The Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) was created in order to facilitate greater sharing of information. TLP is a set of designations used to ensure that sensitive information is shared with the appropriate audience. It employs five official marking options to indicate expected sharing boundaries to be applied by the recipient(s). TLP only has five marking options; any designations not listed in this standard are not considered valid by FIRST.
TLP provides a simple and intuitive schema for indicating when and how sensitive information can be shared, facilitating more frequent and effective collaboration. TLP is not a “control marking” or classification scheme. TLP was not designed to handle licensing terms, handling and encryption rules, and restrictions on action or instrumentation of information. TLP labels and their definitions are not intended to have any effect on freedom of information or “sunshine” laws in any jurisdiction.
TLP is optimized for ease of adoption, human readability and person-to-person sharing; it may be used in automated sharing exchanges, but is not optimized for that use.
TLP is distinct from the Chatham House Rule (when a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.), but may be used in conjunction if it is deemed appropriate by participants in an information exchange.
The source is responsible for ensuring that recipients of TLP information understand and can follow TLP sharing guidance.
If a recipient needs to share the information more widely than indicated by the original TLP designation, they must obtain explicit permission from the original source.
TLP:RED Not for disclosure, restricted to participants only.
Sources may use TLP:RED when information cannot be effectively acted upon without significant risk for the privacy, reputation, or operations of the organizations involved. For the eyes and ears of individual recipients only, no further.
Recipients may not share TLP:RED information with any parties outside of the specific exchange, meeting, or conversation in which it was originally disclosed. In the context of a meeting, for example, TLP:RED information is limited to those present at the meeting. In most circumstances, TLP:RED should be exchanged verbally or in person.
TLP:AMBER+STRICT Limited disclosure, restricted to participants’ organization.
Sources may use TLP:AMBER+STRICT when information requires support to be effectively acted upon, yet carries risk to privacy, reputation, or operations if shared outside of the organization.
Recipients may share TLP:AMBER+STRICT information only with members of their own organization on a need-to-know basis to protect their organization and prevent further harm.
TLP:AMBER Limited disclosure, restricted to participants’ organization and its clients (see Terminology Definitions).
Sources may use TLP:AMBER when information requires support to be effectively acted upon, yet carries risk to privacy, reputation, or operations if shared outside of the organizations involved. Note that TLP:AMBER+STRICT should be used to restrict sharing to the recipient organization only.
Recipients may share TLP:AMBER information with members of their own organization and its clients on a need-to-know basis to protect their organization and its clients and prevent further harm.
TLP:GREEN Limited disclosure, restricted to the community.
Sources may use TLP:GREEN when information is useful to increase awareness within their wider community.
Recipients may share TLP:GREEN information with peers and partner organizations within their community, but not via publicly accessible channels. Unless otherwise specified, TLP:GREEN information may not be shared outside of the cybersecurity or cyber defense community.
TLP:CLEAR Disclosure is not limited.
Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse, in accordance with applicable rules and procedures for public release.
Recipients may share this information without restriction. Information is subject to standard copyright rules.
Under TLP, a community is a group who share common goals, practices, and informal trust relationships. A community can be as broad as all cybersecurity practitioners in a country (or in a sector or region).
Organization
Under TLP, an organization is a group who share a common affiliation by formal membership and are bound by common policies set by the organization. An organization can be as broad as all members of an information sharing organization, but rarely broader.
Clients
Under TLP, clients are those people or entities that receive cybersecurity services from an organization. Clients are by default included in TLP:AMBER so that the recipients may share information further downstream in order for clients to take action to protect themselves. For teams with national responsibility, this definition includes stakeholders and constituents. Note: CISA considers “clients” to be stakeholders and constituents that have a legal agreement with CISA.
TLP-designated email correspondence should indicate the TLP color of the information in the Subject line and in the body of the email, prior to the designated information itself. The TLP color must be in capital letters: TLP:RED, TLP:AMBER+STRICT, TLP:AMBER, TLP:GREEN, or TLP:WHITE.
How to use TLP in documents
TLP-designated documents should indicate the TLP color of the information in the header and footer of each page. To avoid confusion with existing control marking schemes, it is advisable to right-justify TLP designations. The TLP color should appear in capital letters and in 12 point type or greater. Note: TLP 2.0 has changed the color coding of TLP:RED to accomodate individuals with low vision.
Excel for Microsoft 365 Word for Microsoft 365 Outlook for Microsoft 365 More…
Note: This feature requires a Microsoft 365 subscription and is available for users and organizations whose administrators have set up sensitivity labels. If you’re an administrator looking to get started with sensitivity labels see Get started with sensitivity labels.
You can apply sensitivity labels to your files and emails to keep them compliant with your organization’s information protection policies.
The names of these labels, the descriptions you see when you hover over them, and when to use each label will be customized for you by your organization. If you need additional information about which label to apply, and when, contact your organization’s IT department.
How are sensitivity labels applied?
Sensitivity labels are applied either manually or automatically.
Note: Even if your administrator has not configured automatic labeling, they may have configured your system to require a label on all Office files and emails, and may also have selected a default label as the starting point. If labels are required you won’t be able to save a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file, or send an email in Outlook, without selecting a sensitivity label.
To apply, change, or remove a label manually follow these steps:
Important: Sensitivity is not available if your Office account isn’t a work account, and if your administrator hasn’t configured any sensitivity labels and enabled the feature for you.
Choose the sensitivity label that applies to your email.
Note: If your organization has configured a website to learn more about their sensitivity labels, you will also see a Learn More option.
To remove a sensitivity label that has already been applied to an email, unselect it from the Sensitivity menu. Naturally if your organization requires labels on all files you won’t be able to remove it.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint
On the Home tab, select Sensitivity.
Important: Sensitivity is not available if your Office account isn’t a work account with a Office 365 Enterprise E3 or Office 365 Enterprise E5 license assigned, or if your administrator hasn’t configured any sensitivity labels and enabled the feature for you .
Choose the sensitivity label that applies to your file.
Note: If your organization has configured a website to learn more about their sensitivity labels, you will also see a Learn More option.
To remove a sensitivity label that has already been applied to a file, unselect it from the Sensitivity menu. Naturally if your organization requires labels on all files you won’t be able to remove it.
Automatically applied (or recommended) labels
If your administrator has set up automatic labeling then files or emails that contain certain kinds of information – such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information – can have a specified label either recommended for, or applied, automatically.
If a label has been applied automatically you’ll see a notification below the Office ribbon that looks like this.
The notice for when a label has been recommended, but not automatically applied, looks similar.
The way to see the currently applied label, if any, varies slightly depending upon whether you’re on desktop or mobile.
On desktop apps (including Office for the web) look at the status bar at the bottom of the window.
On the Office mobile apps, select the menu.
Outlook is a bit different
In Outlook nothing appears if no label has been selected or if you’re composing an email and only the default label is applied.
If a label has been selected, however, you’ll see it on the InfoBar just above the To field.
What happens when I apply a sensitivity label?
When you apply a sensitivity label, the label information will persist with your file or email, even as it is shared between devices, applications, and cloud services. Applying a sensitivity label may also result in changes to your file or email according to your organization’s configuration, such as:
A header or footer may appear in your file or email
A watermark may appear in your file
Note: If you don’t have permission to change or remove a sensitivity label, you’ll be prevented from doing so with an error message in most apps. In some apps, like Outlook mobile, the sensitivity labels will simply be disabled.
