Enterprise collaboration tools have seen an upsurge in popularity this year, thanks to the global pandemic forcing organizations all over the world to work from home. Even as the economy takes the initial step towards resumption, the days of packed meeting rooms will not be coming back anytime soon, at least in the foreseeable future, as health agencies continue to advise stringent social distancing measures.

This has meant that most enterprise collaboration happens through video-conferencing tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Zoom has been in the news lately for security flaws which have enabled attackers to hijack meetings. While the company has released patches to fix these flaws, security teams are warned to remain vigilant about Microsoft Teams as well. In a security update at the end of March, the company released a patch for a major sub-domain takeover vulnerability in the Microsoft Teams.

Malicious GIF vulnerability

This vulnerability allowed malicious threat actors to take over an organization’s entire roster of Microsoft Teams accounts through a simple GIF image. The unsuspecting victim would have only to view a malicious GIF for their data to be scraped. The exploitation was able to spread extremely quickly as it only required the first victim to view the malicious GIF, rendering organizations at extreme risks of hostile takeovers.

In technical terms, this attack is conducted through the use of a JSON Web token and a Skype token. These two tokens are used by Microsoft to enable Teams users to view and share images. These two tokens are sent to a Microsoft Teams server or a sub-domain under this server for authentication. However, two insecure Microsoft domains can be taken over and if this domain is accessed, the attacker can easily create a Skype token, enabling them to take over the victim’s account data.

Vigilance continues to be important!

It was providential that Microsoft immediately released a patch to fix this vulnerability as otherwise, the consequences could have been significant. Microsoft Teams is actively being used by organizations of all sizes globally to hold meetings and share company data. The sheer simplicity of this breach – making an unsuspecting user view a malicious GIF – could have easily resulted in breaches of data. By garnering user information, attackers could have launched phishing attacks by impersonating leaders.

That’s why enterprises need to follow all mandated security measures when it comes to enterprise collaboration tools such as Teams, Zoom or Slack. Employees must be continuously reminded to ensure they update their solutions and are on the latest versions of the respective software. It is important to have robust user access controls and strong authentication processes in place. Only approved and regulated users should be able to access these tools.

It’s also important for enterprises to have in place powerful security solutions that will keep the organization safe from such security breaches. Seqrite offers a range of solutions to help enterprises secure their perimeters. Data leakage can be stopped by using Seqrite Encryption, a full disk encryption solution that provides enhanced data solutions. Endpoint security can also be easily deployed and managed remotely from anywhere through Seqrite Endpoint Security Cloud.