Daily Archives: August 17, 2020

• Internet Explorer officially goes bye-bye – for Office, er, Microsoft 365 apps

  Posted on August 17, 2020 at 15:17 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  And that old version of Edge gets kicked to the curb, too.

  MS has officially announced the demise of Internet Explorer 11, at least as far as Office goes. Per the official announcement:

  Today, we’re announcing that Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) by this time next year.

  • Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11.
  • Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11.

  This means that after the above dates, customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11.

  That’s bound to come as something of a surprise to folks who actually rely on IE 11. (I know a few of you readers use it.) Particularly because IE 11 doesn’t hit official end of service until your version of Windows hits EOL. Here’s what MS says:

  Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and follows the Lifecycle Policy for the product on which it is installed.

  So you get to keep IE 11 until Windows rots away — but if you use it with Office apps, you have one year to wean your system off.

  Windows News Internet Explorer

• Krebs: This month’s code signing zeroday, CVE-2020-1464, has been around for two years

  Posted on August 17, 2020 at 07:52 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  This month we had two zero-days fixed in the Patch Tuesday crop. Several folks in the press screamed that the sky is falling and you have to get patched right now.

  Seems that the truth is a bit more prosaic. As truth frequently is.

  First we discovered that one of the zero-days, CVE-2020-1380, relies on Internet Explorer and it’s been used on an undisclosed South Korean company, in conjunction with other security holes. By itself, this zero-day doesn’t mean much.

  Now comes word from Brian Krebs that the other zero-day, CVE-2020-1464, was reported to Microsoft two years ago. It’s not exactly front-burner stuff:

  Asked to comment on why it waited two years to patch a flaw that was actively being exploited to compromise the security of Windows computers, Microsoft dodged the question, saying Windows users who have applied the latest security updates are protected from this attack.

  Moral of the story: It’s very, very rare that you need to patch immediately. Wait and see what problems crop up before you install the latest fare from Microsoft.

  Windows Patches/Security August 2020 Black Tuesday