UPDATED: UEFI Signing Requirements
While Microsoft reserves the right to sign or not sign submissions at its discretion, you should adhere to these requirements. Doing so will help you achieve faster turnaround times for getting a submission signed and help avoid revocation. Microsoft may conduct follow-up reviews, including but not limited to questionnaires, package testing, and other security testing of these requirements before signing. The following list contains the latest requirements for the UEFI signing process. These requirements are to ensure the security promise of secure boot, and to help expedite the turnaround of signing submissions.Cloud and AI Cost Efficiency: A Strategic Imperative for Long-Term Business Growth
In this blog, we’ll explore why cost efficiency is a top priority for organizations today, how Azure Essentials can help address this challenge, and provide an overview of Microsoft’s solutions, tools, programs, and resources designed to help organizations maximize the value of their cloud and AI investments.
Chrome extension managed storage policy
Hi there, I've developed a chrome extension and now we want to deploy it using Intune. Force install of extension works great but I can't pass managed data to the extension. Here is the scheme: { "type": "object", "properties": { "apiKey": { "title": "API Key", "description": "An API key to communicate with server.", "type": "string" } } } This is the policy that I created in Intune: OMA-URI: ./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/Chrome~Policy~googlechrome~3rdparty~extensions~eagefwefpbjpewefliifpgfgoewfknnmk~policy Data type: String Value: {"apiKey":"mykey123"} But it doesn't appear in chrome://policy and when I get policies in my code with: const result = await chrome.storage.managed.get(null); The result is empty! What is the problem here? And how to fix it?
GA: Enhanced Audit in Azure Security Baseline for Linux
We’re thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of the Enhanced Azure Security Baseline for Linux—a major milestone in cloud-native security and compliance. This release brings powerful, audit-only capabilities to over 1.6 million Linux devices across all Azure regions, helping enterprise customers and IT administrators monitor and maintain secure configurations at scale. What Is the Azure Security Baseline for Linux? The Azure Security Baseline for Linux is a set of pre-configured security recommendations delivered through Azure Policy and Azure Machine Configuration. It enables organizations to continuously audit Linux virtual machines and Arc-enabled servers against industry-standard benchmarks—without enforcing changes or triggering auto-remediation. This GA release focuses on enhanced audit capabilities, giving teams deep visibility into configuration drift and compliance gaps across their Linux estate. For our remediation experience, there is a limited public preview available here: What is the Azure security baseline for Linux? | Microsoft Learn Why Enhanced Audit Matters In today’s hybrid environments, maintaining compliance across diverse Linux distributions is a challenge. The enhanced audit mode provides: Granular insights into each configuration check Industry aligned benchmark for standardized security posture Detailed rule-level reporting with evidence and context Scalable deployment across Azure and Arc-enabled machines Whether you're preparing for an audit, hardening your infrastructure, or simply tracking configuration drift, enhanced audit gives you the clarity and control you need—without enforcing changes. Key Features at GA ✅ Broad Linux Distribution Support 📘 Full distro list: Supported Client Types 🔍 Industry-Aligned Audit Checks The baseline audits over 200+ security controls per machine, aligned to industry benchmarks such as CIS. These checks cover: OS hardening Network and firewall configuration SSH and remote access settings Logging and auditing Kernel parameters and system services Each finding includes a description and the actual configuration state—making it easy to understand and act on. 🌐 Hybrid Cloud Coverage The baseline works across: Azure virtual machines Arc-enabled servers (on-premises or other clouds) This means you can apply a consistent compliance standard across your entire Linux estate—whether it’s in Azure, on-prem, or multi-cloud. 🧠 Powered by Azure OSConfig The audit engine is built on the open-source Azure OSConfig framework, which performs Linux-native checks with minimal performance impact. OSConfig is modular, transparent, and optimized for scale—giving you confidence in the accuracy of audit results. 📊 Enterprise-Scale Reporting Audit results are surfaced in: Azure Policy compliance dashboard Azure Resource Graph Explorer Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Recommendations view) You can query, export, and visualize compliance data across thousands of machines—making it easy to track progress and share insights with stakeholders. 💰 Cost There’s no premium SKU or license required to use the audit capabilities with charges only applying to the Azure Arc managed workloads hosted on-premises or other CSP environments—making it easy to adopt across your environment. How to Get Started Review the Quickstart Guide 📘 Quickstart: Audit Azure Security Baseline for Linux Assign the Built-In Policy Search for “Linux machines should meet requirements for the Azure compute security baseline” in Azure Policy and assign it to your desired scope. Monitor Compliance Use Azure Policy and Resource Graph to track audit results and identify non-compliant machines. Plan Remediation While this release does not include auto-remediation, the detailed audit findings make it easy to plan manual or scripted fixes. Final Thoughts This GA release marks a major step forward in securing Linux workloads at scale. With enhanced audit now available, enterprise teams can: Improve visibility into Linux security posture Align with industry benchmarks Streamline compliance reporting Reduce risk across cloud and hybrid environments🚨 Azure Service Health Built-In Policy (Preview) – Now Available!
