Hello, and welcome to another episode of the
Everyday Defender podcast. We're back again.
It's been a month. I can't believe the time has
gone by so quickly, but here we are back again.
And I'm joined as always by my friend from the
Netherlands. How are you doing, Koos? Hey, Chris.
How are you doing? Yeah, it's August already.
Summer has almost passed here in the Netherlands.
I do still have my holiday in front of me. I'm
leaving in October, actually. So quite a late
holiday for the European listeners. But yeah,
nice to see you again. Yeah, we're actually getting
some better weather too. It's warming up for
us. So spring is here, which also means lots
of farm chores and, you know, all of that type
of stuff. But hey, not complaining with the nice,
well, it's raining today, but not complaining
with the nice weather in general. I saw you and
your wife washing the donkey the other day outside.
Yes, washing a donkey is not the easiest of things
to do. I saw that. That's funny. Yes, it was.
Her Instagram is full of interesting things.
But not talking about donkeys or llamas or anything
like that today. Yeah, really interested, Kosta,
to hear about Project Perception today. This
is going to be one I'm super excited to hear
your thoughts on that and sort of sit back and
just have you go through all of that type of
stuff. I wanted to talk just a little bit about
some changes to authentication methods in Entra.
You know, it's a very small announcement that
happened, you know, last month or I think it
was last month. But it is, you know, the potential
to impact some folks. And I've also heard some
confusion. I sort of wanted to jump into that,
and then I'll have you tackle the big topic,
right? And then, you know, as to close out the
show again, I promised on the last episode that
I'd talk about Connect 365, so I have something
to share about that as well as we close out later.
Well, don't call SMS MFA a small topic because
I think it has some large impact. I don't know
the details myself, so let us hear what you have
to say on that, but I think people are still
using it a lot. lot on scale and that's that's
true right so so um essentially for for folks
who are not aware who may have missed it um sort
of somewhere mid july around the 13th of july
microsoft had sort of announced that um it was
going to deprecate SMS and voice authentication
methods, right? So if you possibly still have
MFA enabled for folks, but they're using, I guess,
legacy methods and you receive maybe a text message
or a voice phone call, which used to be an option
or still is an option, those methods are now
sort of being phased out and deprecated, right?
And we've talked to it. I mean, we're going to
have to go back to like season one on this show
where we talked about. multi -factor authentication
and conditional access. And we talked about,
you know, why SMS isn't the greatest anymore
anyway, right? So I think everyone understands
that text messaging and voice calls and stuff
are easily spoofable and just are not good mechanisms
or methods for MFA. But there are still organizations
that use it, right? And so... I guess my concern,
and I actually just went through this process
with a client, and actually today was the big
day that they made all the changes within their
environment to actually catch all of the last
users that were still using SMS and stuff. So
literally, this is very new for me. And incidentally,
they had made the decision to move away from
these methods. before Microsoft announced it.
So they've been planning it now for two or three
months that they've been sort of working on moving
away from text messaging and voice. It just so
happens that, you know, whilst this was going
on, Microsoft also announced that they were going
to sort of drop support. And so there's actually
quite a lot. involved in this right and so i
thought you know what this is really topical
i originally i was going to talk a little bit
more about vulnerability management but i thought
let me bring this one um sort of forward and
talk about this because this is happening right
now so um as i said microsoft announced this
in july immediately i've sort of seen um picked
up on some confusion uh sort of out in the industry
and i've also seen some interesting commentary
right through blogs and online about this and
I guess the first thing to sort of set straight
is sort of what actually is happening. So SMS
MFA is not being banned in Entra. Like that's
one of the headlines that I saw somewhere is
like SMS MFA is being banned. Like that's not
actually what's happening. What Microsoft is
doing is they're retiring the Microsoft provided
text messaging and voice sort of capability.
So, you know, up until now, those text messages
that were sent. voice calls that happen, it's
all Microsoft's sort of telephony stuff, right?
They're essentially just phasing that out and
you will no longer be able to do that in intro.
