Vulnerability management for Linux now generally available

by Contributed | Jun 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In May we announced the support for Linux across our threat and vulnerability management capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Today, we are excited to announce that threat and vulnerability management for Linux is now generally available across Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE, and Oracle, with support for Debian coming soon. In addition to Linux, the threat and vulnerability management capabilities already support macOS and Windows, with support for Android and iOS coming later this summer to further expand our support of third party platforms.   

Vulnerability Management plays a crucial role in monitoring an organization’s overall security posture. That’s why we continue to expand our cross-platform support to equip security teams with real-time insights into risk with continuous vulnerability discovery, intelligent prioritization, and the ability to seamlessly remediate vulnerabilities for all their platforms. With the general availability of support for Linux, organizations can now review vulnerabilities within installed apps across the Linux OS and issue remediation tasks for affected .

Image 1: Software inventory page in the vulnerability management console, showing various Linux platforms

Image 2: Software inventory page in the vulnerability management portal, showing glibc across various Linux systems

Support for the various Linux platforms in threat and vulnerability management closely follows what is available across our Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capabilities. This alignment ensures a consistent experience for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers, as we continue to expand our cross-platform support.

More information and feedback

The threat and vulnerability management capabilities are part of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and enable organizations to effectively identify, assess, and remediate endpoint weaknesses to reduce organizational risk.

Check out our documentation for a complete overview of supported operating systems and platforms.

We want to hear from you! If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, please visit us on our Tech Community page.

Windows Insiders gain new DNS over HTTPS controls

by Contributed | Jun 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Credit and thanks to Alexandru Jercaianu and Vladimir Cernov for implementation work

Over the last year, we have been improving the DNS over HTTPS (DoH) functionality in the Windows DNS client. Now we are pleased to introduce you to the different features now available through the Windows Insider program.

To start with, we want to note that the registry key controls documented in our original DoH testing blog post are no longer applicable. As stated there, those instructions were time limited to the initial DoH test rollout. If you did ever set that key, please delete it then reboot your machine before proceeding with the rest of this blog post.

Next, we will be reviewing the new configuration behavior, how Windows will know if a DNS server supports DoH, and what our next steps are in advancing encrypted DNS discovery.

UI

The first control you should try out is the new UI fields in the Settings app, originally announced on the Insider blog. When Windows knows a given DNS server’s IP address has a corresponding DoH server, it will unlock a dropdown that lets you decide whether to require encryption always be used, use encryption but fall back to plain-text DNS when encryption fails, or not to use encryption (the default value).

GPO

For enterprise administrators, we have provided a new GPO for controlling DoH behavior. This will allow the use of DoH to be allowed, required, or prohibited system-wide.

• Allowed will defer the use of DoH to local settings available in the UI per network adapter.


• Required will prevent the use of configured DNS servers if they do not support DoH and will disable fallback to plain-text DNS.


• Prohibited will prevent any local DoH settings from taking effect, ensuring Windows functions as it did before the DoH client using plain-text DNS only.

NRPT

The Name Resolution Policy Table (NRPT) allows administrators to specify rules for name resolution by namespace. For example, you can create an NRPT rule that specifies all queries for “*.microsoft.com” must be sent to a specific DNS server.

If Windows knows that a DNS server provided in an NRPT rule supports DoH (see the next section for how this works), then the traffic affected by the NRPT rule will inherit the benefits of using DoH. This allows admins who want to use DoH for some namespaces and not others to configure that behavior.

