IanaTimeZoneMappings.xml invalid Exchange after November 2024v2 SU

Anyone who runs the Exchange Healthchecker again after the November 2024v2 Exchange update sometimes finds an error that is not pretty but also not completely critical. Here, I really wonder where the quality control is for the updates. This error should be quickly noticeable and is also quickly fixed. NOTE: Restarting IIS is required, so clients …

M365 Monitor action in Safe attachments policy will retire

Microsoft recently announced in the M365 Administration Center notifications that they will be making some adjustments to the paid feature “Safe Attachments.” Specifically, the “Monitor” function will no longer be available. All rules with “Monitor” will be switched to “BLOCK” in February 2025. See Microsoft’s notification for more details: Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (Defender for …

Password Security and New NIST Guidelines Special Publication 800-63B

Unfortunately, the topic of passwords is still taken lightly in many areas. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides some guidelines on passwords, as well as alternatives to passwords such as hardware tokens and smart cards, or generally phishing-resistant authentication methods. Microsoft offers an illustrative schema as a graphic here: To operate with …

Microsoft Entra Connect fails after updating Entra-Connect July Update TLS 1.2

A few weeks ago, I wanted to update the previous Azure AD Connect to Microsoft Entra Connect (as usual). Microsoft released a new version (2.3.30.0) in mid-July. Unfortunately, the installation failed, and even reinstalling and troubleshooting initially went thoroughly wrong. Neither password sync nor user sync wanted to work with this version (operating system Windows …