There will not be options for you anymore. I
know that there are still organizations that
use text messaging, right? In my mind, I struggle
to come up with scenarios and use cases anymore
where text messaging is the only option, right?
I feel like a YubiKey. can replace any you know
any text messaging sort of solution right if
you've got offline type scenarios or no internet
type scenarios where maybe you've got a cell
service but you don't have the internet those
are some of the scenarios historically but i
feel like ubiquis can sort of cater to that now
um i know that you know in the past i've had
clients where they have um minors or young people
logging into the environment if you think about
schools and things like that they can't always
rely on those you know younger generation um
or minors having smartphones right and so text
messaging was a was sort of an answer or a solution
to giving them mfa and i and i see that i think
there are other solutions for sort of that cater
to the education space and the sort of kids or
children's space these days so i in my mind i
struggle to to come up with like real proper
scenarios that still require text messaging where
i hear heard it a lot uh years ago where employees
were complaining that when companies started
uh embracing mfa in general and they were forcing
that's how how employees sometimes felt and forcing
an app on their private phones, right? So they
were like, this is my private phone. If the company
wants me to do something, then they hand me out
a business phone and I'll use that for it. But
like you said, with physical YubiKeys, MFA pass
keys, physical pass keys, I don't think that
argument really stands anymore. And I think that's
a very good one because I think that is a very
valid argument that still happens possibly in
Europe. I think your laws around ability to disconnect,
and using personal devices and things for work
functions is a lot more strict, I think, than
other parts of the world. I think California
also has some very interesting laws that may
sort of, you know, sort of come into play here.
But you're right, like the YubiKey answer just
solves that problem, right? And it's a lot cheaper
to give someone a YubiKey that costs $100 than
to give them an iPhone that costs $1 ,000, right?
It's not even $100 if you buy them in bulk and
you go for the less expensive non -biometric
versions. It's only a couple of, I don't know,
$20 or something. Yeah, no, absolutely. So look,
I think we sort of understand and agree that's
probably very few sort of real scenarios where
text messaging is still really needed. But Microsoft
are not removing... you know, saying you can't
use it. They're just saying they're no longer
going to provide that service, right? So essentially,
if you do need that capability, Microsoft are
going to have partners, sort of telco partners
that will provide that, right? Now, I went and
had a look today to see if I could track down.
a list of these partners and i cannot so that
list is not available online yet um i believe
it's only being really the list itself is only
being released on the 18th of september i would
expect we would see folks like twilio and and
you know those types of telco as a service you
know api as a service type vendors um on that
list so the takeaway is Microsoft's going to
stop providing the service, SMS and voice services,
but you could, if you still desperately need
it, you can. come up with ways to engage third
parties. And ultimately, you're going to be paying
for those text messages yourself now, right?
So it's not going to be Microsoft funding or
footing the bill for the messages and voice calls
and stuff being sent. If you're going to sign
up to something like Twilio, you're going to
end up paying for it. So that's the first piece
I wanted to kind of clarify on this because I
feel like that got lost a little bit in translation
with this announcement. But the second piece
and probably the more important piece is that
Passkeys are going to become the default experience
now, right? And I feel like this is probably
more likely to cause folks issues and have a
bigger user impact in organizations if you don't
plan for it, right? So we all know Passkeys,
it's a great solution. Some organizations, I
think, are slower to adopt Passkeys than others.
And with this change, there is definitely the
potential where you're going to get users who
are going to get sort of forced down this path
key route. And if you don't get ahead of it and
plan it with, you know, comms and all the rest
of the things, there's going to be a challenge,
right? So if we look at the timeline here on
how this is supposedly going to play out, so
the 1st of September, which, you know, as we
sit here recording, it's going to be in, you
know, just over a week's time. It's the 1st of
September. Actually, it's exactly a week, is
the 1st of September. So as you listen to this,
it's probably yesterday, right, that this happened
or a couple of days ago. But 1st of September
is when essentially what's going to happen is
users that are enabled for SMS or voice authentication
methods are going to be auto -enabled for passkeys.