Knowing a server supports DoH

All these mechanisms rely on Windows already knowing a given DNS server IP address supports DoH. We ship a few definitions of known DoH servers in Windows:

Other definitions need to be added using the netsh command. To start with, you can check to see what DoH server definitions we already know by retrieving them:

Using netsh

netsh dns show encryption

Using PowerShell

Get-DnsClientDohServerAddress

Then you can add another server definition to the list and ensure it never falls back to plain-text DNS:

Using netsh

netsh dns add encryption server=<resolver-IP-address> dohtemplate=<resolver-DoH-template> autoupgrade=yes udpfallback=no

Using PowerShell

Add-DnsClientDohServerAddress -ServerAddress ‘<resolver-IP-address>’ -DohTemplate ‘<resolver-DoH-template>’ -AllowFallbackToUdp $False -AutoUpgrade $True

If you prefer to allow fallback so that when encryption fails you can still make DNS queries, you can run the same commands with the fallback flag toggled to add a new server:

Using netsh

netsh dns add encryption server=<resolver-IP-address> dohtemplate=<resolver-DoH-template> autoupgrade=yes udpfallback=yes

Using PowerShell

Add-DnsClientDohServerAddress -ServerAddress ‘<resolver-IP-address>’ -DohTemplate ‘<resolver-DoH-template>’ -AllowFallbackToUdp $True -AutoUpgrade $True

The `-AutoUpgrade` and `-AllowFallbackToUdp` flags together represent the values present in the Setting app per-server dropdown. If for some reason you want to add these DoH server definitions but leave them to use unencrypted DNS for now, you can set the `-AutoUpgrade` flag to false instead of true as in the examples above.

If you want to edit an existing list entry rather than adding a new one, you can use the `Set-DnsClientDohServerAddress` cmdlet in place of the `Add-DnsClientDohServerAddress` cmdlet.

It would be easier for users and administrators if we allowed a DoH server to have its IP address determined by resolving its domain name. However, we have chosen not to allow that. Supporting this would mean that before a DoH connection could we established, we would have to first send a plain-text DNS query to bootstrap it. This means a node on the network path could maliciously modify or block the DoH server name query. Right now, the only way we can avoid this is to have Windows know in advance the mapping between IP addresses and DoH templates.

Coming up next

Going forward, we want to be able to directly discover DoH server configuration from the DNS server. This would mean DoH servers could be used without having to include it in Windows or manually configure the IP address to DoH template mapping. We are currently contributing to two proposals in the IETF ADD WG to enable this: Discovery of Designated Resolvers (DDR) and Discovery of Network-designated Resolvers (DNR). We look forward to updating you with our first tests in supporting DoH discovery!

How to break and change list item permission using Power Automate?

by Contributed | Jun 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Introduction

In this article, we will see a step-by-step implementation of how to break and change list item permission using Power Automate. and for this, we will use REST API.

Implementation

Create a SharePoint List

Create a Power Automate – We will create an Automated Cloud Flow

1. Go to Power Automate > My flows > Click on New flow > Select Automated Cloud Flow

2. It will ask for the flow name and trigger.

Add flow name and choose a trigger when an item is created.

3. Click on Cerate.

4. Now set Site name and list name in when an item is created in list action.

For all API Calling, we will use Send an HTTP request to SharePoint action.

5. Now we will call REST API to break role inheritance.

Set all properties as below.

6. Now we will set new permission so for that we need a user id to whom we have to give permission and need a role definition ID.

User ID: You can directly use User ID if you have or if you have a user name or login name then we have to find user id from the particular user so for that we will call REST API.

Role definition ID: You can use id based on permission.

1. Create a variable and set User Title or if you have any list column then you can use it.

2. Call API to get a user ID and filter it by the above-declared user name.

It will return an object as below,

{
  "d": {
    "results": [
      {
        "__metadata": {
          "id": "https://sitename.sharepoint.com/_api/Web/GetUserById(2)",
          "uri": "https://sitename.sharepoint.com/_api/Web/GetUserById(2)",
          "type": "SP.User"
        },
        "Id": 2,
        "Title": "Chandani Prajapati"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Now we want to use the only id from this so we will use an expression as below,

outputs(‘Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_-_Get_user_id’)?[‘body’][‘d’][‘results’]?[0][‘Id’]

And we will set it in a variable called UserId.

3. Now we will set contribute permission for the above UserId.

Now we can test the flow.

Output

We can see contribute permission for an item as below,

Summary

In this article, we have seen how to break and change list item permission using power automate.

Hope this helps!

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