Not all apps on all platforms support the same behavior, so the exact results of applying a sensitivity label may vary slightly. For more information about what capabilities are supported on each platform see Support for sensitivity label capabilities in apps.
Justify changes to sensitivity label
Your administrator can have a policy that requires you to provide justification before changing a sensitivity label from a higher sensitivity to a lower sensitivity. In this configuration, you may be asked to choose a justification reason or provide your own when selecting a less sensitive label.
Note: You will only be asked to justify changes one time after opening a document or replying to forwarding an email message. After justifying once, subsequent changes will not require justification until that document or email message is closed and opened again.
Automatically convert the case of your text in Word, Excel, Google Docs, and more.
Capitalization isn’t something you have to think much about. The first letter of a sentence gets capitalized, along with any proper nouns—and you write in all caps when you’re angry (or excited, depending on who you ask).
As long as you type with the capitalization you want, everything’s fine. But when you go to write a long title and have to hold Shift for every first letter or when you write a few sentences without realizing caps lock was on, capitalization can suddenly get more frustrating. It can take seemingly forever to edit each letter back to the case you want—and it’s so easy to miss the stray cApital letter in a long essay or blog post.
Here’s how to automatically capitalize text properly in Word, Google Docs, and other text editors—and in thousands of other apps using Zapier’s Formatter tool.
How to change case in Word
If you’re working in Microsoft Word, it’s easy to change the capitalization or case of text in your document.
Select your text.
In the Home section of the toolbar, click the Change Caseoption. (It’s right next to your font options: a capital and lowercase Aa with a dropdown arrow.)
Select the case you want.
Your options are: Sentence case., lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize Each Word, or tOGGLE cASE to swap your writing’s current case—perfect for the times you swap capital and lowercase accidentally.
Or you can highlight the text and use Word’s keyboard shortcut—Shift + fn +F3—to change selected text between lowercase, UPPERCASE or Capitalizing Each Word.
How to change case in Excel
It’s a little more complicated in Excel—you’ll need to use a formula to get the job done.
To make text uppercase in Excel, use the formula =UPPER(A1:A99), where A1:A99 is the cell range you want to change.
To make text lowercase in Excel, use the formula =UPPER(A1:A99).
To make text Title Case in Excel, use the formula =PROPER(A1:A99).
In every case, you’ll need to put the formula in another cell, and the new text will show up in that cell or column.
How to capitalize text in Google Docs
Google Docs also includes a capitalization tool, hidden in its menus.
Select your text.
Click Format > Text>Capitalization.
Choose the case you want (lowercase, UPPERCASE, or Title Case).
How to capitalize text on macOS
Using a Mac? Lots of apps on your Mac already includes macOS’s built-in spelling and grammar checks along with text transformations.
In most Mac apps:
Select the text, and right-click on it to see the text options.
Hover over the Transformations menu.
Select the case you want (the Capitalize option will capitalize the first letter of every word).
If you don’t see the options in the right-click menu, check the gear icon in the app’s font settings—that’s where Pages and other Apple apps put those same transformations.
How to capitalize text in Sublime Text
One of the most popular code and text editors Sublime Text also includes a capitalization tool.
Select your text.
Click Edit > Convert Case.
Select the case you want.
In addition to the standard options, Sublime Text also includes snake_case (lowercase, with an underscore between each word) and kebab-case (lowercase, with a hyphen between each word).
How to convert case online
Another option is to use a web app to format your text. There are a number of simple web apps that can swap your case for you.
In TitleCase, type or paste in your text, and then choose the case you want to automatically convert your text to.
In Convert Case (pictured above), type or paste in your text, then choose each of the case options you want. It’ll give you your text in all of those cases for a quick way to pick what looks best.
Automatically convert text case with Zapier
These tips work great for changing your capitalization within an app, like if you want to convert caps to lowercase in an article you’re writing. But if you want to change capitalization as you send information from one app to the other, here’s how to automatically convert text case with Zapier.
An internet outage can have major consequences for a digital business, especially when it happens during peak usage times and on holidays. Outages can lead to revenue loss, complaints, and customer churn.
Of course, internet outages regularly impact companies across all verticals, including some of the largest internet companies in the world. And they can happen when you least expect them.
Read on to learn about some of the most impactful internet outages to date and some steps you can take to keep your business out of harm’s way.
Historical Internet Outages You Need to Know About
1. Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage in December 2021, lasting for several hours. The outage impacted operations for many leading businesses, including Netflix, Disney, Spotify, DoorDash, and Venmo.
Amazon blames the outage on an automation error causing multiple systems to act abnormally. The outage also prevented users from accessing some cloud services.
This outage proved the largest and safest cloud providers are also susceptible to downtime.
2. Facebook
Facebook as well suffered a major outage in 2021, leaving billions of users unable to access its services, including its main social network, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
According to Facebook, the cause of the outage was a configuration change on its backbone routers responsible for transmitting traffic across its data centers. The outage lasted roughly six hours, an eternity for a social network.
3. Fastly
Cloud service provider Fastly had its network go down in June 2021, taking down several sizeable global news websites, including the New York Times and CNN. It also impacted retailers like Target and Amazon, and several other organizations.
The outage resulted from a faulty software update, stemming from a misconfiguration, causing disruptions across multiple servers.
4. British Airways
British Airways experienced a massive IT failure in 2017 during one of the busiest travel weekends in the United Kingdom.
This event created a nightmare scenario for the organization and its customers. Altogether, it grounded 672 flights and stranded tens of thousands of customers.
According to the company, the outage ensued when an engineer disconnected the data center’s power supply. A massive power surge came next, bringing the business’s network down in the process.
5. Google
Google had a major service outage in 2020. It only lasted about forty-five minutes, but it still impacted users worldwide.
Services including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Calendar all crashed. So did Google Home apps. The outage also impacted third-party applications using Google for authentication.
The issue happened due to inadequate storage capacity for the company’s authentication services.
6. Dyn
Undoubtedly, one of the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in history occurred in 2016 against Dyn, which was a major backbone provider.
The attack occurred in three waves, overwhelming the company’s servers. As a result, many internet users were unable to access partnering platforms like Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix.
While the internet outage lasted only about an hour, Verizon experienced a sharp drop in traffic volume. Naturally, many customers complained about the loss of service.
At first, the company reported the incident was the result of someone cutting fiber cables. However, it was unrelated and turned out to be a “software issue” during routine network maintenance activities.
8. Microsoft
Another major internet outage occurred at Microsoft when its Azure service went under in December 2021. Azure’s Active Directory service crashed for about ninety minutes.
Compared to some other outages, this one was relatively small. Nonetheless, it prevented users from signing in to Microsoft services such as Office 365. Although applications remained online, users couldn’t access them, making this a major productivity killer for many organizations worldwide.
9. Comcast
There was an internet outage at Comcast in November 2021, which happened when its San Francisco backbone shut down for about two hours.
Following the outage, a broader issue occurred, spanning multiple U.S. cities, including hubs like Philadelphia and Chicago. Several thousand customers lost service, leaving them unable to access basic network functionality during the height of the pandemic.
10. Akamai Edge DNS
Akamai, a global content delivery provider, experienced an outage with its DNS service in 2021. The Akamai outage resulted from a faulty software configuration update activating a bug in its Secure Edge Content Delivery Network.