So you're probably going to find if you don't
get ahead of this and you have users that are
using... you know, text messaging as a primary
authentication method, they're going to start
getting nudged for passkey registration, right?
Now, initially, they're going to be able to skip
that passkey registration and they can skip the
prompt. But, you know, as time goes by, that...
the ability to do that is going to go away. So
that happens first of September. So you don't
have much time. On the 18th, apparently, is when
we'll start seeing the supported list of telco
providers and what the deployment guidance looks
like, you know, for all of this pricing, all
of that type of stuff in the Microsoft Security
Store. That's where we'll see that. And then
I think 30th of October is when you can actually
start configuring these sort of third -party
providers. Now, you know... I don't know how
concrete these dates are. This is stuff that
I've sort of pieced together, you know, reading
various articles and looking at various sources.
So some of the stuff isn't from Microsoft officially.
So again, you know, take it with a grain of salt
in terms of when telcos are going to be providing
stuff, when the partners will be released, all
of that stuff. But hopefully this gives you a
little bit of an indication as like the change
is happening soon. You need to actually start
looking at it. And then the 1st of February is
sort of the next really big milestone date on
the Microsoft side. That's when they're officially
retiring that service in intro, right? So after
the 1st of February, you know... Users are going
to be forced to register their pass keys. There's
not going to be a skip option anymore or a snooze
option on that registration. So that prompt will
essentially be forced for them to be logging
in. So you've got to really get ahead of your
registration campaigns and comms processes and
all of that stuff to make sure that you're informing
your user base of what's happening. And I think
this is really the key message that... I wanted
to get out for this today. If you have a large
environment and every single one of your users
is going to be affected by this, well, you've
got a week, so that's not really a lot of time.
There is an opt -out capability sort of to opt
out of this between that 1st of September and
1st of February window. It does delay that auto
-enrollment, and it's sort of a one -time only
thing. Once February hits, though, there's no
more opt -out, right? So very important to know
that you've got, you know, potentially between
now and February to try and solve this problem.
There are some great resources available. So
I've put some links in the show notes to a PowerShell
script that actually can help you identify this.
So if you don't actually know, and I would encourage
you to run this, even if you think everyone in
your organization is running, you know, Authenticator
or Passkeys or something. I still run this just
to make sure, right? With my client, we have
been running this sort of script over the last
little while to identify people. And we actually
noticed in the last month, some people who had
previously been using Authenticator had all of
a sudden switched to text messaging again. So
just because you think that you had it under
control last week or last month. may not be the
case right now. So there is a link to a script
on GitHub that Microsoft has published for this.
We'll help you identify the scale and the scope
of the change in your environment. There's some
interesting information about comms and the process
and all of that type of stuff on Microsoft Learn.
So I've linked to that as well. And I'm hoping
that this will kind of help folks, you know,
just try and get ahead of this a little bit if
you can. Not a lot of time here. So, yeah. I
was surprised about the timelines, actually,
Chris. I'm not sure if we have seen Microsoft
announce something which was forced on everybody
in such short notice. That's right, yeah. Usually
you would think there's at least nine months
or a year or whatever it is, right? But this
is very, very sudden, and I think that's the
thing. It was only announced in July, and it's
taken that long. just for people to become aware
of it right um so if you know um yeah definitely
is is a very very short runway on this um and
of course most people in the community the mvps
everybody who's working with microsoft identity
solutions very uh intensively they already saw
this coming of course one day and they probably
already moved away from sms authentication but
i can imagine especially a lot of larger customers
who uses its scale when they announce something
in july and only six weeks later they are forced
uh with prompts to the user which they can opt
out of but six weeks is short notice i would
say yeah yeah i mean a lot of organizations you
can't get comms out to your entire business in
six weeks right if you think about the the process
and i mean for right for you know whether it's
right or wrong or whatever it's just the reality
is that it takes a while for the the information
to filter through you know you have to engage
you know, change management people, comms people,
draft up the comms, review the comms, make sure
the comms go out to all the right people, make
sure that all the distribution lists are up to
date so that everyone actually receives the comms.
