Microsoft To Offer Some Free Security Products After Criticism

Microsoft is expanding its suite of free security tools for customers, the software company said on Wednesday, following criticism that it was charging clients to protect themselves against Microsoft's mistakes. From a report: The move follows a high-level hack that allowed allegedly Chinese spies to steal emails from senior U.S. officials - and complaints from security specialists and lawmakers against paying for tools In a blog post published on Wednesday, Microsoft said the advanced features in Microsoft's auditing suite - which it calls Microsoft Purview - would be available to all customers "over the coming months." Although not enough to prevent hacks on their own, digital auditing tools are critical for helping organizations figure out whether intruders are in their network, how they got in and how to get them out.

Brilliant!

[Tablizer]

1. Sell a boat full of holes
2. Sell corks to fix the holes
3. Drive the other boat-makers out of business
4. Profit!

Great!

[awwshit]

There is a big price difference between E3 and E5, where Defender for Desktop is way over-priced. But if you go with E3 then you give up some really helpful things. Its great that CISA put pressure on Microsoft to help us protect ourselves. I'm going to benefit.

Why?

[quonset]

Why must they conflict inflict themselves upon us?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[williamyf]

... Cue 3rd party providers of auditing tools complaining to regulators about monopolistic practices in 3... 2... 1...

Re:

[sabbede]

MS doesn't need to provide auditing tools, just make the dang logs available and searchable. That's the appalling thing - they charge a premium to see the logs for activity in your tenant as if they shouldn't already be yours. MS has a log of changes to your global admin group, and they shouldn't charge you to see it.

Re:

[awwshit]

Two things happened here and the summary does not cover it.

1. A Microsoft signing cert was compromised in some unknown way.
2. Someone used the cert to access email on a non-classified cloud instance belonging to the Government.
3. The Government noticed the intrusion based on logging and visibility (presumably SIEM).
4. The Government leaned on Microsoft to give more customers access to the logging info - a win for everyone but Microsoft.

Welcome to capitalism!

[kmoser]

It's like when the credit agencies (Equifax, etc.) get hacked, then offer to charge you for credit monitoring and credit reports. (Yes, they are supposed to offer this for free, but in practice they try to upsell it.)

Re:

[sabbede]

That's not Capitalism, that's greed - a human vice present whenever humans are, regardless of the economic system.

I was just complaining about that!

[sabbede]

Because it's annoying to be denied the ability to see past the last 7 days worth of logins, or only have audit trails for user account changes, so you can't see when an f-ing connector's definition was changed or where the change came from.