In a similar fashion to other attacks against service providers, Akamai’s outage caused widespread damage. Other websites—including American Airlines, Fox News, and Steam—all experienced performance issues following the incident.
11. Cox Communications
Cox Communications reported a major internet outage in March 2022, impacting nearly seven thousand customers in the Las Vegas region.
The problem resulted from an NV Energy backhoe damaging a transmission line and triggering a power event. The surge caused a cable modem to reset, and many customers tried to reconnect simultaneously. As a result, it took several hours for service to resume.
12. Slack
The recent Slack outage in January 2021 created havoc for distributed workers who rely on the platform for communication and collaboration.
The platform’s outage impacted organizations across the US, UK, Germany, Japan, and India, with interruptions occurring for about two and a half hours. Slack says the issue came from scaling problems on the AWS Transit Gateway, which couldn’t accommodate a spike in traffic.
Best Practices for Avoiding Internet Outages
At the end of the day, there’s nothing you can do to prevent outages entirely, especially if your business relies on multiple third-party systems. Eventually, your company or a partner will experience some level of service disruption. It’s best to plan for them and, where possible, enable systems to ‘fail gracefully.’
As part of your resiliency planning, here are some steps to mitigate damage, maximize uptime, and keep your organization safe, along with some best practices to help you avoid disruptions from network and connectivity issues.
Set Up a Backup Internet Solution
It’s impossible to protect your business from local internet outages completely. They can stem from issues like local construction, service disruptions, and more.
Consider setting up a backup internet solution as a workaround, so you never lose connectivity. For example, you may choose to combine broadband with a wireless failover solution.
Consider a Multi-Cloud Strategy
If your business is in the cloud, it’s a good idea to explore a multi-cloud strategy. By spreading your workloads across multiple cloud providers, you can prevent cloud service disruptions from knocking your digital applications offline. This approach can also improve uptime and resiliency.
Use Website Performance and Availability Monitoring
One of the best ways to protect your business is to use website performance and availability monitoring. It provides real-time visibility into how end users are interacting with and experiencing your website.
A robust website performance and availability monitoring solution can provide actionable insights into the health and stability of your website. As a result, you can track uptime and performance over time and troubleshoot issues when they occur.
The Pingdom Approach to Website Performance Monitoring
SolarWinds® Pingdom® provides real-time and historical end-user experience monitoring, giving your team deep visibility from a single pane of glass. With Pingdom, it’s possible to protect against the kind of outages helping your company make headlines for the wrong reasons.
This post was written by Justin Reynolds. Justin is a freelance writer who enjoys telling stories about how technology, science, and creativity can help workers be more productive. In his spare time, he likes seeing or playing live music, hiking, and traveling.
Threat actors continue to adapt to the latest technologies, practices, and even data privacy laws—and it’s up to organizations to stay one step ahead by implementing strong cybersecurity measures and programs.
Here’s a look at how cybercrime will evolve in 2023 and what you can do to secure and protect your organization in the year ahead.
With the rapid modernization and digitization of supply chains come new security risks. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains—this is a three-fold increase from 2021. Previously, these types of attacks weren’t even likely to happen because supply chains weren’t connected to the internet. But now that they are, supply chains need to be secured properly.
The introduction of new technology around software supply chains means there are likely security holes that have yet to be identified, but are essential to uncover in order to protect your organization in 2023.
If you’ve introduced new software supply chains to your technology stack, or plan to do so sometime in the next year, then you must integrate updated cybersecurity configurations. Employ people and processes that have experience with digital supply chains to ensure that security measures are implemented correctly.
It should come as no surprise that with the increased use of smartphones in the workplace, mobile devices are becoming a greater target for cyber-attack. In fact, cyber-crimes involving mobile devices have increased by 22% in the last year, according to the Verizon Mobile Security Index (MSI) 2022 with no signs of slowing down in advance of the new year.
As hackers hone in on mobile devices, SMS-based authentication has inevitably become less secure. Even the seemingly most secure companies can be vulnerable to mobile device hacks. Case in point, several major companies, including Uber and Okta were impacted by security breaches involving one-time passcodes in the past year alone.
This calls for the need to move away from relying on SMS-based authentication, and instead to multifactor authentication (MFA) that is more secure. This could include an authenticator app that uses time-sensitive tokens, or more direct authenticators that are hardware or device-based.
Organizations need to take extra precautions to prevent attacks that begin with the frontline by implementing software that helps verify user identity. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Risks Report, 95% of cybersecurity incidents are due to human error. This fact alone emphasizes the need for a software procedure that decreases the chance of human error when it comes to verification. Implementing a tool like Specops’ Secure Service Desk helps reduce vulnerabilities from socially engineered attacks that are targeting the help desk, enabling a secure user verification at the service desk without the risk of human error.
As more companies opt for cloud-based activities, cloud security—any technology, policy, or service that protects information stored in the cloud—should be a top priority in 2023 and beyond. Cyber criminals become more sophisticated and evolve their tactics as technologies evolve, which means cloud security is essential as you rely on it more frequently in your organization.
The most reliable safeguard against cloud-based cybercrime is a zero trust philosophy. The main principle behind zero trust is to automatically verify everything—and essentially not trust anyone without some type of authorization or inspection. This security measure is critical when it comes to protecting data and infrastructure stored in the cloud from threats.
Ransomware attacks continue to increase at an alarming rate. Data from Verizon discovered a 13% increase in ransomware breaches year-over-year. Ransomware attacks have also become increasingly targeted — sectors such as healthcare and food and agriculture are just the latest industries to be victims, according to the FBI.
With the rise in ransomware threats comes the increased use of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS). This growing phenomenon is when ransomware criminals lease out their infrastructure to other cybercriminals or groups. RaaS kits make it even easier for threat actors to deploy their attacks quickly and affordably, which is a dangerous combination to combat for anyone leading the cybersecurity protocols and procedures. To increase protection against threat actors who use RaaS, enlist the help of your end-users.
End-users are your organization’s frontline against ransomware attacks, but they need the proper training to ensure they’re protected. Make sure your cybersecurity procedures are clearly documented and regularly practiced so users can stay aware and vigilant against security breaches. Employing backup measures like password policy software, MFA whenever possible, and email-security tools in your organization can also mitigate the onus on end-user cybersecurity.
Data privacy laws are getting stricter—get ready #
We can’t talk about cybersecurity in 2023 without mentioning data privacy laws. With new data privacy laws set to go into effect in several states over the next year, now is the time to assess your current procedures and systems to make sure they comply. These new state-specific laws are just the beginning; companies would be wise to review their compliance as more states are likely to develop new privacy laws in the years to come.
Data privacy laws often require changes to how companies store and processing data, and implementing these new changes might open you up to additional risk if they are not implemented carefully. Ensure your organization is in adherence to proper cyber security protocols, including zero trust, as mentioned above.
And that’s a wrap! Impact Week 2022 has come to a close. Over the last week, Cloudflare announced new commitments in our mission to help build a better Internet, including delivering Zero Trust services for the most vulnerable voices and for critical infrastructure providers. We also announced new products and services, and shared technical deep dives.
Were you able to keep up with everything that was announced? Watch the Impact Week 2022 wrap-up video on Cloudflare TV, or read our recap below for anything you may have missed.
We are making the Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite available to teams that qualify for Project Galileo or Athenian at no cost. Cloudflare One includes the same Zero Trust security and connectivity solutions used by over 10,000 customers today to connect their users and safeguard their data.
