Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Azure Firewall is a managed stateful network security service that recently became generally available for premium features across most Azure regions, providing capabilities such as TLS inspection, URL filtering and more
Across the different virtual networks and subscriptions, rules are created for network segmentation and access control. Managing the network traffic may require you to audit rules for utilization, flow hit count or require a previous working configuration.
This runbook will help create instantaneous back-up copies of Azure Firewall with the Firewall Policy and when scheduled with an automation account, you can take daily/weekly snapshots and store them in a specified path.
For this runbook, Azure blob storage will be used to store Azure Firewall configuration for both network infrastructure and firewall policy at the time of the dump. You can edit the template to specify another storage method. We also discuss how to redeploy a firewall to a known configuration using one of the backed-up templates. For more information on other network resources that you may like to adapt to this runbook, please see the Export-AzResourceGroup module.
Requirements
Go to the Search bar and type Automation account. Create a New Automation account. When done, go to the Automation account and in the Settings blade, under Account settings, create a “Run As” account. This provide the service principal access that will be used to auto-login into our script later.
This runbook is a PowerShell module and we need to confirm that we have access to network and resources modules. On the Automation account blade which you have just created, go to Modules and then search the Gallery to import the following three requisites:
– Az.Account
– Az.Network
– Az.Resources
Next, we create a storage account to store each back-up created in Azure Blob storage. Go to the search bar for resources and search for Storage Account. Create a Storage account. Select Cool storage mode
On the Automation account blade, click on Runbooks and create one. Here below, I have created AzFwBackUp.
After creating the runbook, copy the code from our Azure Network Security Github repository and paste it in line one. This code has three functions: 1. Create storage, 2. Export the firewall configuration, and save in the storage, and 3. Purge the older backups. It uses the Get-AzFirewall and Get-AzFirewallPolicy cmdlet to create snapshot instances.
Click Save and then click on Test Plane.
On the next page, you will be prompted for a few parameters which you have set up earlier:
Click Start to begin the dry run to confirm you can store a copy of the current configuration. Once done, you can then proceed to create a schedule to make this run periodically.
The back-up should be available in your Storage -> Container in .json format.
To create a schedule, go to the Runbook that was created, at the Runbook blade, select Schedules -> Add a Schedule. Give it a name and select “Recurring” Configure for every week or month.
Click to “Link the schedule to the runbook.” Select the runbook you have created and then click “Configure parameters and run settings,” Fill this form as done earlier.
The Runbook should now be all set to create back-ups in. json template that may be used to restore the firewall to an earlier configuration. The storage account should now store your back-ups as specified.
To restore an Azure firewall (firewall infrastructure and firewall policy) to an earlier configuration, run the following syntax in your Cloud shell:
New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -name $azurefirewallname -ResourceGroupName $resourcegroupname -TemplateFile $filepath
Note that Rule Collection Groups or RCGs are treated as dependency objects and these objects cannot be deployed in parallel. Collection groups all reference the policy as dependant (dependsOn in the arm template).
This means it will first update policy and then try to update all rule collection groups in parallel. This may fail due to the policy dependency issue. (This is currently by ARM (Azure Resource Manager) design and a roadmap item).
Hence, rule collection groups must be deployed one after the other using the “depends on” tag in your firewall backup file.
As an example, the Rule Collection Group would have to be edited using the rule processing order.
The format is to first specify the Firewall Policy name, then Policy RCG object.
"type": "Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies/ruleCollectionGroups",
"apiVersion": "2020-11-01",
"name": "SOC-NS-FWPolicy_premium/DefaultNetworkRuleCollectionGroup",
"location": "westus2",
"dependsOn": [
"[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies', 'SOC-NS-FWPolicy_premium')]",
"[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies/ruleCollectionGroups', 'SOC-NS-FWPolicy_premium','DefaultDnatRuleCollectionGroup')]"
]
(Also, confirm that the KeyVault information is not missing after the redeployment is complete)
In summary, you may need to export firewall settings when creating child policies, restoring from a wrong configuration, auditing rules etc. By setting up frequent back up schedule, you can create a historical record of your configuration.
For more information about Azure firewall use cases and governance information, see the Azure Network Security TechCommunity blog
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA has added 13 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.
| CVE Number | CVE Title | Required Action Due Date |
| CVE-2021-32648 | October CMS Improper Authentication | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-21315 | System Information Library for node.js Command Injection Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-21975 | Server Side Request Forgery in vRealize Operations Manager API Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-22991 | BIG-IP Traffic Microkernel Buffer Overflow Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-25296 | Nagios XI OS Command Injection Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-25297 | Nagios XI OS Command Injection Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-25298 | Nagios XI OS Command Injection Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-33766 | Microsoft Exchange Server Information Disclosure Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2021-40870 | Aviatrix Controller Unrestricted Upload of File Vulnerability | 2/1/2022 |
| CVE-2020-11978 | Apache Airflow Command Injection Vulnerability | 7/18/2022 |
| CVE-2020-13671 | Drupal Core Unrestricted Upload of File Vulnerability | 7/18/2022 |
| CVE-2020-13927 | Apache Airflow Experimental API Authentication Bypass Vulnerability | 7/18/2022 |
| CVE-2020-14864 | Oracle Corporate Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Path Traversal Vulnerability | 7/18/2022 |
Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a living list of known CVEs that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise. BOD 22-01 requires FCEB agencies to remediate identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect FCEB networks against active threats. See the BOD 22-01 Fact Sheet for more information.
