This is good news for those who believed that the latest updates for Microsoft Office
could contain a Ransomware
.
Everything now seems to be back to normal, as the ransomware detected is, in fact, false positives.
Potential ransomware in Microsoft updates
More fear than harm. On Wednesday March 16, Windows administrators believed in a potential ransomware-type cyberattack affecting a number of users wishing to update the Office 2021 service. In reality, it was not.
With online threats constantly on the rise, deploying ransomware through Microsoft updates would have been all the more catastrophic. And this while the Redmond firm has deployed in its update for Office a way to more easily detect potential ransomware.
As a result, Windows administrators had a few cold sweats. According to a Microsoft report, “ As of the morning of March 16, customers may have encountered a series of false positive detections that are attributed to a detection of ransomware behavior in the file system, and alerts were triggered on OfficeSvcMgr.exe “.
Back to normal for Office users
Windows Defender’s runaway is therefore not due to a sharp detection of a hitherto hidden ransomware. ” Our investigation revealed that a recently deployed update to the service components that detect ransomware alerts introduced a code issue that was causing alerts to be triggered when no issue was present. “added Microsoft.
An update of the Cloud logic has made it possible to overcome the problem, thus making it possible to stop the untimely reports of ransomware which… are not. To the ” rain of alerts received last Wednesday by Microsoft security services has therefore succeeded the calm.
The Redmond firm has not yet communicated further on the subject, but continues to work to refine the detection of potential viruses in its own services, which does not protect it from hiccups from time to time. Of course, this should in no way diminish our daily vigilance against serious threats such as ransomware.
A popular saying among system administrators is that “the biggest security hole is the chair-keyboard interface”. But what could be this interface at the origin of so many evils in the digital world? Well… it’s you. Well, not really YOU, who are reading us, but rather the human user behind each screen. No need to take it personally!
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Source: Bleeping Computer
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