Like it's a, you know, it's not so easy when
you're trying to do this at large scale. So hopefully
this helps some folks. Yeah, and on the other
hand, we're talking about cybersecurity here,
and maybe companies should realize that they
should adapt to have a faster way to implement
changes. Because, well, nowadays with everything
that's going on, with all the cyber attacks going
on everywhere, you have to adapt quickly. Same
as with patching, vulnerability management we
talked about earlier. You can't have a server
patch four times a year anymore. Because you
don't get the comms out quicker to employees
or whatever. It's something you have to adapt
to, I guess, in this modern world. No, you're
not wrong. That's a very good point. That is
a very, very good point. Yeah. Yeah, and that
maybe also allows me to bridge this a little
bit into the next topic, project perception.
Also an announcement in July, Monday 27th, Microsoft
made a big announcement where they launched Project
Perception to the world. I saw it all over my
LinkedIn feed. Everybody was talking about it.
Only a couple of people were actually at the
launch event, but it was a big launch event.
There were also some international press there,
and they made quite some headlines there. What
is Project Perception? Well, in short, it's marketing.
Microsoft's agentic AI cybersecurity platform.
And I know what you're thinking. You're hearing
AI and you're probably already reaching out to
the knob of your radio to turn off this podcast.
Don't do it. It's no AI slop or AI marketing
speak going on here. So Microsoft hasn't been
very subtle about the framing either. So attackers
now also. use ai and ai agents to attack companies
and we mentioned being faster with your changes
and that is actually something that you have
to apply on defending for cyber attacks as well
According to Microsoft, reactive security is
over. Their answer boils down to it takes agents
to fight agents. Well, you might think this is
a lot of marketing speak by Microsoft, and it
probably is a little bit. But if you look at
the research, there are quite some figures to
back this up. If you look at the results from
a threat report from CrowdStrike, they measured
an 89 % year -over -year increase. in AI -enabled
adversary operations. And there's also an international
AI safety report, which is a report written up
by more than 90 authors. And they report that
AI agents are already finding 77 % of all software
vulnerabilities. The number that even surprised
me more is that that capability is doubling every
seven months. So if you look at how AI is being
capable of finding software vulnerabilities,
you can imagine that if you just let people loose
with their AI agents are probably attacking you
and abusing those, exploiting those vulnerabilities
faster than you can patch them or defend against
them. Like I said, Microsoft really wants to
have something in place to coordinate the defense
around such. attacks. What they kind of do, they
use signals and perception, which they already
have from your endpoints, your servers, your
identity. That's Defender XDR as we know it,
right? A lot of signals going in there. A lot
of those signals are stored into tables and Microsoft
is trying to have with AI agents, they want to
Apply security context on top of that and have
a continuously monitoring of your state, so to
speak. So like I said, they work with agents.
Well, not just separate agents, but actually
entire teams of agents. And they divided them
into separate teams. And I think this is quite
a unique approach. They have red, blue, and green
teams. The red teams sound familiar. They uncover
attack parts and they should... be able to expose
some attack parts in your environment before
the attackers do, hopefully. The blue agents
are there to do the triage on the incidents,
but they can also correlate signals and come
up with new detections to help you find things
faster in the future. And then you have the green
agents, and they are there to remediate findings
and harden your posture. That concept of green
agents and green teaming, it's not the... First
time I've heard it, but it certainly is a new
concept, isn't it? It's something we're starting
to hear more and more now is that third line
of defense, the green agents and the green team
stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned
that because the technology behind these green
agents is not that new. I haven't covered this
on this podcast yet. It was on my to -do list.
It was called Project M -. Probably maybe you
have heard of this. I have. It is an M and then
dash, but it pronounces M -. It's an acronym
apparently. It stands for multi -model agentic
scanning harness. But sometimes I think these
acronyms are just made up after the fact. I don't
know. Well, it began as an internal project at
Microsoft to hunt down vulnerabilities in software.
