The Clown Car of Enterprise Security Crashes Again (Sup, Microsoft SharePoint)...

If you’re wondering what leaving your front door open, fridge running, with a note saying “help yourself” looks like in cybersecurity… well, Microsoft's Sharepoint is it. The company behind the godless Bing and Clippy, confirmed “active attacks” are exploiting a zero-day flaw in its on-premises SharePoint servers. The good news? If you’re one of the few who ditched on-prem five years ago, you might be fine. The bad news? You probably didn’t.

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Federal agencies, state governments, universities, energy firms were all caught off guard by a vulnerability that grants unauthenticated access and lets attackers execute arbitrary code with the subtlety of a SWAT team busting through drywall. And yes, Microsoft issued patches. For some versions. Others? Still vulnerable. So in classic Microsoft fashion, the fix arrived late, incomplete, and reliant on blind optimism. (Sup, Crowdstrike). 

(Source: CNBC) 

Additionally, according to Palo Alto’s Unit 42 and Eye Security, hackers are already exfiltrating encryption keys, deploying persistent backdoors, and in at least one case, hijacked a government repository meant to inform citizens about how their democracy works… which feels a little too poetic, even for this timeline.

However, Microsoft’s public response to the whole clusterf* was simple: “Here’s a blog post. Good luck.”  The company declined further comment, which means lawyers are present and they’re ready to get it on. Now, real quick: Let’s all pause and remember the fact that SharePoint is still integrated with Outlook, Teams, and the Microsoft ecosystem at large. So once attackers are in, they aren’t just grabbing PDFs… they’re swimming in your network like STD’s in a lazy river. CISA, understaffed thanks to a 65% slash in response team funding, is apparently working “around-the-clock.” Which is encouraging, except we now know they had to notify 100+ compromised orgs manually, over six hours, because automation apparently also got hit in the breach.

(Source: Giphy) 

As for the attackers? No one's saying who they are, but you don’t need an intelligence briefing to connect the dots. The scale, method, and targets smell like a state-sponsored buffet… not some script loser playing Minecraft with your network. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft is simultaneously walking away from China-based engineers working on Pentagon cloud programs, which is about three geopolitical plotlines too many for one week. And yet, investors should take note. Microsoft barely budged on the news, which says more about market inertia than cybersecurity hygiene. But this is now the second time in two years the company’s security posture has allowed adversaries direct access to sensitive government systems. And while cloud revenue continues to print money, public sector trust doesn’t scale quite as easily.

(Source: Giphy) 

Translation: This is a systemic failure disguised as a feature set. And Microsoft, for all its trillion-dollar market cap and beltway dominance, keeps proving that enterprise security is just one bad patch away from collapse. In the end, we’ve seen the same story before… with the same company (read: Microsoft) in the mix. Meaning, keep your eyes on Microsoft and this story and place your bets accordingly. Until next time, friends…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Microsoft as mentioned in the article.