Under-resourced organizations that are vital to the basic functioning of our global communities (such as community hospitals, water treatment facilities, and local energy providers) face relentless cyber attacks, threatening basic needs for health, safety and security. Cloudflare’s mission is to help make a better Internet. We will help support these vulnerable infrastructure by providing our enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity solution to them at no cost, with no time limit.
We are excited to announce our public sector suite of services, Cloudflare for Government, has achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (“FedRAMP”) is a US-government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.
At Cloudflare, we want to give our customers tools that allow them to maintain compliance in this ever-changing environment. That’s why we’re excited to announce a new version of Geo Key Manager — one that allows customers to define boundaries by country, by region, or by standard.
Cloudflare is participating in the AS112 project, becoming an operator of the loosely coordinated, distributed sink of the reverse lookup (PTR) queries for RFC 1918 addresses, dynamic DNS updates and other ambiguous addresses.
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the glue that keeps the entire Internet together. However, despite its vital function, BGP wasn’t originally designed to protect against malicious actors or routing mishaps. It has since been updated to account for this shortcoming with the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) framework, but can we declare it to be safe yet?
We are excited to share that we have grown our offering under the Athenian Project to include Cloudflare’s Area 1 email security suite to help state and local governments protect against a broad spectrum of phishing attacks to keep voter data safe and secure.
Large-scale cyber attacks on enterprises and governments make the headlines, but the impacts of cyber conflicts can be felt more profoundly and acutely by small businesses that struggle to keep the lights on during normal times. In this blog, we’ll share new research on how small businesses, including those using our free services, have leveraged Cloudflare services to make their businesses more secure and resistant to disruption.
A year and a half ago, Cloudflare launched Project Pangea to help provide Internet services to underserved communities. Today, we’re sharing what we’ve learned by partnering with community networks, and announcing an expansion of the project.
We want to tell you more about how we work with civil society organizations to provide tools to track and document the scope of these disruptions. We want to support their critical work and provide the tools they need so they can demand accountability and condemn the use of shutdowns to silence dissent.
At Cloudflare, part of our role is to make sure every person on the planet with an Internet connection has a good experience, whether they’re in a next-generation market or a current-gen market. In this blog we talk about how we define next-generation markets, how we help people in these markets get faster access to the websites and applications they use on a daily basis, and how we make it easy for developers to deploy services geographically close to users in next-generation markets.
We didn’t start out with the goal to reduce the Internet’s environmental impact. But as the Internet has become an ever larger part of our lives, that has changed. Our mission is to help build a better Internet — and a better Internet needs to be a sustainable one.
We’re excited to announce an opportunity for Cloudflare customers to make it easier to decommission and dispose of their used hardware appliances in a sustainable way. We’re partnering with Iron Mountain to offer preferred pricing and value-back for Cloudflare customers that recycle or remarket legacy hardware through their service.
With the incredible growth of the Internet, and the increased usage of Cloudflare’s network, even linear improvements to sustainability in our hardware today will result in exponential gains in the future. We want to use this post to outline how we think about the sustainability impact of the hardware in our network, and what we’re doing to continually mitigate that impact.
Last year, Cloudflare committed to removing or offsetting the historical emissions associated with powering our network by 2025. We are excited to announce our first step toward offsetting our historical emissions by investing in 6,060 MTs’ worth of reforestation carbon offsets as part of the Pacajai Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) Project in the State of Para, Brazil.
Cloudflare is working hard to ensure that we’re making a positive impact on the environment around us, with the goal of building the most sustainable network. At the same time, we want to make sure that the positive changes that we are making are also something that our local Cloudflare team members can touch and feel, and know that in each of our actions we are having a positive impact on the environment around us. This is why we make sustainability one of the underlying goals of the design, construction, and operations of our global office spaces.
Once a year, we pull data from our Bot Fight Mode to determine the number of trees we can donate to our partners at One Tree Planted. It’s part of the commitment we made in 2019 to deter malicious bots online by redirecting them to a challenge page that requires them to perform computationally intensive, but meaningless tasks. While we use these tasks to drive up the bill for bot operators, we account for the carbon cost by planting trees.
As governments continue to use sanctions as a foreign policy tool, we think it’s important that policymakers continue to hear from Internet infrastructure companies about how the legal framework is impacting their ability to support a global Internet. Here are some of the key issues we’ve identified and ways that regulators can help balance the policy goals of sanctions with the need to support the free flow of communications for ordinary citizens around the world.
On February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Cloudflare jumped into action to provide services that could help prevent potentially destructive cyber attacks and keep the global Internet flowing. During Impact Week, we want to provide an update on where things currently stand, the role of security companies like Cloudflare, and some of our takeaways from the conflict so far.
A series of protests began in Iran on September 16, following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini — a 22 year old who had been arrested for violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law. The protests and civil unrest have continued to this day. But the impact hasn’t just been on the ground in Iran — the impact of the civil unrest can be seen in Internet usage inside the country, as well.
We thought this week would be a great opportunity to share Cloudflare’s principles and our theories behind policy engagement. Because at its core, a public policy approach needs to reflect who the company is through their actions and rhetoric. And as a company, we believe there is real value in helping governments understand how companies work, and helping our employees understand how governments and law-makers work.
What does it mean to apply human rights frameworks to our response to abuse? As we’ll talk about in more detail, we use human rights concepts like access to fair process, proportionality (the idea that actions should be carefully calibrated to minimize any effect on rights), and transparency.
This blog dives into a discussion of IP blocking: why we see it, what it is, what it does, who it affects, and why it’s such a problematic way to address content online.
Our Impact Report is an annual summary highlighting how we are trying to build a better Internet and the progress we are making on our environmental, social, and governance priorities.
Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet, and we are committed to doing this with ethics and integrity in everything that we do. This commitment extends beyond our own actions, to third parties acting on our behalf. We are excited to share our Third Party Code of Conduct, specifically formulated with our suppliers, resellers and other partners in mind.
Visit 1.1.1.1 from any device to get started with our free app that makes your Internet faster and safer.
To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet, start here. If you’re looking for a new career direction, check out our open positions.
The Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool is located at https://connectivity.office.com. It’s an adjunct tool to the network assessment and network insights available in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the Health | Connectivity menu.
Important
It’s important to sign in to your Microsoft 365 tenant as all test reports are shared with your administrator and uploaded to the tenant while you are signed in.
Note
The network connectivity test tool supports tenants in WW Commercial but not GCC Moderate, GCC High, DoD or China.
Network insights in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center are based on regular in-product measurements for your Microsoft 365 tenant, aggregated each day. In comparison, network insights from the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test are run locally in the tool.
In-product testing is limited, and running tests local to the user collects more data resulting in deeper insights. Network insights in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center will show that there’s a networking problem at a specific office location. The Microsoft 365 connectivity test can help to identify the root cause of that problem and provide a targeted performance improvement action.
We recommend that these insights be used together where networking quality status can be assessed for each office location in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and more specifics can be found after deployment of testing based on the Microsoft 365 connectivity test.
What happens at each test step
Office location identification
When you click the Run test button, we show the running test page and identify the office location. You can type in your location by city, state, and country or choose to have it detected for you. If you detect the office location, the tool requests the latitude and longitude from the web browser and limits the accuracy to 300 meters by 300 meters before use. It’s not necessary to identify the location more accurately than the building to measure network performance.