And it even uncovered a batch of previously unknown
bugs in Windows itself. And in July, MDash was
actually released in private preview and integrated
into the Defender exposure management pane. So
as part of Defender... of XDR exposure management,
they were already applying AI to help you finding
some hardening improvements in your environment
and through exposure management. And now they
took MDash and they equipped the harness with
an in -house cybersecurity model. And this was
the second time. This was also a part of the
big announcement, to be honest. So Microsoft
has an in -house Microsoft AI division and they...
are working and developing all kinds of specific
LLMs for specific tasks. And for cybersecurity,
they created a new model called MAI Cyber One
Flash. Try to say that 10 times faster, Chris.
Well, the MAI stands for Microsoft AI. So that
is the... depicting that it is an in -house model
from the AI division inside Microsoft. They also
released a transcribed voice image and now Cyber
1 Flash. I think Flash is added to... to let
you know that this is a fast model. There will
probably be larger cyber models that are working
on as well. So again, with the combination with
this new cyber model and the MDash capabilities
they already created, that has now become the
green agent, the green teams in Project Perception.
So I saw quite some impressive demos, and I'm
linking in the show notes also the original release
with, I don't know, a one -hour video with a
lot of demos in there. It's quite impressive
how you can see that the red agents, for example,
are hunting down vulnerabilities in some kind
of web application or databases using legacy
authentication, for example. The red teams will
actually actively try and take advantage of these
bugs and prove. that they are exploitable. And
then the blue agents will propose new detections
and hunting queries to make sure you're alerted
when abuse happens. And the green agents for
the whole MDash stuff is applying fixes. So they're
proposing even literally GitHub or Azure DevOps
pull requests to improve settings in your environment
to fix those posture improvements. Okay, wow.
With the whole new CyberOne Flash model they
announced, they were quite proud, and I think
rightfully so, that they were able to pair this
with ChatGPT 5 .4 and achieve a score of 96 %
on CyberGym. So Cybergym is a universal benchmark
used by a lot of companies nowadays to prove
how good a LLM model is into detecting software
vulnerabilities. And I believe this was the highest
score yet. They scored even 12 points above Anthropix
Mythos. So Mythos was obviously... became quite
famous lately. But they scored above that in
the cyber gym and even with less power consumption.
So this was... this was also a big thing and
great to hear Microsoft thinking about this because
we don't know what project perception is actually
going to cost just to skip to the conclusion
on this right now. It's a limited private preview
right now. They're figuring out how they're going
to make this happen cost -wise. But they did
mention that they are aware that this whole security
and AI defense isn't always on mission, right?
So you have, to constantly be looking out for
vulnerabilities and attacks and you're processing
lots of tokens if you do that 24 -7. And these
costs are a real constraint for the defenders.
Because if you think of it, an adversary has
the benefit here. They are only targeting a company
or targeting a set of applications for a limited
time. So they're spending tokens only for a limited
time when they're using AI for that. And the
defenders have to defend 24 -7. So Microsoft
really recognizes this. And that's also why they
shared some details on how they are actually
routing different... models together so they
use small models like the cyber one flash model
for the day -to -day more more uh bulk of the
ai operations and when it comes to harder tasks
they're able to route it to a more expensive
more elaborate bigger model um for for specific
tasks and that would be the harness that's doing
that right that's where you would use m dashes
to make you know route between the models and
stuff and yeah i'm i was going to ask you do
you know if if the mai models are actually available
for for use um like by themselves or do you have
to use because i've i've heard of them obviously
microsoft strategically they will be bit you
know well served by developing their own models
so they can be less reliant on open ai and and
others right and so obviously for a while now
they've been working on these mai models but
i'm curious as to whether you could just use
um one of the like the mai the cyber flash model
itself in in stuff that you're doing you know
Well, I can put some more research in that and
maybe we can have this topic on a future episode
because I think the whole discussion about open
versus closed LLM models and running the models
locally even without being depending on the big
clouds and everything is a very interesting topic.