Although BOD 22-01 only applies to FCEB agencies, CISA strongly urges all organizations to reduce their exposure to cyberattacks by prioritizing timely remediation of Catalog vulnerabilities as part of their vulnerability management practice. CISA will continue to add vulnerabilities to the Catalog that meet the meet the specified criteria.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Hello again! I’m Jeff Sakowicz, Principal Program Management Lead for Application Platform Security within the Microsoft Identity team. Our team’s goal is to foster a secure, trustworthy, and thriving app ecosystem. Part of achieving this goal is enabling apps to support a Zero Trust security model.
This is the second post in our series on why Zero Trust matters for developers. In the previous post, I introduced the Zero Trust principles and how they apply to identity and access management. In this post, I will focus on how you can design apps using the principle of least privileged access with the Microsoft identity platform.
Why should you care about using least privileged access?
In short, by limiting what your app has permission to do, you reduce the potential blast radius of attacks and increase adoption of your apps by customers. In our experience, IT administrators are sensitive to the levels of permission being requested by applications and are applying more scrutiny when deciding whether to grant a given app permissions. When you create an app that asks for a lot of permissions, it will be less likely to be approved or could be denied altogether.
What is overprivilege and what is an overprivileged app?
When an entity asks for, and in some cases is granted, more permissions than it needs, we call it “overprivileged.” In this post we will focus exclusively on overprivileged applications with respect to OAuth2.0 permissions in the Microsoft Identity platform and use example scenarios of client apps that call the Microsoft Graph API. That said, principles in this blog do apply to other permission models and APIs – we’ll cover this more in future posts.
Overprivilege occurs when an app has requested and been granted unused or reducible permissions:
What are the goals in combatting overprivileged apps?
There are three main goals for us in the Microsoft Identity team in terms of combatting overprivileged apps:
How can you ensure your apps become least privileged?
Here are three high level best practices for developers and IT Admins to keep in mind when thinking about adhering to the least privileged principle for applications:
Microsoft has tools that help you with this process. For example, when Then, you can find the corresponding permissions from least to most privileged for Microsoft Graph by using this handy permissions reference.
Learn more about specific steps in the documentation here: https://aka.ms/least-privilege.
How to start building Zero Trust readiness
To even learn more, check out the new guidance for developers we’ve published to the Zero Trust Guidance Center. It includes new development and integration resources for developing Zero Trust-ready apps.
For more details, read the full whitepaper for developers that can be downloaded here: Zero Trust for the Microsoft Identity developer
Learn more about Microsoft identity:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) January 2021 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from Microsoft or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around the community work we do around Microsoft 365 ecosystem during the past month. Thank you for being part of this success.
Sharing is caring!
Microsoft 365 PnP is a nick-name for Microsoft 365 platform community activities coordinated by numerous teams inside of the Microsoft 365 engineering organizations. PnP is a community-driven open-source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for Microsoft 365.
Topics vary from Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, OneDrive and SharePoint. Active development and contributions happen in GitHub by providing contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation for different areas. PnP is owned and coordinated by Microsoft engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community.
The initiative is facilitated by Microsoft, but we have multiple community members as part of the PnP team (see team details in end of the article) and we are always looking to extend the PnP team with more community members. Notice that since this is open-source community initiative, so there’s no SLAs for the support for the samples provided through GitHub. Obviously, all officially released components and libraries are under official support from Microsoft.
Main resources around Microsoft 365 Community:
Here are the latest blog posts and announcements around Microsoft 365 development topics from https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blogs.
Latest community posts at https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog
Community call recording blog posts:
Microsoft 365 Developer Podcasts
In the Microsoft 365 Developer Podcast, Jeremy Thake and Paul Schaeflein talk Microsoft 365 with fellow industry experts. The show formerly known as Office 365 Podcast is back! New episodes out soon!
blog
Microsoft 365 PnP Weekly Podcasts and vlogs
PnP Weekly is a recurrent podcast with visitors where Vesa and Waldek talk about the latest news and announcements in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint areas.
There are numerous different community calls on different areas. All calls are being recorded and published either from Microsoft 365 Developer or Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) YouTube channels. Recordings are typically released within the following 24 hours after the call. You can find a detailed agenda and links to specific covered topics on blog post articles at the Microsoft 365 developer blog when the videos are published.
If you are interested in doing a live demo of your solution or sample in these calls, please do reach out to the PnP Team members (contacts later in this post) and they are able to help with the right setup. These are great opportunities to gain visibility for example for existing MVPs, for community members who would like to be MVPs in the future or any community member who’d like to share some of their learnings.
Most of the community driven repositories are in the PnP GitHub organization as samples are not product specifics as they can contain numerous different solutions or the solution works in multiple different applications.
All SharePoint specific repositories or services supported directly by Microsoft are located in the SharePoint GitHub organization
Classic PnP named repositories – older tooling
Repositories in the GitHub Microsoft Search organization controlled by the PnP initiative
Other related resources from GitHub
Following statements apply across all of the community lead and contributed samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like SharePoint Starter Kit, yo teams or PnP PowerShell. All Microsoft released SDKs and tools are supported based on the specific tool policies.
Please see the specifics on the supportability on the tool, SDK or component repository or download page.