JavaScript tests
After office location identification, we run a TCP latency test in JavaScript and we request data from the service about in-use and recommended Microsoft 365 service front door servers. When these tests are completed, we show them on the map and in the details tab where they can be viewed before the next step.
Download the advanced tests client application
Next, we start the download of the advanced tests client application. We rely on the user to launch the client application and they must also have .NET 6.0 Runtime installed.
There are two parts to the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test: the web site https://connectivity.office.com and a downloadable Windows client application that runs advanced network connectivity tests. Most of the tests require the application to be run. It will populate results back into the web page as it runs.
You’ll be prompted to download the advanced client test application from the web site after the web browser tests have completed. Open and run the file when prompted.
Start the advanced tests client application
Once the client application starts, the web page will update to show this result. Test data will start to be received to the web page. The page updates each time new-data is received and you can review the data as it arrives.
Advanced tests completed and test report upload
When the tests are completed, the web page and the advanced tests client will both show that. If the user is signed in, the test report will be uploaded to the customer’s tenant.
Sharing your test report
The test report requires authentication to your Microsoft 365 account. Your administrator selects how you can share your test report. The default settings allow for sharing of your reports with other user within your organization and the ReportID link is not available. Reports will expire by default after 90 days.
Sharing your report with your administrator
If you’re signed in when a test report occurs, the report is shared with your administrator.
Sharing with your Microsoft account team, support or other personnel
Test reports (excluding any personal identification) are shared with Microsoft employees. This sharing is enabled by default and can be disabled by your administrator in the Health | Network Connectivity page in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Sharing with other users who sign in to the same Microsoft 365 tenant
You can choose users to share your report with. Being able to choose is enabled by default, but it can be disabled by your administrator.
Sharing with anyone using a ReportID link
You can share your test report with anyone by providing access to a ReportID link. This link generates a URL that you can send to someone so that they can bring up the test report without signing in. This sharing is disabled by default and must be enabled by your administrator.
Network Connectivity Test Results
The results are shown in the Summary and Details tabs. The summary tab shows a map of the detected network perimeter and a comparison of the network assessment to other Microsoft 365 customers nearby. It also allows for sharing of the test report. Here’s what the summary results view looks like:
Here’s an example of the details tab output. On the details tab we show a green circle check mark if the result was compared favorably. We show a red triangle exclamation point if the result exceeded a threshold indicating a network insight. The following sections describe each of the details tab results rows and explain the thresholds used for network insights.
Your location information
This section shows test results related to your location.
Your location
The user location is detected from the users web browser. It can also be typed in at the user’s choice. It’s used to identify network distances to specific parts of the enterprise network perimeter. Only the city from this location detection and the distance to other network points are saved in the report.
The user office location is shown on the map view.
Network egress location (the location where your network connects to your ISP)
We identify the network egress IP address on the server side. Location databases are used to look up the approximate location for the network egress. These databases typically have an accuracy of about 90% of IP addresses. If the location looked up from the network egress IP address isn’t accurate, this would lead to a false result. To validate if this error is occurring for a specific IP address, you can use publicly accessible network IP address location web sites to compare against your actual location.
Your distance from the network egress location
We determine the distance from that location to the office location. This is shown as a network insight if the distance is greater than 500 miles (800 kilometers) since that is likely to increase the TCP latency by more than 25 ms and may affect user experience.
The map shows the network egress location in relation to the user office location indicating the network backhaul inside of the enterprise WAN.
Implement local and direct network egress from user office locations to the Internet for optimal Microsoft 365 network connectivity. Improvements to local and direct egress are the best way to address this network insight.
Proxy server information
We identify whether proxy server(s) are configured on the local machine to pass Microsoft 365 network traffic in the Optimize category. We identify the distance from the user office location to the proxy servers.
The distance is tested first by ICMP ping. If that fails, we test with TCP ping and finally we look up the proxy server IP address in an IP address location database. We show a network insight if the proxy server is further than 500 miles (800 kilometers) away from the user office location.
Virtual private network (VPN) you use to connect to your organization
This test detects if you’re using a VPN to connect to Microsoft 365. A passing result will show if you have no VPN, or if you have a VPN with recommended split tunnel configuration for Microsoft 365.
VPN Split Tunnel
Each Optimize category route for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams is tested to see if It’s tunneled on the VPN. A split out workload avoids the VPN entirely. A tunneled workload is sent over the VPN. A selective tunneled workload has some routes sent over the VPN and some split out. A passing result will show if all workloads are split out or selective tunneled.
Customers in your metropolitan area with better performance
Network latency between the user office location and the Exchange Online service is compared to other Microsoft 365 customers in the same metro area. A network insight is shown if 10% or more of customers in the same metro area have better performance. This means their users will have better performance in the Microsoft 365 user interface.
This network insight is generated on the basis that all users in a city have access to the same telecommunications infrastructure and the same proximity to Internet circuits and Microsoft’s network.
Time to make a DNS request on your network
This shows the DNS server configured on the client machine that ran the tests. It might be a DNS Recursive Resolver server however this is uncommon. It’s more likely to be a DNS forwarder server, which caches DNS results and forwards any uncached DNS requests to another DNS server.
This is provided for information only and does not contribute to any network insight.
Your distance from and/or time to connect to a DNS recursive resolver
The in-use DNS Recursive Resolver is identified by making a specific DNS request and then asking the DNS Name Server for the IP Address that it received the same request from. This IP Address is the DNS Recursive Resolver and it will be looked up in IP Address location databases to find the location. The distance from the user office location to the DNS Recursive Resolver server location is then calculated. This is shown as a network insight if the distance is greater than 500 miles (800 kilometers).
The location looked up from the network egress IP Address may not be accurate and this would lead to a false result from this test. To validate if this error is occurring for a specific IP Address, you can use publicly accessible network IP Address location web sites.
This network insight will specifically impact the selection of the Exchange Online service front door. To address this insight local and direct network egress should be a pre-requisite and then DNS Recursive Resolver should be located close to that network egress.
Exchange Online
This section shows test results related to Exchange Online.
Exchange service front door location
The in-use Exchange service front door is identified in the same way that Outlook does this and we measure the network TCP latency from the user location to it. The TCP latency is shown and the in-use Exchange service front door is compared to the list of best service front doors for the current location. This is shown as a network insight if one of the best Exchange service front door(s) isn’t in use.
Not using one of the best Exchange service front door(s) could be caused by network backhaul before the corporate network egress in which case we recommend local and direct network egress. It could also be caused by use of a remote DNS recursive resolver server in which case we recommend aligning the DNS recursive resolver server with the network egress.
We calculate a potential improvement in TCP latency (ms) to the Exchange service front door. This is done by looking at the tested user office location network latency and subtracting the network latency from the current location to the closets Exchange service front door. The difference represents the potential opportunity for improvement.
Best Exchange service front door(s) for your location
This lists the best Exchange service front door locations by city for your location.
Service front door recorded in the client DNS
This shows the DNS name and IP Address of the Exchange service front door server that you were directed to. It’s provided for information only and there’s no associated network insight.
SharePoint Online
This section shows test results related to SharePoint Online and OneDrive.
The service front door location
The in-use SharePoint service front door is identified in the same way that the OneDrive client does and we measure the network TCP latency from the user office location to it.