I did a quick Google search and apparently the
Microsoft MAI models are not open source. So
they're a propriety in -house models. Just like,
well, the Anthropic models are, for example,
you can only use them through their services.
I do see that the models can be used from Azure
AI Foundry. So that's not the same as running
them locally, of course, but then you can probably
connect them. Foundry is expensive. I've been
messing around with some of the GLM open models
and GLM 5 .2. I think the Foundry cost to run
that is something like $60 an hour. It's, you
know, it's not nothing. But it's interesting
because, you know, one of the challenges I think
as a defender trying to defend things is that
a lot of the commercial models have such big,
like so many guardrails, right? You can't get,
you know, Claude and Sonnet or any of the current
Claude models to defend or do anything into in,
you know. that's cyber -specific because it triggers
the guardrails so quickly. And so you almost
have to be looking at how can you use open models
or use models where you can bring the processing
of that stuff in -house or use it locally so
that you can use the full... power of the model
without tripping the guardrails right yeah so
this whole thing is going to become very interesting
because it's great to have the model but the
model is not useful if if it doesn't allow you
to do the things that you need it to do um so
yeah Yeah, and that was also the main reason
why Anthropic did not release the Mythos model
a while ago. And then Fable launched, which was
a more stripped down, a more secure version with
a lot of guardrails, people noticed. So, yeah,
that might be also the reason. I'm not sure if
MAI… why CyberOne Flash is actually being available
in AI Foundry to chat with and interactively
interact with. When you look at Project Perception,
and I put some screenshots also in the show notes,
you have what they call playbooks. And these
playbooks are now pre... But I can imagine there
will be more and there will be probably some
options where you create your own playbooks.
So, for example, you can tell Project Perception
that you want help with an investigation on an
incident. And it has a blue icon telling you
that the blue team will actually help you with
that. And you point it to an incident and it
will do the whole triage for you and it will
write you a report. And if there are any remediating
actions required, it will ask you for input.
So it will never interact. It's always humanly
driven on the decision part. But you can, for
example, also ask it to protect against a specific
threat. So there is from the... threat intelligence
feed obviously a whole list of threats in there
you can select a threat so i don't know some
kind of storm or blizzard or you know all those
you've seen those names before and you can say
i want to protect my company against this threat
and you can see a red a blue and green green
icon stand next to there and there all the agent
teams will actually come into play and try and
see if you're actually vulnerable to that threat
and what you can do to protect yourself against
it. And also I really liked the green one, which
is in the screenshot as well, plan for posture
remediation. So then it will go across your estates,
also your Azure cloud and all the Defender XDR
stuff and give you a prioritized list of how
you can improve your posture as well. And that
is the MDash stuff you see now as part of perception.
There goes my joke. Very new, of course. So it
is in limited private preview, so you can request
access, but I'm not sure how they will be giving
out access right now. I can imagine there are
a lot of constraints on hardware and costs in
the back as well. Like I said, it's still read
-only right now, so the agents are not actually...
making changes for you. But I can't imagine a
future where that will happen. It's only Azure
for now when it comes to cloud reconnaissance.
So no on -prem, no AWS or GCP or whatever. So
there's a lot of stuff that will be added later.
And it is expected that parts of this will be
released during Ignite later this year. Okay.
I mean, it's such an interesting... We're in
this place now where things are changing so quickly,
right? The rapid development in this is crazy.
