Amazon Paused Rollout of Microsoft Office for a Year After Hacks

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Paused Rollout of

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Office for a Year After Hacks

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.com Inc. has delayed the deployment of

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Corp.’s cloud-based Office suite for a year as the two companies work to resolve

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concerns about the security of the bundle of email and productivity software. The tech giants signed a deal last year to provide

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employees with

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365, the cloud-based package that includes Word,

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, Windows and other software.

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has long used versions of Office installed on its own servers.

But

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paused the rollout after

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discovered a Russia-linked hacker group had gained access to some of its employees’ email accounts. After conducting its own analysis of the software,

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asked for changes to guard against unauthorised access and create a more detailed accounting of user activity in the apps, some of which

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also markets as Office 365.

It’s an unusual confluence of events: a massive commercial deal between two Seattle-area cloud-computing rivals, a state-sponsored hack, and an engineering collaboration that could improve the security of the world’s most widely used office productivity software.

“We deep-dived into O365 and all of the controls around it and we held – just as we would any of our service teams within

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– we held them to the same bar,” said CJ Moses,

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’s chief information security officer. Moses’s team gave

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security chief Charlie Bell – a former

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engineering executive – a list of requested enhancements, and engineers from both companies have spent months working on those changes.

“We believe we’re in a good place to start redeployment next year,” Moses said in an interview last week at

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Web Services’ re:Invent conference.

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declined to comment.

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committed $1 billion (roughly Rs. 84,821 crore) over five years to buy

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’s 365 software for its roughly 1.5 million employees, Business Insider reported last year. The deal made

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, the second largest private employer in the US behind Walmart Inc., one of the biggest buyers of

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’s flagship cloud productivity suite.

Then last fall, a hacking group called Midnight Blizzard attacked some of

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’s corporate systems. The company disclosed in January that the group ultimately gained access to a “small number” of employee email accounts, including senior leaders and cybersecurity and legal workers. It was one among a series of lapses that spurred Chief Executive officer Satya Nadella to declare security

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’s top priority.

Moses early this year recommended to

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security chief Steve Schmidt and CEO Andy Jassy that the company suspend the rollout, to give time for

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to assess the damage and for

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to conduct further investigation.

“At that time still,

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wasn’t able to tell us if they had gotten the [hackers] out of their environment,” Moses said.

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’s requests included modifying tools to verify that users accessing the apps are properly authorized and, once in, that their actions are tracked in a manner that

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’s automated systems can monitor for changes that might indicate a security risk, Moses said.

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’s bundle, cobbled together from what had been separate products, includes different protocols for authenticating and tracking users, some of which didn’t meet

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’s standards.

“We wanted to make sure that everything was logged, and that we had access to that logging in near-real time,” Moses said. “That was part of the hangup.”

Bell, who supervised Moses at AWS before leaving for

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in 2021, indicated that

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would make the enhancements available to other customers, Moses said. He praised his former boss’s efforts.

“They’ve done yeoman’s work,” Moses said. “We’ve given them some pretty steep tasks.”

© 2024 Bloomberg LP

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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#

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#Paused #Rollout #

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#Office #Year #Hacks

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