Resiliency is a key focus for Microsoft in making sure our customers experience minimal impact due to planned or unexpected outages that may occur. Up until now there has been no native scalable solution to provide consistent notifications across Azure subscriptions for Service Health events. Building on the success of Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts (AMBA) where this functionality is currently available, the AMBA team has combined with the Service Health Product team to include this capability into the Azure native experience. We’re excited to announce the release of Azure Service Health Built-In Policy (Preview), a new built-in Azure Policy designed to simplify and scale the deployment of Service Health alerts across your Azure environment. This policy enables customers to automatically deploy Service Health alerts across subscriptions, ensuring consistent visibility into platform-level issues that may impact workloads. Existing subscriptions can be remediated in bulk and new Azure subscriptions, created once the Policy has been assigned, will automatically be configured for receiving Service Health alerts. 🔍 What's the purpose of this announcement? It addresses situations where customers only permit the use of built-in policies. It automates the setup of Service Health alerts across all subscriptions when deployed at the management group level. It ensures consistent alert coverage for platform events. It helps reduce manual setup and ongoing maintenance. 🛠️ What options are available with the Policy? All the learnings from AMBA have been taken into consideration in designing and creating this policy. There are now a wide range of options available to provide flexibility based on your needs. These options are surfaced as parameters within the policy: It audits the existing environment for compliance. It ensures the ability to provide custom alert rules that align with the naming standards. It gives the ability to choose the types of Service Health events to monitor. It supports Bring-your-own Action Group, or the ability to create a new Action Group as part of the Policy assignment. For ARM role notification, it ensures the ability to choose from a pre-set list of built-in roles for notifications. It provides the ability to choose from email, Logic App, Event Hubs, webhook, and Azure Functions within the Action Group. It enables naming Resource groups, and location flexibility. It gives the ability to add Resource tags. 🧩 What about Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts? The AMBA team have been working to incorporate the newly built-in policy into a future release. The team plans to roll this out in the next few weeks along with details for existing customers on replacing the existing AMBA custom policy. These changes will then be consumed into Azure Landing Zones. AMBA continues to offer a wide range of alerts for both platform and workload services in addition to Service Health alerts. This announcement does not serve as a replacement for AMBA but simply compliments the AMBA solution. 📣 What’s Next? Check out the guidance on leveraging this policy in your environment Deploy Service Health alert rules at scale using Azure Policy - Azure Service Health Should you require support for this policy please raise a support ticket via the portal as comments raised below may not be addressed in a timely manner
Time Zone configuration profiles and policies
Hello, I'm trying to find out the way to control "automatic time zone change" option to allow users to turn it off or on. On the Intune side there is a configuration profile using OMA-URI settings ("./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/UserRights/ChangeTimeZone" with string "LOCAL SERVICEAdministratorsUsers"). This one controls whether user can change the Time Zone manually in the Control Panel (the old school way) and it also reflects in the Settings when the "Set time zone automatically" is turned off however we have some users that have this option greyed out and I have not found a way how to change this from the Intune side. Users are normally standard users and they do not have administrative rights by default but they should be able to change some of the settings when they invoke "elevation mode" eg in the 1st picture below if I would switch "Set time zone automatically" on I would be presented with authentication dialog and after authentication the setting would turn on. 1st case - user can change the "set time zone automatically" option on/off but is not in the group that is allowed to manually change the time zone hence it does not even show the time zone choices (this reflects the configuration profile mentioned above) 2nd case - user can change the "set time zone automatically" option on/off and is in the group that is allowed to manually change the time zone => shows additional options Time Zone and DST. 3rd case - user can not change the "set time zone automatically" option at all means can't change the TZ or DST in Settings, but is able to change time zone via Control Panel (see below) And the question for the million $$$ 🙂 is if or where is the option / configuration that makes the "Set time zone automatically" greyed out. Any ideas? Thanks
