Microsoft with a pair of critical moves.
First, they confirmed recently that they are undoing their block of Visual Basic for Application macros in Office. Quote “based on feedback,” they are rolling that back… much to the chagrin of security professionals. However, it’s been confirmed that the rollback is temporary – although we don’t know how long until it returns. Of course, you can always block it via Group Policy.
On the positive side, Autopatch has reached general availability. The service automated patching through a combination of AI and human management by Microsoft and is in Windows Enterprise/Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 licenses. Customers must have Azure AD, Intune, and supported versions of Windows 10 and 11.
Why do we care?
Autopatch feels like a quietly rolling out feature that isn’t getting enough attention. Sign me up – Microsoft managing this with their expertise, vision across devices, and cloud tech? Sounds like much value. I hear the screams about patching woes from the Windows NT days. Pick one – downtime because of failed patching or downtime from ransomware because of slowness on patch rollouts? (PAUSE) I thought so.
Microsoft appears to have miscommunicated on their rollback – it being temporary should have been part of the initial communications. However, I’ll give some grace that something we’re unaware of may be happening. The key takeaway for me was the value of good communications.