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Test your team’s security readiness with the Gone Phishing Tournament 74% of breaches involve the human element. Let's face it—technology alone isn't sufficient in the relentless fight against cyber-attacks. With AI technology like LLMs becoming more ubiquitous, phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated and cyber-attackers are honing in on the easiest targets: the users. From nation-states to basement-dwelling hackers, the strategy is simple yet effective: exploit human behavior to find a way in, then sit back as the defenses fall like dominos. Luckily, with all this going on, you don't have to stay still. You can turn potential victims in your …

Today, we had a service request our our customer wants to understand the health status of their Azure SQL Database. Know this is crucial for maintaining high availability. Microsoft Azure offers powerful monitoring features—Service Health and Resource Health—that can send you real-time alerts, helping you react quickly to any issues. This article will cover how to set up and use these features. Azure Service Health What is Service Health? Service Health is a feature within the Azure portal that shows the status of Azure services across different regions. It includes information about outages, planned maintenance, and other events affecting Azure service…

I’m excited to share the release of the latest installment of Microsoft Mechanics, showcasing how businesses can achieve more across every customer interaction by integrating intelligence into their communications with Azure AI Service and Azure Communication Services. Watch the video here and read on to learn more. Using generative AI to create more human-centric experiences Large-language models like ChatGPT on Azure OpenAI allow you to build applications with natural and life-like conversations, but most solutions use only simple text-based interactions and don’t have a path to bring a human into the loop. Azure Communication Services and Azure AI…

This tutorial shows you how to build and deploy a full-stack web application on Azure using React, Spring Boot, and PostgreSQL empowered by JHipster Azure Spring Apps. JHipster Azure Spring Apps provides a holistic solution for full-stack web development, covering front-end, back-end, database, and cloud deployment. Prioritizing simplicity, it offers one-click project creation through JHipster Online. With over 100k monthly users, JHipster is a leading code generator, fostering a vibrant developer community. What is JHipster Azure Spring Apps? Initiated as a Yeoman application generator in 2013, JHipster has evolved into a comprehensive development pl…

In my previous blog on chaos engineering, I talk about how to improve application resilience with Azure Chaos Studio. Fault injection impacts resources directly, and it must be done in a controlled and secure way to prevent unforeseen damages to your application. Hence, in this post, I show you how to efficiently manage permissions to perform secure fault injection. Our customers have been asking for the ability to reuse fault injection permissions across multiple chaos experiments. And we listen! Earlier in August 2023, the Azure Chaos Studio team launched the public preview of User-Assigned Managed Identity and Custom Role Assignment. There are 2 types of Azure …

In the fall of 2018, we announced the general availability (GA) of Azure Database for MariaDB. Since that release five years ago, we’ve invested time and resources in Azure Database for MariaDB to further extend our commitment to the open-source community by providing valuable, enterprise-ready features of Azure for use on open-source database instances. In November 2021 we released Flexible Server, the next-generation deployment option for Azure Database for MySQL. As we continue to invest in Azure Database for MySQL and focus our efforts on Flexible Server to make it the best destination for your open-source MySQL workloads, we’ve decided to retire the Azure Data…

Introducing Signatures, helping you grow your personal brand, check out the video above for details, Click spoiler below to see a full transcript Spoiler (Highlight to read) Hello and welcome to this Tech Community Tech Update, I am Allen Smith Technical & Compliance lead for the Microsoft Tech Community. In this update I want to show you a feature we recently enabled on the Microsoft Tech Community to automatically generate a signature on your posts. The signature can be used to tell other community members who you work for, your job title, your preferred pronouns or a link to your company website. Interested? let us dive in... So here we a…

Organizations are continuously looking for ways to streamline their processes, enhance security, and improve the overall efficiency of their operations. One common challenge faced by businesses is securely accessing and managing APIs while ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data. In this blog, we'll explore how organizations can leverage Azure Logic App and Managed Identities to achieve seamless integration with Azure API Management, simplifying authentication and enhancing security. Managed Identities provide a secure way for Azure services and resources to authenticate themselves to other Azure services, eliminating the need for explicit creden…

