Maybe some of their targets did use example.com for some probing, and the NSA had a hand in Sumitomo Electric Industries' mail server.
https://www.akamai.com/blog/security/autodiscovering-the-gre...
According to it, it seems that if someone registers autodiscover.com then example.com lacking autodiscover.example.com will make Outlook try checking if autodiscover.com has an entry.
It's just a braindead system.
Working on Linux automation systems we would need to make sure to disable anything related to Avahi in our images otherwise name resolution would fail for some customers.
Support patiently explained .local is reserved for something else and kindly provided Wikipedia links.
They never responded why they used .local in their docs, trainings, webinars they provided, though :)
It's like when .dev became a gTLD, knowingly breaking a bunch of setups for a mix of vanity and a cash grab. Obviously dropped the ball on the engineering side.
I always make up some impossible domains like domain.tmptest
Otherwise you're one DNS "misconfiguration" away from sending dev logs and auth tokens to some random server.
> Since at least February 2020, Microsoft's Autodiscover service has incorrectly routed the IANA-reserved example.com to Sumitomo Electric Industries' mail servers at sei.co.jp, potentially sending test credentials there.
https://www.akamai.com/blog/security/autodiscovering-the-gre...
According to it, it seems that if someone registers autodiscover.com then example.com lacking autodiscover.example.com will make Outlook try checking if autodiscover.com has an entry.
It's just a braindead system.
"Aha, the defective trucks only cause injuries to people who have their hands on the wheel at highway speeds, but I've never bothered holding the wheel at high speed, I just YOLO so I wouldn't be affected"
If people had used IANA's reserved TLDs they too would be unaffected because although Windows will stupidly try to talk to for example autodiscover.example that can't exist by policy and so the attempt will always fail.
Wait, does their autodetect send email and password to their servers, instead of just domain???
Hold up, does this mean outlook sends your full credentials to Microsoft when you try to set up an outlook account? I'm sure they pinky promise they keep your credentials secure, but this feels like it breaks all sorts of security/privacy expectations.
>I would expect such a feature to use end-to-end encryption for the data
How would "end-to-end encryption" when such features by definition require the server to have access to the credentials to perform the required operations? If by "end to end" you actually mean it's encrypted all the way to the server, that's just "encryption in transit".
It was the Ethernom Beamu, company now defunct.
Already many years ago I remember installing a firewall on my phone and noticing in surprise that Outlook was not connecting at all to my private mail server, but instead only sending my credentials to their cloud and downloading messages from there.
The only Android mail client not making random calls to cloud servers was (back then) K-9 Mail.
https://www.xda-developers.com/privacy-implications-new-micr...
It looks like Microsoft Edge had the _ability to disable_ this added in 2020 or 2021, but it isn't currently the default and the Group Policy unintuitively only applies to unencrypted HTTP Connections.
Are you talking about NTLM hashes? It's a weak hash, but not the same as "sending your password". The biggest difference is that even a weak hash can't be reversed if the password has high enough entropy.
Not just an “outlook account” - any account in outlook, with default settings at least.
I run a mail server, mainly for me but a couple of friends have accounts on there too, and a while ago one friend reported apparently being locked out and it turned out that it was due to them switching Outlook versions and it was connecting via a completely different address to those that my whitelists expected sometimes at times when they weren't even actively using Outlook. Not only were active connections due to their interactive activity being proxied, but the IMAP credentials were stored so the MS server could login to check things whenever it wanted (I assume the intended value-add there is being able to send new mail notifications on phones/desktops even when not actively using mail?).
> but this feels like it breaks all sorts of security/privacy expectations.
It most certainly does. The behaviour can be tamed somewhat, but (unless there have been recent changes) is fully enabled by default in newer Outlook variants.
The above-mentioned friend migrated his mail to some other service in a huf as I refused to open my whitelist to “any old host run by MS” and he didn't want to dig in to how to return behaviour back to the previous “local connections only, not sending credentials off elsewhere where they might be stored”.
godzillabrennus•1h ago