Microsoft is making ready a brand new safety characteristic for its collaboration software program Groups that may preserve you extra knowledgeable about simply who’s making an attempt to contact you.

The newest addition (opens in new tab) to the Microsoft 365 product roadmap explains that Microsoft Groups customers will quickly be “prompted with the choice to acknowledge or go away the group chat” after they get an invite from exterior their group. The change is because of take impact in some unspecified time in the future subsequent month.

Though the roadmap entry affords up few particulars, it highlights an pointless hole within the safety armor, which may very well be abused by cybercriminals to realize entry to delicate knowledge.

Microsoft Groups chats

Microsoft Groups has let customers have group chats and calls exterior your group and with private customers for a while now, but it surely’s by no means been excellent at notifying them about the place an invitation has come from.

This can be a frequent downside. These a part of busy organizations may not acknowledge a reputation merely due to the dimensions of their office, and should assume {that a} stranger is the truth is a piece colleague.

Up till now, the largest safety measure Microsoft has put in place to guard Groups customers from this explicit difficulty is requiring exterior entry capabilities to be enabled. Because of this the flexibility to be contacted by all Groups customers, no matter group, is on the discretion of the chief of the consumer’s group.

Whereas the continued shift to distant working makes this a particularly helpful characteristic, permitting organizations the world over to collaborate seamlessly on-line, the brand new replace can be of reduction to members of bigger organizations, in addition to any employee aware about their on-line safety.

Groups has seen its justifiable share of safety points inside the final 12 months. Whereas Microsoft has a status for shortly patching these issues as soon as they’re disclosed, and has even gone so far as enabling end-to-end encryption on one-to-one calls, it might sound a bit shocking {that a} easy heads-up characteristic has taken this lengthy to implement.

Bugs in a bit of software program are inevitable, however after they expose customers’ recordsdata and knowledge, it’s straightforward to see how Groups’ exterior entry options could be misused. 

Whereas the upcoming replace nonetheless will depend on some vigilance on the a part of the consumer, it should undoubtedly shield many discerning customers from cyberattacks at work.

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