In today’s post, I’m excited to shed light on a creative solution I devised to meet a unique client requirement. Azure Blob storage, in its native form, doesn’t inherently support multi-region active-active architectures. However, as every cloud architect knows, challenges often pave the way for innovative solutions. My client was on the hunt for a method to achieve a multi-region active-active configuration with Azure blob storage. Rising to the occasion, I devised two potential designs, presenting both to the client. After a thorough discussion, the client chose the design that fit their needs seamlessly. I believe sharing these designs might prove beneficial for…

The Microsoft Graph is foundational to the new Microsoft 365 Copilot. As the world’s largest dataset, it is the source of all information that feeds Microsoft 365 Copilot. With the addition of the Semantic Fabric and Graph Connectors it provides Microsoft 365 customers with an unbeatable wealth of information and usefulness right within the applications that users are already using today. In this MidDay Café Tyrelle Barnes and Michael Gannotti sit down with Microsoft’s Chantrelle Nielsen, Principal PM Manager, Microsoft Graph. They discuss the Graph and it’s significance, whether customers should build their own Copilots or leverage Microsoft’s out of the box Copilots,…

We’ve got several new capabilities to announce with our September service release (2309), including Microsoft Intune Suite Remote Help expanding to macOS and enhancements to Remote Help for Windows. We’re releasing the Zebra Lifeguard Over-the-Air integration with Intune, which we offered for public preview in May, and we’ve added more than 30 settings for Apple devices, part of our ongoing effort to ensure Intune has Day zero support for the latest Apple releases. Finally, we’ve released Microsoft Intune Endpoint Privilege Management for Windows 365 devices so customers can facilitate elevations for users on Cloud PC devices. Your feedback is important! Please let us …

This blog post is the latest in a series of updates to let you know about updates to Marketplace Rewards. You can follow along with the tag Marketplace Rewards to capitalize on these changes. Welcoming more Teams app publishers The marketing ecosystem is dynamically evolving, and with it, the needs of our partners are adjusting, too. So we’ve updated the requirements for Marketplace Rewards benefits for Teams app publishers. If you’ve published a Teams app, you no longer are required to be engaged in ISV Success Build or Publish or have been part of the legacy Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits program. Now, if you’ve published a Teams app in the Microsoft commer…

The Forms live presentation feature is a crowd favorite, receiving an abundance of positive feedback since its initial release. It effectively bridges the gap between form owners and their audience, significantly elevating engagement levels. We've recently updated the live presentation experience to be even more immersive and seamless when you present your forms or quizzes. Let's delve into these exciting changes! You can also try out these improvements from this amazing template or watch the video of these improvements below. Fresh design style When you switch to the “present” mode, you'll find that you have extra space available to showcase your questions…

Introduction: In the ever-evolving landscape of API development, dealing with legacy systems and formats is a common challenge. This blog post aims to assist you in leveraging Azure API Management (APIM) to address a specific scenario: transforming XML data to JSON and vice versa. We'll delve into the techniques supported by Azure API Management that allow you to bridge the gap between these formats seamlessly. Understanding the Challenge: Legacy systems often communicate using XML, while modern APIs tend to rely on JSON due to its simplicity and widespread support. In scenarios where your API needs to interact with both formats, a transformation …

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 171 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: Get it now in our marketplace [attachment=51023:name] Streamlit on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Streamlit is an open-source, easy-to-use language for creating interactive web apps. It offers faster deployments, extensibility, and cost-effectiveness. Apps4Rent provides support for Streamlit, ensuring consistent environments across different Microsoft Azure compute resources. [attachment=51024:name] Mosaic LLM Foundry on Ubuntu 20.04: This offer from Apps4Rent provides Mosaic LLM…

The Windows operating system has evolved significantly since its inception, and with each iteration, new features and tools have been introduced to improve user productivity and experience. For decades, Command Prompt has been a steadfast companion for users of Microsoft Windows. However, with the advent of Windows Terminal and Microsoft's push toward modernization, questions about the fate of Command Prompt have risen. In recent years, it has become a very useful tool especially to AI entrepreneurs. AI entrepreneurs and developers in the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence and machine learning rely on command-line tools and scripting languages to buil…