So it wouldn't surprise me if in a month from
now, this has already matured significantly from
where it is today, right? You know, we've definitely
seen that type of improvements. And again, it
goes back to your point that you made earlier
of like, we really need... as organizations to
be able to react more quickly to things right
it doesn't help if you now look at this and you
go hey this sounds like a good idea sounds like
something i want to use in my organization and
it takes you a year to plan to be able to implement
it right because one year from now it's going
to be a completely different landscape and and
there's you know so the quick iteration you know
fail fast mentality is is and mindset is really
going to help um organizations stay ahead so
Very cool. Yeah, and the company I work for has
been a design partner on Project Perception for
a while now. So we have access. So I was able
to play around a little bit with it. Unfortunately,
I couldn't take any screen captures or videos
of that because it's obviously a private preview
or limited public preview, I must say. But I
really recommend looking at the introduction
link in the show notes and watch the video there
with some demos, and then you'll get a better
understanding of how this is going to work. Yeah,
and it's interesting times with all the AI stuff.
I still sometimes have some hard times when it
comes to... how we now interact with each other.
I'm getting fully automated emails from HR by
AI nowadays, and it makes me also sigh a little
bit inside. But on the other hand, it's really
interesting what AI can bring you. Not only it
enables me to be a sort of programmer nowadays,
I'm creating a lot of cool stuff I wasn't able
to do in the past, but also with the whole defending
stuff. I think it's really important to embrace
the ai side of things there because otherwise
like you said you're too late and the tackle
has already taken place yeah and you're not you're
not wrong um and i think that's a it's a good
segue right because um well it's a good table
for two reasons but let me comment is i i'm getting
so much linkedin ai like i literally have people
reaching out to me on linkedin um and it's all
ai bots right because you know when you when
you respond to say please know don't contact
me again or thank you for the contact but you
know because i like to try and be as polite as
possible but after i've politely declined you
three times and then you reach out to me a fourth
time like that's just you know that's just rude
right and it's because it's all ai so um you
know um but i was gonna say uh it's a good segue
because you know to talk about our community
project i'd um i'd sort of said to everyone uh
last month that i would i would update on uh
connect 365 and kind of where we are and you
know a lot of what i've been able to achieve
working on this project has been because of the
help of AI. And I conceptualized this stuff such
a long time ago, but I struggle to find time
to learn new things, right? And especially when
it comes to learning to code in Rust, right?
Stuff like that. I'm super interested in it,
but I don't always have the time to spend. It's
like learning to speak Dutch. love to do it don't
always have the time to spend to um to uh to
to commit to it right i'm not sure if i agree
with that comparison chris because learning rushed
you can use ai for that so you just tell ai to
do that talking dutch you have to do yourself
well both are equally useful though right so
um but uh anyway so um Essentially, for those
folks who don't know, Connect 365 is sort of
a PowerShell -based, or it used to be a PowerShell
-based tool that I put together. I think I wrote
the first version of this thing back in sort
of 2010 or 2012. And it was just a way to very
quickly and easily, at the time, connect to Exchange
Online. So, you know, you had to remember a whole
sequence of commands in order to connect to Exchange
Online via PowerShell back in the day. Instead
of just stringing them together into a PS1 file,
I wrapped a GUI around it so that you could execute
it and then it would give you a login interface,
basically. Now, back then, we used basic auth,
so it was username and password. And so it was
easy to just take the username and password,
put it into the field on a GUI, and then just
pass that through to... connect to login but
over the years you know mfa became a thing and
we we you know we don't use basic auth anymore
and all of that type of stuff and so i've i've
updated the script you know over the years to
to include more modules and the most recent version
now there's a few um out of date modules in it
but it basically at one point in time had everything
you needed to to administer m365 from from powershell
so it had links to all the modules um and essentially
you You launch the script, you get an interface
and you tick the services you wanted to connect
to. So if you want to connect to Exchange Online
and, you know, Entra, tick those two things,
pop in your username. It will then authenticate
you through, you know, through Entra, MFA happens,
all of that stuff. And you end up with a session
that has all of the correct modules imported.
So you can use one window to do all the stuff.
That's kind of where we are. But, you know, the
challenge with it. has been that it's always
been native PowerShell. And originally it was
using some WinForms UI components and the current
version uses WPF, which none of the stuff works
cross -platform. It doesn't work in PowerShell
Core. So if you want to use it on Mac or Linux,
you cannot. And so for probably the last three
years, I've been wanting to rebuild this and
make it cross -platform. I myself stopped using
Windows many, many years ago. And so I haven't
been using my own tool because I don't really
use Windows anymore. And it's not really something
I used. And so I wanted to redo this. And I've
been sort of contemplating how I make this work.
