Safety feature for Microsoft 365 apps bites the dust as hackers embrace more sophisticated AI-powered techniques

What you need to know

• Microsoft is depreciating Defender Application Guard for Office, impacting Windows Security Isolation APIs.

• The feature is essentially designed to help protect users from falling victim to malicious attacks deployed by hackers.

• The company recommends that users transition to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint attack surface reduction rules, Protected View, and Windows Defender Application Control.

Microsoft recently announced its plans to deprecate Defender Application Guard for Office, impacting Windows Security Isolation APIs. As an alternative, the company recommends that users consider "transitioning to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint attack surface reduction rules along with Protected View and Windows Defender Application Control."

What is the Defender Application Guard for Office and how does it work?

For those unfamiliar with the Defender Application Guard for Office, it's a feature designed to help protect users from falling victim to malicious attacks deployed by hackers. It leverages the hardware isolation approach to identify and obliterate sophisticated and deceitful ploys that attackers use.

What's more, its capabilities can be used across multiple Microsoft services, including Microsoft Edge as well as Microsoft Office. As highlighted by Microsoft:

"For Microsoft Edge, Application Guard helps to isolate enterprise-defined untrusted sites, protecting your company while your employees browse the Internet. As an enterprise administrator, you define what is among trusted web sites, cloud resources, and internal networks. Everything not on your list is considered untrusted. If an employee goes to an untrusted site through either Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge opens the site in an isolated Hyper-V-enabled container."

RELATED: Microsoft 365 browser extension to shut down despite 10 million downloads

As for Microsoft Office, the feature helps prevent untrusted Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files from accessing trusted resources. The Defender Application Guard for Office ships with an isolated Hyper-V-enabled container where it opens the untrusted files; this way, the host operating system remains safe from attacks.

Hackers are using more sophisticated tactics

Last month, we reported on a Microsoft study highlighting how hackers are leveraging sophisticated AI-powered techniques to make their attacks more lethal and undetectable.

It remains unclear if users are equipped with modern solutions and tools that will help them keep such attacks at bay. But whatever the case, it's apparent that generative AI is on the rise, and more people are jumping into the fray and finding loopholes to use the technology to cause harm. However, President Biden issued an Executive Order that put guardrails in place to help govern AI and prevent it from spiraling out of control.

What are your thoughts on Microsoft depreciating this security feature? Let me know in the comments.

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