Register, and it's also according to status updates from Google.
[German]As of July 12, 2022, Microsoft has also fixed printing vulnerabilities as part of its security updates. As expected, users and administrators encounter printer issues after installing the July 2022 security updates. Below, I summarize some reports of problems. In addition, two pieces of information about fixing printing issues have come to my attention, which I'll also briefly outline.
[German]Something is happening for troubled users of Microsoft Access, who have been suffering for weeks from an Access ACCDE/MDE bug introduced by an update. When using forms, Access reports that the requested class library or wizard is not a VBA project. Microsoft seems to have found the bug and is in the process of gradually rolling out a fix for the various Microsoft Office versions. However, at the time of writing this post, not all fixes had been released.
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[German]U.S. Cyber Security Administration (CISA) has set a deadline of August 2, 2022 for U.S. institutions to fix the CVE-2022-22047 vulnerability, which is rated with a CVSS index of 7.8. This vulnerability in the Client Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS) affects virtually all versions of Windows and was fixed in the July 2022 updates.
[German]Microsoft's outlook.com service currently experiencing a number of problems. There is not only the problem that private outlook.com email accounts are deactivated because of suspicious activities for POP3 and IMAP. Business users currently also seem to have problems accessing their mailboxes via the web interface. The login is denied. In addition, during a research today I noticed some people where Outlook as a client is on strike and can't access the mail servers. It always asks for credentials.
[German]Brief information to users who use private Microsoft accounts (i.e. no self-managed company accounts). Are you currently receiving security warnings for Outlook accounts, stating that these accounts are now blocked due to suspicious activities? Often with the note that suspicious logins to the Microsoft account have been detected. A blog reader just contacted me about this and shared a theory. After a short investigation, I found numerous reports since a few days, where people observed, that their outlook.com accounts are being synced from foreign IPs (despite 2FA). It's not clear, whether it's a service issue or a security flaw.
[German]A dashboard used to manage the database of Shanghai police authorities was not secured by a password for over a year and could be freely accessed via the Internet. This is likely the cause of the recently leaked Shanghain Police Files, which reveal data on over 1 billion Chinese visitors. The whole thing is hosted in the Alibaba Cloud, using – according to experts – outdated technology with security problems. Something rings a bell in the back of my head, some places in Europe (e.g. Switzerland) rely on the Chinese cheap cloud for data storage. Details on the above case and the open database can be found in the blog post Hacker sells 1 billion personal data from Shanghai police data base for 10 bitcoins.
[German]Quick poll to the administrators among the readership who are running a Microsoft Exchange on-premises installation on Windows Server 2019. Have you experienced any performance issues with Microsoft Exchange after installing the July 2022 update? I got a report from a blog reader who had to uninstall the security update. Continue reading
MVP:
2013 – 2016
WIMVP:
2017 – 2020