Have you ever wondered how to securely access another Azure App Service from your app service without exposing any credentials or secrets? If so, you might be interested in using Managed Identities (MSI) or Service Principals to authenticate and authorize your app service to another app service that is protected by Azure Active Directory (AAD) using built-in authentication (Easy-Auth). In this article, I will show you how to use MSI or Service Principal of app1 to access app2, which is a custom resource that requires AAD authentication. Normally, we would use the MSI-validator tool to test the functionality of MSI. However, it only supports specific resource…

Back to July 1, 2023, we have released the information about the new Teams Rooms SKUs informing that all Teams Rooms devices, including Microsoft Surface Hubs and Microsoft Teams Panels, using a user license (i.e., A, E, G) will receive an error message and the device will fail to sign-in to the applicable service after the 90-day grace period expires on September 30, 2023. IMPORTANT! There are less than 10 days remaining before the Microsoft Teams Rooms licensing policy enforcement goes into effect. Please ensure all Microsoft Teams Rooms are properly licensed by September 30, 2023 to prevent any interruption in service. Microsoft Teams Rooms, including Mi…

During our recent development work with a partner, they asked a question... We want to deploy Azure Policies with our Managed application to ensure the solution stays compliant and security standards are enforced. Is there a way for us, as a publisher, to get alerted if the policies deployed with the Managed application are violated and then quickly engage with the customers to ensure that their deployment is secure? The short answer was no, so we built one! We are open-sourcing the code for this solution so that other publishers can adopt this approach to ensure customers' Managed applications are secure. For more context on the solution described he…

Introduction: Web applications are often exposed to various types of attacks, such as denial-of-service (DoS), brute force, or credential stuffing. These attacks can overwhelm your application with a large number of requests, affecting its performance and availability. To prevent these attacks, you need a way to detect and block abnormal traffic patterns and limit the rate of requests to your application. In this blog post, we will introduce a new feature - Rate limiting for Azure Web Application Firewall on Application Gateway that is currently in Public Preview. This feature allows you to define custom rules to limit the number of requests from different sources, …

This blog describes how to configure remote-write to send data from Prometheus running in your Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) cluster to Azure managed Prometheus using Azure Active Directory authentication. Then query and view the data via Azure managed Prometheus and Grafana. Currently ARO doesn't support Managed Identity, hence we are using Azure Active Directory Service Principal approach. Managed Identity support for ARO is coming soon. One of the major drawbacks with Service Principal approach is that the client secret will have an expiry date. Credit Huge thanks to Vishwanath Narasimhan & Rakshith Padmanabha from Microsoft and Paul Czarkowski f…

Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks continue to be some of the most prevalent and costly attacks facing organizations worldwide. Between April 2022 and April 2023, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detected and investigated 35 million BEC attempts with an adjusted average of 156,000 attempts daily[1]. In just the last 30 days we have observed potential BEC attack related activity in over 150 customers. Microsoft 365 Defender has comprehensive prevention, detection, and disruption options for BEC attacks across Microsoft’s products and solutions. Using Microsoft Sentinel’s ability to collect data across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-…

The following blog contains important information about TLS certificate changes for Azure Storage endpoints that may impact client connectivity. Azure Storage uses some intermediate certificates that are set to expire on 27th June,2024. We will be rolling out new certificates for the expiring intermediate certificates starting March 2024. We expect that most Azure Storage customers will not be impacted; however, your application may be impacted if you explicitly specify a list of acceptable CAs (a practice known as “certificate pinning”). Certificate pinning is no longer considered the best practice. In scope Azure Storage services include Blob, File, Table, Que…

Active Directory Hardening Series - Part 1 – Disabling NTLMv1 Hello everyone, Jerry Devore back again after to along break from blogging to talk about Active Directory hardening. In my role at Microsoft, I have found every organization has room to improve when it comes to hardening Active Directory. Many times, customers are aware of issues but are afraid of unintended impacts if they make a change. In other words, organizations are getting stuck in the "analysis paralysis" stage. In this series my goal is to help you understand how to move forward with confidence by better understanding the changes along with how to perform proper due diligence. Before …