Download speed
We measure the download speed for a 15 Mb file from the SharePoint service front door. The result is shown in megabytes per second to indicate what size file in megabytes can be downloaded from SharePoint or OneDrive in one second. The number should be similar to one tenth of the minimum circuit bandwidth in megabits per second. For example if you have a 100mbps internet connection, you may expect 10 megabytes per second (10 MBps).
Buffer bloat
During the 15Mb download we measure the TCP latency to the SharePoint service front door. This is the latency under load and it’s compared to the latency when not under load. The increase in latency when under load is often attributable to consumer network device buffers being loaded (or bloated). A network insight is shown for any bloat of 100ms or more.
Service front door recorded in the client DNS
This shows the DNS name and IP Address of the SharePoint service front door server that you were directed to. It’s provided for information only and there’s no associated network insight.
Microsoft Teams
This section shows test results related to Microsoft Teams.
Media connectivity (audio, video, and application sharing)
This tests for UDP connectivity to the Microsoft Teams service front door. If this is blocked, then Microsoft Teams may still work using TCP, but audio and video will be impaired. Read more about these UDP network measurements, which also apply to Microsoft Teams at Media Quality and Network Connectivity Performance in Skype for Business Online.
Packet loss
Shows the UDP packet loss measured in a 10-second test audio call from the client to the Microsoft Teams service front door. This should be lower than 1.00% for a pass.
Latency
Shows the measured UDP latency, which should be lower than 100ms.
Jitter
Shows the measured UDP jitter, which should be lower than 30ms.
Connectivity
We test for HTTP connectivity from the user office location to all of the required Microsoft 365 network endpoints. These are published at https://aka.ms/o365ip. A network insight is shown for any required network endpoints, which cannot be connected to.
Connectivity may be blocked by a proxy server, a firewall, or another network security device on the enterprise network perimeter. Connectivity to TCP port 80 is tested with an HTTP request and connectivity to TCP port 443 is tested with an HTTPS request. If there’s no response the FQDN is marked as a failure. If there’s an HTTP response code 407 the FQDN is marked as a failure. If there’s an HTTP response code 403 then we check the Server attribute of the response and if it appears to be a proxy server we mark this as a failure. You can simulate the tests we perform with the Windows command-line tool curl.exe.
We test the SSL certificate at each required Microsoft 365 network endpoint that is in the optimize or allow category as defined at https://aka.ms/o365ip. If any tests do not find a Microsoft SSL certificate, then the encrypted network connected must have been intercepted by an intermediary network device. A network insight is shown on any intercepted encrypted network endpoints.
Where an SSL certificate is found that isn’t provided by Microsoft, we show the FQDN for the test and the in-use SSL certificate owner. This SSL certificate owner may be a proxy server vendor, or it may be an enterprise self-signed certificate.
Network path
This section shows the results of an ICMP traceroute to the Exchange Online service front door, the SharePoint Online service front door, and the Microsoft Teams service front door. It’s provided for information only and there’s no associated network insight. There are three traceroutes provided. A traceroute to outlook.office365.com, a traceroute to the customers SharePoint front end or to microsoft.sharepoint.com if one was not provided, and a traceroute to world.tr.teams.microsoft.com.
Connectivity reports
When you are signed in you can review previous reports that you have run. You can also share them or delete them from the list.
Network health status
This shows any significant health issues with Microsoft’s global network, which might impact Microsoft 365 customers.
Testing from the Command Line
We provide a command line executable that can be used by your remote deployment and execution tools and run the same tests as are available in the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool web site.
The command line test tool can be downloaded here: Command Line Tool
You can run it by double clicking the executable in Windows File Explorer, or you can start it from a command prompt, or you can schedule it with task scheduler.
The first time you launch the executable you will be prompted to accept the end user license agreement (EULA) before testing is performed. If you have already read and accepted the EULA you can create an empty file called Microsoft-365-Network-Connectivity-Test-EULA-accepted.txt in the current working directory for the executable process when it is launched. To accept the EULA you can type ‘y’ and press enter in the command line window when prompted.
The executable accepts the following command line parameters:
-h to show a link to this help documentation
-testlist <test> Specifies tests to run. By default only basic tests are run. Valid test names include: all, dnsConnectivityPerf, dnsResolverIdentification, bufferBloat, traceroute, proxy, vpn, skype, connectivity, networkInterface
-filepath <filedir> Directory path of test result files. Allowed value is absolute or relative path of an accessible directory
-city <city> For the city, state, and country fields the specified value will be used if provided. If not provided then Windows Location Services (WLS) will be queried. If WLS fails the location will be detected fromthe machines network egress
-state <state>
-country <country>
-proxy <account> <password> Proxy account name and password can be provided if you require a proxy to access the Internet
Results
Output of results are written to a JSON file in a folder called TestResults which is created in the current working directory of the process unless it already exists. The filename format for the output is connectivity_test_result_YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.json. The results are in JSON nodes that match the output shown on the web page for the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool web site. A new result file is created each time you run it and the standalone executable does not upload results to your Microsoft tenant for viewing in the Admin Center Network Connectivity pages. Front door codes, longitudes, and latitudes are not included in the result file.
Launching from Windows File Explorer
You can simply double click on the executable to start the testing and a command prompt window will appear.
Launching from the Command Prompt
On a CMD.EXE command prompt window you can type the path and name of the executable to run it. The filename is Microsoft.Connectivity.Test.exe
Launching from Windows Task Scheduler
In Windows Task Scheduler you can add a task to launch the standalone test executable. You should specify the current working directory of the task to be where you have created the EULA accepted file since the executable will block until the EULA is accepted. You cannot interactively accept the EULA if the process is started in the background with no console.
More details on the standalone executable
The commandline tool uses Windows Location Services to find the users City State Country information for determining some distances. If Windows Location Services is disabled in the control panel then user location based assessments will be blank. In Windows Settings “Location services” must be on and “Let desktop apps access your location” must also be on.
The commandline tool will attempt to install the .NET Framework if it is not already installed. It will also download the main testing executable from the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool and launch that.
Test using the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant
Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant (Assistant) automates all the steps required to execute the command-line version of the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool on a user’s machine and creates a report similar to the one created by the web version of the connectivity test tool. Note, the Assistant runs the command line version of Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool to produce the same JSON result file, but the JSON file is converted into .CSV file format.
The reports will be available on the below screen once the Assistant has finished scanning the user’s machine. To access these reports, simply click on the “View log” option to view them.
Connectivity test results and Telemetry data are collected and uploaded to the uploadlogs folder. To access this folder, use one of the following methods:
Open Run (Windows logo key + R), and run the %localappdata%/saralogs/uploadlogs command as follows:
In File Explorer, type C:\Users<UserName>\AppData\Local\saralogs\uploadlogs and press Enter as follows:
Note: <UserName> is the user’s Windows profile name. To view the information about the test results and telemetry, double-click and open the files.
Types of result files
Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant creates 2 files:
Network Connectivity Report (CSV) This report runs the raw JSON file against a rule engine to make sure defined thresholds are being met and if they are not met a “warning” or “error” is displayed in the output column of the CSV file. You can view the NetworkConnectivityReport.csv file to be informed about any detected issues or defects. Please see What happens at each test step for details on each test and the thresholds for warnings.
Network Connectivity Scan Report (JSON) This file provides the raw output test results from the command-line version of the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool (MicrosoftConnectivityTest.exe).
FAQ
Here are answers to some of our frequently asked questions.
What is required to run the advanced test client?
The advanced test client requires .NET 6.0 Runtime. If you run the advanced test client without that installed you will be directed to the .NET 6.0 installer page. Be sure to install from the Run desktop apps column for Windows. Administrator permissions on the machine are required to install .NET 6.0 Runtime.
The advanced test client uses SignalR to communicate to the web page. For this you must ensure that TCP port 443 connectivity to connectivity.service.signalr.net is open. This URL isn’t published in the https://aka.ms/o365ip because that connectivity isn’t required for a Microsoft 365 client application user.
What is Microsoft 365 service front door?
The Microsoft 365 service front door is an entry point on Microsoft’s global network where Office clients and services terminate their network connection. For an optimal network connection to Microsoft 365, It’s recommended that your network connection is terminated into the closest Microsoft 365 front door in your city or metro.
Note
Microsoft 365 service front door has no direct relationship to the Azure Front Door Service product available in the Azure marketplace.
What is the best Microsoft 365 service front door?
A best Microsoft 365 service front door (formerly known as an optimal service front door) is one that is closest to your network egress, generally in your city or metro area. Use the Microsoft 365 network performance tool to determine location of your in-use Microsoft 365 service front door and the best service front door(s). If the tool determines your in-use front door is one of the best ones, then you should expect great connectivity into Microsoft’s global network.
What is an internet egress location?
The internet egress Location is the location where your network traffic exits your enterprise network and connects to the Internet. This is also identified as the location where you have a Network Address Translation (NAT) device and usually where you connect with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). If you see a long distance between your location and your internet egress location, then this may identify a significant WAN backhaul.
This article describes how to restrict Active Directory (AD) replication remote procedure calls (RPC) traffic to a specific port in Windows Server.
Applies to: all supported versions of Windows Server Original KB number: 224196
Summary
By default, Active Directory replication remote procedure calls (RPC) occur dynamically over an available port through the RPC Endpoint Mapper (RPCSS) by using port 135. An administrator can override this functionality and specify the port that all Active Directory RPC traffic passes through. This procedure locks down the port.
When you specify ports to use by using the registry entries in More information, both Active Directory server-side replication traffic and client RPC traffic are sent to these ports by the endpoint mapper. This configuration is possible because all RPC interfaces supported by Active Directory are running on all ports on which it’s listening.
Note
This article doesn’t describe how to configure AD replication for a firewall. Additional ports must be opened to make replication work through a firewall. For example, ports may need to be opened for the Kerberos protocol. To obtain a complete list of the required ports for services across a firewall, see Service overview and network port requirements for Windows.
More information
Important
This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, see How to back up and restore the registry in Windows.
When you connect to an RPC endpoint, the RPC runtime on the client contacts the RPCSS on the server at a well-known port (135). And it obtains the port to connect to for the service supporting desired RPC interface. It assumes that the client doesn’t know the complete binding. It’s the situation with all AD RPC services.
The service registers one or more endpoints when it starts, and has the choice of a dynamically assigned port or a specific port.
If you configure Active Directory and Netlogon to run at port x as in the following entry, it becomes the ports that are registered with the endpoint mapper in addition to the standard dynamic port.
Use Registry Editor to modify the following values on each domain controller where the restricted ports are to be used. Member servers aren’t considered to be logon servers. So static port assignment for NTDS has no effect on member servers.
Member servers do have the Netlogon RPC Interface, but it’s rarely used. Some examples may be remote configuration retrieval, such as nltest /server:member.contoso.com /sc_query:contoso.com.
Registry key 1
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters Registry value: TCP/IP Port Value type: REG_DWORD Value data: (available port)
Restart the computer for the new setting to become effective.
Registry key 2
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters Registry value: DCTcpipPort Value type: REG_DWORD Value data: (available port)
Restart the Netlogon service for the new setting to become effective.
Note
When you use the DCTcpipPort registry entry, and you set it to the same port as the TCP/IP Port registry entry, you receive Netlogon error event 5809 under NTDS\Parameters. This indicates that the port configured is in use, and you should choose a different port.
You’ll receive the same event when you have a unique port, and you restart the Netlogon service on the domain controller. This behavior is by design. It occurs because of the way the RPC runtime manages its server ports. The port will be used after the restart, and the event can be ignored.
Administrators should confirm that the communication over the specified port is enabled if any intermediate network devices or software is used to filter packets between the domain controllers.
Frequently, you must also manually set the File Replication Service (FRS) RPC port because AD and FRS replication replicate with the same Domain Controllers. The FRS RPC port should use a different port.
Don’t assume that clients only use the Netlogon RPC services and thus only the setting DCTcpipPort is required. Clients are also using other RPC services such as SamRPC, LSARPC, and also the Directory Replication Services (DRS) interface. You should always configure both registry settings and open both ports on the firewall.
Known issues
After you specify the ports, you may encounter the following issues:
In this tutorial, we will dive into how to secure a Microsoft Exchange mail server with the CrowdSec collaborative firewall! Installing CrowdSec on a Microsoft Exchange server will allow you to protect against common attacks but also new threats.
A good example is the security breach ProxyNotShell which made headlines in October 2022: CrowdSec can detect exploit attempts and block malicious IP addresses, thanks to the fact that it contains a collection for IIS and attacks based on HTTP/HTTPS protocols. Other examples are more classic cases: brute force attacks on the Exchange webmail interface.
Due to how it functions, an Exchange server will be exposed to the Internet depending on the architecture of your IS (for example, the presence or absence of a reverse proxy). However, it must be able to communicate outward and also be reachable from the outside to send and receive emails to your users’ mailboxes.
This same server is also reachable through Webmail which allows users to check their emails from a browser. This implies the presence of an IIS web server that hosts both Webmail and Exchange Admin Center. Furthermore, when an Exchange server is compromised by a cyberattack, this mainly involves HTTP/HTTPS access: hence the interest in protecting yourself.
This article is a continuation of my first article on installing an Exchange Server 2019 server. For the installation of the Microsoft Exchange Server itself, I invite you to read my previous tutorial.
I already wrote about how to install CrowdSec on Windows in a previous article, but that was the Alpha version. Now, the CrowdSec agent for Windows is available in a stable version, which means that it is ready to be implemented in production.
Note: if you have previously installed the alpha version on your server, you must uninstall it before installing this new CrowdSec version.
Register the CrowdSec instance with the Central API
Register the CrowdSec service within Windows (automatic start)
Once done, begin the installation. Just follow the steps without making any changes. Then, allow about 2 minutes for the Agent to fully install.
As soon as the CrowdSec Agent is in place, we have access to the “cscli” command line which allows you to manage your CrowdSec instance from it.
To list current collections:
cscli collections list
To list the current bouncers (none by default):
cscli bouncers list
B. Installing the ISS Collection
On Windows, CrowdSec natively sets up the “crowdsecurity/windows“, but it is not enough to protect your Exchange server. We will need to add the IIS collection, which will also add two more collections to detect web attacks.
This collection is installed from this command:
cscli collections install crowdsecurity/iis
In just a few seconds after adding, we can list the installed collections to see the presence of the new collections.
To justify what I said in the introduction about the ProxyNotShell vulnerability, we can look at the details of the “crowdsecurity/http-cve” collection. Here, we can see the presence of a detection scenario named “crowdsecurity/CVE-2022-41082” corresponding to this vulnerability.
