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Facebook’s Messenger Kids app is built around a simple premise: children shouldn’t be able to talk to users who haven’t been approved by their parents. But a design flaw allowed users to sidestep that protection through the group chat system, allowing children to enter group chats with unapproved strangers. For the past week, Facebook has been quietly closing down those group chats and alerting users, but has not made any public statements disclosing the issue. The alert, which was obtained by The Verge. Facebook confirmed to The Verge that the message was authentic, and said the alert had been sent to thousands of users in recent days. “We recently notified some parents of Messenger Kids account users about a technical error that we detected affecting a small number of group chats,” a Facebook representative said. “We turned off the affected chats and provided parents with additional resources on Messenger Kids and online safety.” The bug arose from the way Messenger Kids’ unique permissions were applied in group chats. In a standard one-on-one chat, children can only initiate conversations with users who have been approved by the child’s parents. But those permissions became more complex when applied to a group chat because of the multiple users involved. Whoever launched the group could invite any user who was authorized to chat with them, even if that user wasn’t authorized to chat with the other children in the group. As a result, thousands of children were left in chats with unauthorized users, a violation of the core promise of Messenger Kids. Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.

Microsoft says that several changes designed to make Office 365 licensing technology more reliable for subscription-based Office clients will be rolled out during August. Office 365 is part of the Microsoft 365 software offer which also bundles Windows 10 and EMS (short for Enterprise Mobility + Security), a bundle that provides customers with an easy way of enjoying a simple to manage and secure online productivity platform in Microsoft's vision. "In August, we’ll start slowly rolling out these changes to commercial customers on Monthly Channel. The roll-out will continue to Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted) in September, and Semi-Annual Channel in January 2020," says Microsoft. While the Office activation and licensing changes will affect both users and admins who manage Office 365 devices, the activation process will not be changed in its entirety. More to the point, Office users will still have to activate their installation by sign-in in on their devices, with the software to automatically detect their credentials and activate itself if single sign-on is enabled. Also, Office users can still deploy and activate Office 365 apps on up to five desktop devices, five smartphones, and five tablets as part of their Office 365 subscription. The changes Microsoft will start rolling out during August are designed to remove prompts when deactivating Office installations, as well as automatically sign out users when the sign-in limit is reached. This new groups expiration policy will allow all Office 365 admins to improve their groups' lifecycle management once it reaches public preview by making sure that active groups are not haphazardly removed and data is irremediably lost. Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.

An Israeli cybersecurity company has developed spyware that can scrape data from the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft products, according to The Financial Times. The report says NSO Group’s proprietary smartphone malware, Pegasus, harvests not only data stored on a device but also any information stored in the cloud, including a user’s location data, archived messages, and photos. NSO Group, who previously installed the malware in Facebook’s WhatsApp, denied that it markets software capable of capturing data in the cloud. It’s unclear if it has developed the tools internally. “The Financial Times got it wrong. NSO’s products do not provide the type of collection capabilities and access to cloud applications, services, or infrastructure suggested in this article,” the company told CNBC in a statement. “Increasingly sophisticated terrorists and criminals are taking advantage of encrypted technologies to plan and conceal their crimes, leaving intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the dark and putting public safety and national security at risk. NSO’s lawful interception products are designed to confront this challenge.” NSO Group says it has a screening process for clients and only sells to responsible governments for facilitating terrorism or criminal investigations. In May, WhatsApp said a flaw in the messenger service could allow NSO Group software to be downloaded to phones through a simple phone call and to monitor calls made through the service. The Facebook-owned application put a patch in place to fix the problem. Follow this thread on OUR FORUM.