In April 2020 we announced our new Microsoft 365 PnP team model and grew the MVP team quite significantly. PnP model exists for having more efficient engagement between Microsoft engineering and community members. Let’s build things together. Your contributions and feedback is always welcome! During August, we also crew the team with 5 new members. PnP Team coordinates and leads the different open-source and community efforts we execute in the Microsoft 365 platform.
We welcome all community members to get involved on the community and open-source efforts. Your input do matter!
Got feedback, suggestions or ideas? – Please let us know. Everything we do in this program is for your benefit. Feedback and ideas are more than welcome so that we can adjust the process for benefitting you even more.

We are excited to announce new community contributor program for all the active community members. Through this program you can get officially acknowledged with the a Credly badge around your work on our open-source and community channels. See more from
https://aka.ms/m365pnp-recognition. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
These are different areas which are closely involved on the community work across the PnP initiative. Some are lead and coordinated by engineering organizations, some are coordinated by the community and MVPs.

Microsoft Graph Toolkit is engineering lead initiative, which works closely with the community on the open-source areas. The Microsoft Graph Toolkit is a collection of reusable, framework-agnostic web components and helpers for accessing and working with Microsoft Graph. The components are fully functional right of out of the box, with built in providers that authenticate with and fetch data from Microsoft Graph.
All the latest updates on the Microsoft Graph Toolkit is being presented in our bi-weekly Microsoft 365 Generic Dev community call, including the latest community contributors.

Community docs model was announced in the April 2020 and it’s great to see the interest for community to help each other by providing new guidance on the non-dev areas. See more on the announcement from the SharePoint blog – Announcing the Microsoft 365 Community Docs. We do welcome contributions from the community – our objective is to build a valuable location for articles from Microsoft and community together.
New articles
Have ideas for articles or want to contribute yourself? – Get involved! Here are also some additional resources explaining the model more detailed.