The installation is done in only a few clicks: just follow the wizard.
Once done, the command below will make it possible to see the presence of the bouncer.
cscli bouncers list
Let’s go to the next step.
D. Add IIS log support
For CrowdSec to focus on the logs generated by IIS, and by extension, corresponding to the access to the OWA and ECP portals of Exchange, we must indicate to it the paths to the log files it will analyze.
You can see the presence of a “dynamic” path which is characterized by the presence of the wildcard character: “C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\*\*.log “. This value will allow CrowdSec to find and read log files located in the tree “C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\
In addition to the path to the log files, this configuration block we just added contains a parameter named use_time_machine. It is important because IIS does not write logs in real-time in the log file, but it writes new events in blocks, every minute. Thanks to this parameter, CrowdSec will read the date and time of each line to find its way and process the events chronologically, this avoids false positives.
However, if you are not using the log files, but the event viewer, you should use this piece of code and not the one mentioned above:
Finally, we need to restart CrowdSec. This operation is done in PowerShell with this command:
Restart-Service crowdsec
CrowdSec setup is complete! Now let’s test it!
III. Is the Exchange server protected?
A. Brute force on OWA – Webmail Exchange
There are several possible methods to perform a brute force attack on OWA. Of course, you could do this manually for testing, but you could also use something a bit more automated to simulate a brute-force attack. As for us, we will use a Bash script named “OWA BRUTE” that executes Hydra (an offensive tool compatible with many protocols to test a service’s authentication, equipment, etc. ) with specific parameters corresponding to Outlook Web Access.
First, we need to install Hydra and Git. The first one is a prerequisite to use the script and perform our attack, while the second one will be used to clone the GitHub repository to get the Bash script (you can also copy and paste the script in a file…).
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hydra git
Once this is done, we clone the GitHub project in “/home/florian”:
cd /home/florian/
git clone
Then, we create a file “users.txt” in which we indicate some names of users. You can also recover a list on the Internet.
nano /home/florian/owabrute/users.txt
In the same sense, we create a file “passwords.txt” with the passwords to test.
nano /home/florian/owabrute/passwords.txt
Then, we move to the OWA BRUTE directory to add the execution rights on the Bash script.
cd /home/florian/owabrute/
chmod +x owabrute.sh
All that remains is to launch the attack by targeting “mail.domaine.fr” and then using our previously created files.
We can see that the script will test each combination. At the end, it will indicate if it has succeeded or not in finding a valid combination. However, CrowdSec will intervene…
Indeed, if I look at my Exchange server, I can see that there is a new IP address blocked because of brute force (“crowdsecurity/windows-bf”). The CrowdSec agent has correctly blocked the IP address that caused this attack.
Since we are here to test, we can unblock our IP address manually:
cscli decisions delete –ip X.X.X.X
Let’s move on to a second test.
B. Scan Web on OWA
In the case where someone tries to scan your Web server, when IIS is used by Exchange, they can rely on various tools including Nikto which is used to analyze the security level of a Web server. For this example, OWA will be scanned with the Nikto tool: we will see if CrowdSec detects what is happening on the IIS server…
First of all, let’s install this tool:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nikto
Then, we launch the scan to webmail:
nikto -h https://mail.domaine.fr/owa
The analysis will take several minutes…
…Except that after a while, CrowdSec will realize that this web client is performing suspicious actions and it will decide to block it. In the example below, we can see the reason “http-sensitive-files” which means that the client tried to access sensitive files.
In this second example, where we performed a completely different action compared to the first attempt, CrowdSec also managed to detect our malicious actions.
IV. Conclusion
We have just seen how to set up the CrowdSec agent on Windows to protect a Microsoft Exchange mail server! Here, I took the example of Exchange Server 2019, but it also applies to previous versions. With these two quick, but concrete examples, we could see the efficiency of CrowdSec!
I’ll also take this moment to remind you of the existence of the CrowdSec Console which allows you to follow the alerts raised by one or more CrowdSec Agents from a web-based console. To learn more about the implementation and all the functionalities, you can visit the Console page.
Over the years, Google has done much to alleviate the pain of editing Microsoft Office files on Chromebooks, but in my opinion, the progress has felt like walking through mud. The only time we see significant improvements to this experience is when Google feels like making them. I’ve had a support ticket submitted since 2019 that complains about some of these issues, and no one addressed it. (23 days ago it was finally moved)
We have an on-going investigation in an internal doc (can’t be published here). But one thing to share is to re-confirm this issue reproduces on stock Android 11 as long as the user is using the internal Files app (Settings > Storage > Files) and not the Files By Google app where files open as editable instead of read-only.Chromium Bug report from 2019, comment from last year
Now, a new update in ChromeOS Canary, which was spotted a little while ago by C2 Productions on Twitter, shows the company testing out a new pop-up dialogue for Office Editing on its laptop operating system.
In the Files app, double-clicking a .docx or another Office-type file in your local storage will now present you with an option to either open it in Google Docs or Microsoft Office itself. Of course, you’ll have to have the app installed in order to trigger this, as well as the “Enable Office files upload workflow” developer flag enabled.
to be fair, you’ve been able to select which program you’d like to open your files in for a few years now by selecting the “Open with” dropdown at the top of the Files app. This additional in-your-face pop-up is just more helpful and takes the burden off of the user to think about manually swapping the default program. Most device owners don’t do this, in my experience, and I can see why this change is being made.
What’s even more interesting, however, is what else this flag enables. Another image, which was also provided by C2 Productions, shows off a new “Move and Upload option for Office documents. You see, in order to edit files in the installed Office program, it has to be in One Drive. In the past, my frustration with writing traditional files on a Chromebook came from exactly this. No matter what I did to modify them from the local storage or Google Drive, they would open in ‘Read only’ mode.
Okay, so the simple solution all of these years was to get a few lines of code to automate the copy-and-paste process of moving your docs into Microsoft’s cloud? Well, why didn’t they think of this sooner? Choosing “Microsoft Office” from the aforementioned pop-up then presents you with the option to do exactly that – move your information over to Google’s biggest competitor and allow you to use their tools.
It’s effectively an arrow pointing out of Google’s house saying “We tried, we can’t fix it – just go use the other guys”. It wouldn’t be right for me to skip mentioning the fact that Google Docs’ “Native Office Editing” updates have been really well implemented, but most people still prefer the name brand that Microsoft has brought to the table for the past few decades, and I can’t blame them.
I only care that this issue is permanently resolved and becomes a thing of the past. Anyone who chooses to use a Chromebook over a Windows machine should still be able to edit their files without the two companies fueding and pointing fingers at each other. I spent countless hours going back and forth between Google and Microsoft and both of them blamed the other for the ‘Read Only’ problem. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s better than we’ve had up until this point, so I’ll take it.
Important: Sensitivity is not available if your Office account isn’t a work account, and if your administrator hasn’t configured any sensitivity labels and enabled the feature for you. 
Note: If your organization has configured a website to learn more about their sensitivity labels, you will also see a Learn More option.
Important: Sensitivity is not available if your Office account isn’t a work account with a Office 365 Enterprise E3 or Office 365 Enterprise E5 license assigned, or if your administrator hasn’t configured any sensitivity labels and enabled the feature for you .
Note: If your organization has configured a website to learn more about their sensitivity labels, you will also see a Learn More option.
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