 Microsoft sued a cyber-espionage group with North Korean links tracked as Thallium for breaking into its customers' accounts and networks via spear-phishing attacks with the end goal of stealing sensitive information, as shown by a complaint unsealed on December 27. "To manage and direct Thallium, Defendants have established and operate a network of websites, domains, and computers on the Internet, which they use to target their victims, compromise their online accounts, infect their computing devices, compromise the security of their networks, and steal sensitive information from them," Microsoft's complaint says]. The lawsuit was filed by Microsoft on December 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, as first reported by Bloomberg Law's Blake Brittain. According to Microsoft, Thallium targets both public and private industry targets and it has been observed while previously attacking "government employees, organizations and individuals that work on Nuclear Proliferation issues, think tanks, university staff members, members of organizations that attempt to maintain world peace, human rights organizations, as well as many other organizations and individuals." The North Korean hackers are also believed to have been active since at least 2010 according to Redmond's complaint, and it is known for being behind spear-phishing attacks they operate via legitimate services such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. A list of 50 domains used by Thallium in their attacks is available in Appendix A of Microsoft's complaint against the hacking group. Netscout's ATLAS Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT) also tracks one of the North Korean hacking group's campaigns as STOLEN PENCIL. According to Netscout, the hackers' STOLEN PENCIL APT campaign has been targeting academic institutions since at least May 2018 in spear-phishing attacks with the end goal of stealing credentials. Based on several shared resources, Palo Alto Networks' Unit42 also linked Thallium's STOLEN PENCIL campaign with a malware dubbed BabyShark and delivered as part of a spear-phishing campaign focused "on gathering intelligence related to Northeast Asia’s national security issues," starting with November 2018. "Well-crafted spear-phishing emails and decoys suggest that the threat actor is well aware of the targets, and also closely monitors related community events to gather the latest intelligence," Unit42 said. Follow the link to OUR FORUM for more.  Microsoft is working on adding support to the Outlook on the web browser-based client for sending emails via alias email addresses (also known as aliases or proxy addresses). After the feature's release, Office 365 customers will be able to send messages via Outlook on the web using any previously set up alias besides their primary SMTP address. Email sender aliases support will prove useful for users who need to send emails from multiple branded domain names or on behalf of a specific company team or department. Having the choice to choose any alias available for their account will also remove the hassle of setting up shared Office 365 mailboxes or creating additional POP or IMAP accounts. "So to kick-off our journey to provide you and your users with the flexibility to send email using an alias, we're excited to announce that soon Outlook on the web (aka OWA) will natively support the ability to choose the sender or FROM from a drop-down list right within the compose pane," says the planned feature's Microsoft 365 roadmap entry. "And when the recipient receives that message, the FROM and REPLY TO will show that alias, regardless where the recipient's mailbox happens to live." This new feature designed to allow Office 365 customers to send email from proxy addresses (aliases) from Outlook on the web is currently under development, with Microsoft planning to make it generally available in all Exchange environments during Q4 2020. In related news, Microsoft is working on adding the highly popular Outlook for Windows Message Recall feature to the Exchange Online hosted cloud email service for businesses. Once it will roll out to all Office 365 environments during Q4 2020, the Message Recall feature will make it possible for users of Microsoft's cloud email to retrieve emails not yet opened by the recipients, regardless of the email client they use. Redmond is also planning to add protection against Reply-All email storms in Exchange Online sometime during Q3 2020, an issue impacting Office 365 members of improperly locked down email distribution lists. Reply-All storms (aka reply-allpocalypses) are huge chain reaction email sequences usually started by one of the members of a large email list who replies to the entire list using the "Reply All" feature. This can lead to accidental Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) incidents that could take down some of the email servers used to deliver the numerous replies. Follow this and more on OUR FORUM.  In 2019, smartphone brands have made huge jumps in camera quality, especially when it comes to zoom and low-light. On the other hand, video quality hasn’t been given the same amount of attention. That could change in 2020 with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865’s improved ISP. Yet, even as Android smartphones are shipping with larger internal storage capacities, have faster modems, and are now supporting 5G networks, an old limitation prevents most of these phones from saving video files that are larger than 4GB in size. However, that could change in Android 11, the next major version of Android that’s set to release in 2020. I’ll try to summarize the reasoning behind this limitation without going too deep into the technical aspects. Basically, Google decided that Android’s MediaMuxer and MPEG4Writer classes, which are respectively responsible for muxing (combining) video files and saving them as MP4 files, should support outputting an MP4 file with a maximum size of 2^32 – 1 byte, which is approximately 4GB. This decision was made in early 2014, back when the Google Nexus 5 with its maximum 32GB of internal storage was still on the market, SD cards were still widely in use, and the first phones with 4K video recording had just come to market (Galaxy Note 3). Thus, there wasn’t much demand to save video files over 4GB in size: most phones didn’t have enough storage, SD cards formatted in FAT32 wouldn’t support it anyway, and few phones recorded in high enough quality to even meet that limitation. Fast forward 5 years and much has changed: there are now phones with 1TB of storage, SD cards are now the exception rather than the norm, and 4K video recording is ubiquitous, with 8K video recording soon to reach devices. Today, if you record a 4K video on the Pixel 4, your video will reach 4GB in size in about 12 minutes; that’s at the default quality settings of 30fps for the frame rate and 48Mbps for the bitrate. After about 12 minutes of recording, the camera app will save the video and immediately begin recording another video – without the user noticing. When you check your phone’s DCIM folder, you’ll notice that what was supposed to be one continuous video recording has instead been split into multiple video files. For example, a 73-minute video recording on my Pixel 4 was split into 7 different files – all of which were seen by Google Photos as separate recordings. It’s not difficult to mux these MP4 files before uploading to Google Photos, but you’ll have to use a third-party app if you want to do so. Most people wouldn’t bother or know how to do so, I would imagine. Further details provided on OUR FORUM. |
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