These are the updated SharePoint Framework samples which are available from the different repositories.
How to find what’s relevant for you? Take advantage of our SharePoint Framework web part and extension sample galleries – also includes solutions which work in Microsoft Teams

These are samples which have been contributed on the community samples since last summary. We do welcome all Microsoft Teams samples to this gallery. They can be implemented using in any technology.
If you are interested on Microsoft Teams samples, we have just released also new Microsoft Teams sample gallery. Contributions to Microsoft Teams samples is also more than welcome. This gallery already surfaces all Microsoft samples, Microsoft Teams app templates and community samples.

There was also numerous smaller updates on the different Power Platforms samples. See more details on available samples from following location
If you have any existing samples which you’d be willing to share with others – please submit a pull request or contact the PnP team members to get started on getting more closely involved on this initiative. Here to help.

We have released new Microsoft 365 Script Sample gallery within past month. We welcome all scripts on Microsoft 365 automation to this centralized repository, targeted to help to manage and automate day-to-day operations.
Here are the latest updates on the Script Samples
If you have any existing scripts which you’d be willing to share with others – please submit a pull request or contact the PnP team members to get started on getting more closely involved on this initiative.
Independent Connectors Program

Microsoft Power Platform comes with a huge variety of already built-in connectors and also provides you with the ability of creating your own custom connectors. As of July 2021, anyone can submit the connectors they built to Microsoft Power Platform so that they can be used by others as well. Previously, only API owners could publish their connectors. The Independent Publisher Connector Program’s mission is to bring the best together: the best people, connecting great ideas to data, apps, and flows. We want to make it easier for connector developers to collaborate on connectors.
For more information, you can watch this video on Publish a connector to the Publish a connector to the Power Platform with Independent Publisher Connector Program gram and check out Microsoft Power Platform Connectors on GitHub
These are the latest connectors:

The “Sharing Is Caring” imitative is targeted for learning the basics around making changes in Microsoft Docs, in GitHub, submitting pull requests to the PnP repositories and in GitHub in general. Take advantage of this instructor lead training for learning how to contribute to docs or to open-source solutions. Everyone is welcome to learn how to get started on contributing to open-source docs or code!
See exact details on the latest updates from the specific open-source project release notes. You can also follow up on the project updates from our community calls. There are numerous active projects which are releasing new versions with the community even on weekly basis. Get involved!
Please see all the Microsoft 365 development documentation updates from the related documentation sets and repositories as listed below:
You can find all Microsoft 365 related videos on our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos or at Microsoft 365 Dev. These channels contains already a significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos, and community call recordings.
Here are the new Microsoft demo or guidance videos released since the last monthly summary:
Community demos as following:
Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) since last release details in GitHub repositories or community channels. PnP is really about building tooling and knowledge together with the community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued across the Microsoft 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.
Thank you for your assistance and contributions on behalf of the community. You are truly making a difference! If we missed someone, please let us know.
Jono Duncan (JourneyTEAM) | @SuaveJono
Lindsay Shelton (Stowers Institute for Medical Research) | @lshelton_tech
Companies: Here’s the companies, which provided support the community initiative for this month by allowing their employees working for the benefit of others in the community. There were also people who contributed from other companies during last month, but we did not get their logos and approval to show them in time for these communications. If you still want your logo for this month’s release, please let us know and share the logo with us. Thx.
Microsoft people: Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved with the PnP work during last month.
MVP Community team (PnP Team) manages the PnP community work in the GitHub and also coordinates different open-source projects around Microsoft 365 topics. PnP Team members have a significant impact on driving adoption of Microsoft 365 topics. They have shown their commitment to the open-source and community-driven work by constantly contributing to the benefit of the others in the community.
Thank you for all that you do!
Here are the Microsoft Internal PnP Core team members:
See all of the available community calls, tools, components and other assets from https://aka.ms/m365pnp. Get involved!
Got ideas or feedback on the topics to cover, additional partnerships, product feature capabilities? – let us know. Your input is important for us, so that we can support your journey in Microsoft 365.
“Sharing is caring!”
Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) – January 13th 2021
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