At Least 10 Hacking Groups Using Microsoft Software Flaw

The security holes...leave the door open to industrial-scale cyber espionage, allowing malicious actors to steal emails virtually at will from vulnerable servers. Tens of thousands of organizations have already been compromised,...the sluggish pace of many customers’ updates...means the field remains at least partially open to hackers of all stripes...Intriguingly, several of the groups appeared to know about the vulnerability before it was announced by Microsoft on March 2.

This is a security flaw with Microsoft Exchange Server. It’s been patched.

If you maintain an Exchange Server, make sure it has the latest updates and provide a deep scan on all your mailbox databases and domain controllers.

Don’t tell the numbskulls I used to work with just a few years ago.

No antivirus and no admin privileges / policies protecting any of the desktops.

Oh, and no SAN, and no backups.

Yeah, it was all just great. /s

When you look at the Forensic analysis done on the Antrim County Dominion systems:

Link to Dominion Democracy Suite Antrim County Forensic Analysis Report

Allied Security Operations Group, LLC was hired to do the forensic analysis on the Dominion voting systems in Antrim Michigan after a rare judge granted legal access to the voting systems which allowed the plaintiff who was concerned his vote had not been counted (who, for ONCE, was deemed to have "standing" in an election case.) They were able to get the machines frozen and were able to take exact copies of the software, and examine the hardware.

As an IT person, I found it astonishing. Some of the low-lights:

All users were using the same Superuser accounts with full admin privileges. I heard from another source they actually had the credentials taped to the monitors.
Windows updates and patches were 2 YEARS out of date.
Antivirus was 4.5 YEARS out of date
No hard drive encryption
SQL database had no password protection.
Server security logs prior to 11/4/2021 at 11:03 PM were intentionally deleted. Only the security logs were missing. Other logs before that time were still present.

As an IT person, there is too much "apparent" ineptitude to be...ineptitude as the root cause. Especially those security logs that are missing. That is a red flag for me.

That’s horrible. I was on a forensic team that helped Atlanta after their ransomware attack. It was even worse.

Senior level appointees and politicians kept critical data on their own hard drives because they “didn’t trust” the city full time IT staff.

They constantly complained:

“We hired you to get our data back!”

In this case, there was simply so much ineptitude I couldn’t even pin ineptitude as the cause. Even fat, slobby, inept government workers couldn’t have been that inept.

In this case, it sure did seem like a feature.

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