Blogs by Ashwin

  Summary It can easily detect risks in real-time and offline. A risky sign-in may generally means an illegitimate sign-in attempt of a user account. Reason Turning on the sign-in risk policy ensures that suspicious sign-ins are challenged for MFA. What If? After triggering the policy, users will require MFA to access the account, however, if any user hasn't registered MFA on their account, then, they would be automatically blocked from accessing their account. Hence, it is recommended to configure the MFA registration policy by all users who are a part of the Sign-in Risk policy. How to? To configure a Sign-in risk policy, use the following steps: Login to  https://admin.microsoft.com  as a  Global Administrator. Go to  Admin centers  and click on  Azure Active Directory. Select  Azure Active Directory  and then  Security. Select  Conditional Access. Now, create a new policy by choosing  New Policy. Set the below conditions within the policy-                    Under Users or work

  Summary Password hash synchronization is one of the sign-in methods used for accomplishing hybrid identity synchronization and since Azure AD synchronizes a hash, it provides a user's password from an on-premises Active Directory instance to a cloud-based Azure AD instance. Note- Audit and remediation procedures in this recommendation only work for Microsoft 365 tenants operating in a hybrid configuration via Azure AD Connect sync. Reason This one can actually reduce the number of passwords required by your users to just one and also enables the leaked credential detection for your hybrid accounts, However, leaked credential protection can be leveraged via Azure AD Identity Protection and is a subset of the feature that can identify an organization's user account passwords appearing on dark web or public space.  Even if the network connection of your on-premises environment is crashed, Microsoft can still process sign-ins to 365 with Hash Sync, which may not be possible with

  Summary Use Conditional Access to block legacy authentication protocols in Office 365.  Reason Since legacy authentication don't support MFA, they are often used by attackers for malicious purposes. Hence, if we block legacy authentication, it will make it very difficult for attackers to gain access. What If? This setting, if enabled, will prevent users from connecting with older versions of Office, ActiveSync or using protocols like IMAP, POP or SMTP and may require upgrades to older versions of Office, and use of mobile mail clients that supports modern authentication.   How to? To setup a conditional access policy to block legacy authentication, use the following steps: Login to  https://admin.microsoft.com  as a  Global Administrator. Go to  Admin centers  and click on  Azure Active Directory. Select  Azure Active Directory  and then  Security. Select Conditional Access. Now, create a new policy by choosing New Policy. Set the below conditions within the policy-              

  Summary If Azure Active Directory Password Protection to Active Directory is enabled, then, it will help in protecting against the use of common passwords. However, this recommendation applies to Hybrid deployments only, and will be of no use unless working with on-premises Active Directory. Reason As Azure Directory protects an organization against the use of weak or leaked passwords and also helps them in creating a list of custom banned passwords to prevent their users from using easily guessed passwords that are specific to their industry; deploying this feature to Active Directory will strengthen the passwords that are used in the environment. What If? The end result of this setting highly depends upon existing password policies in place in the environment, hence, those with stronger password policies in place, will be affected minimally, while, those without them will have to implement Azure Active Directory Password Protection for users to change and adhere to more stringent r

  Summary If self-service password reset is enabled, it will allow the users to easily reset their own passwords in Azure AD. So, whenever your users sign in to Microsoft 365, they will have to provide additional contact information to help reset their passwords in the future and if combined registration is enabled, extra information outside MFA will not be required. As of August 2020, combined registration is enabled by default. Reason After this, users will not have to depend on the helpdesk to reset their passwords and moreover, this mechanism will automatically block the common, easily guessable passwords. Combined registrations should be enabled (if not already by default), as it will save the users from the hassle of registering for password reset separately from MFA. What If? We all know that, this setting will require the users to provide additional contact information in order to get enrolled in the self-service password reset along with some minor user education who are habit

  Summary It is recommended to designate more than one global administrators, so that a single admin can be monitored easily and the redundancy can be maintained in case the single admin leave an organization. However, not more than four global admins can be set for any tenant and they ideally have no licenses assigned to them.   Reason If there is only one global tenant administrator, he or she can easily perform any kind of malicious activity without any possibility of being discovered by another admin, having more than one global administrators ensures that one of their accounts will be successfully breached by an external attacker. What If? If there is only one global administrator in a tenant, then, another global administrator will be required to be identified as well as configured, while, for more than four global administrators, a review of role requirements for current global administrators will be needed to identify which of the users want require global administrator access.

  Summary In order to enable multifactor authentication for all users in the Microsoft tenant 365, they will be prompted to authenticate with a second factor, which is generally a text message to a registered mobile number where they type in an authorization code, or with a mobile application like Microsoft Authenticator,  after logging in to the Microsoft 365 services Reason MFA generally requires an individual to present at least two separate forms of authentication before granting access, can offer extra assurance about the identity of the individual trying to get access, which further requires for an attacker to compromise minimum two different authentication mechanisms, that not only increases the compromise difficulty level, but also, reduces the risks. What If? If MFA is implemented for all users in administrative roles, it will permanently change the users' routine as they will have to enroll in MFA via phone, SMS, or an authentication application. After that MFA will alway

  Summary Enabling the multifactor authentication for all users who are also the members of administrative roles in the Microsoft 365 tenant includes roles like: Global Administrator Billing Administrator Exchange Administrator SharePoint Administrator Password Administrator Skype for Business Administrator Service Support Administrator User Administrator Dynamics 365 Service Administrator Power BI Administrator Reason MFA generally requires an individual to present at least two separate forms of authentication before granting access, can offer extra assurance about the identity of the individual trying to get access, which further requires for an attacker to compromise minimum two different authentication mechanisms, that not only increases the compromise difficulty level, but also, reduce the risks. What If? If MFA is implemented for all users in administrative roles, it will permanently change the users' routine as they will have to enroll in MFA via phone, SMS, or an authentica

  Initial Exploration & Cleansing of the Melbourne Housing Dataset Here, we will look at the contents of a data loaded  from a data store that is registered in Azure Machine Learning and start doing some basic cleaning regarding the raw data: Download the given packages via Python PIP either separately or using the requirements file you can find in GitHub's repository- pandas, seaborn, plotly, scikit-learn, numpy, missingno, umap-learn, and statsmodels. You can either create a new Jupyter notebook or follow along with the one mentioned before. Now, connect to your ML workspace via the configuration file. After that, retrieve the data from your defined ML data store, yourname, and load the dataset into a tabular dataset object. Since, the methods offered by tabular dataset object are not enough, we have to convert it into pandas DataFrame, providing the first look of our data. Now, we can look at the so-called shape of the datasets, which will show us how many columns and how ma

  To read part 1, please click  here To read part 2, please click  here Exploring & Analyzing File Datasets We need to look out for the following aspects while exploring and analyzing datasets: Uniformity- If all the images in a dataset are not of same size, then, they should be rescaled which might require centering pixel values per channel, may be followed by some form of normalization. Augmentation- Here, we diversify the dataset without taking on new data (new images), which can be very useful while dealing with small dataset and typically involves horizontal as well as vertical flipping, cropping, and rotating among other transformation. However, if you want to take pictures as uniformly as possible to cover a lot of various scenarios, you have to consider following aspects: Camera Type- We might require same type of camera to take pictures in the same format across the globe.  Environmental Conditions- Lighting, temperature, humidity, etc. can also influence the electronics i