And I didn't want it to be... a script anymore
for some reason. And I'm still playing with the
idea of having a 2E version that is all text
-based and PowerShell native still. So it's not
impossible that that may happen. But I wanted
to essentially build an app that handled all
of the connectivity for you. And so that's essentially
what I've done is I've spent the time to firstly
update all the modules. So we are recent again
with modules that you need. And there's a bunch
of them now. So if you think about things like
Graph and Entra, they're all there. Teams and
Exchange Online, it's all there. But I've also
included third -party modules. So PMP PowerShell,
which is quite a popular one that is not a Microsoft
module, but lots of folks use it. So that's included
as well. One of the things I've also thought
about that, you know, I know frustrates a lot
of people is when you connect to Graph, you have
to define your scope, right? The scope of the
permissions and the rights that you want to use
during that session. And so not everyone always
understands or knows what exactly it is they
want to do. And so what I've done is I've created
some quick scopes so that if you are connecting
and you click Graph, it will... prompt you to
to select your scope so you can go if you if
you want to there's an advanced option where
you can go and pick exactly the scope that you
want if you know it but if you don't let's say
you just want to do a user administration i've
got a user administration profile tick that and
it's going to correctly get, you know, your user
read -write -all, group read -write -all, directory
read -all. So you're going to, you know, it's
just a quick way to kind of help you get to the
things that you need, right? So I've predefined
five that I could think of were ones that were
sort of commonly used. So there's some stuff
for application management and device and Intune,
stuff like that. So it handles sort of that heavy
lifting or figuring that stuff out for you. And
then the other thing that it does that I think
is really, really helpful is it actually can
manage modules for you and the module installation
and module updates. So there's a prerequisite
checker like there was on the PowerShell version.
But now the great thing about this is, you know,
you can actually install and update. the, you
know, the required modules that you might want
to use right from the app. And it will launch
PowerShell and sort of do that all for you. So
it is actually a native sort of app cross -platform.
It's actually built in Rust, launches PowerShell.
So you end up still being, you know, once executed.
you still are dropped into a PowerShell window
with the correct modules and all the stuff as
before. It's just the user interface and all
the app logic now runs as a Rust app. So my goal
is that this will be correctly assigned code
as applications that you can download and install
on Windows, Mac, and there's a Flatpak version
for Linux as well. So still a few little bugs
and things for me to test and tweak out. I've
been testing it pretty thoroughly on my Mac,
but I've still got to do some Windows testing
and certainly Linux testing. But hopefully by
the time you all are hearing this and listening
to this, this will be available in GitHub and
you'll be able to take it for a test drive. provide
some feedback if there's anything you find that
uh i'm sure there will be bugs and things that
don't work this it's actually quite a complex
um application now compared to um what it used
to be right it used to just be you know a few
hundred lines of powershell code now it's actually
a very you know complex thing um but i'm thinking
about all sorts of other things you know um being
able to do session management and all sorts of
things with it as well so um first version probably
won't have everything all the bells and whistles
but uh it will hopefully function well for what
it needs to do. So I got some screenshots in
the show notes. You even got dark mode, Chris.
You know, I personally prefer the light mode,
but I know that everyone else in the world likes
dark mode, and I knew that I would be getting
a lot of drama if I did not include dark mode.
So dark mode was one of the first UI things I
did. Great. Well, you have to make sure that
you share this properly aside from mentioning
it here in the podcast, because I think a lot
of people will be very happy with what you did
here. Yeah. Yeah. Look, we'll get it functioning
and working properly first. And then, yeah, definitely
get it shared out. It's been, you know, I've
been working on this project now for, you know,
15 years or so. So it's been my sort of labor
of love. But I'm really sort of happy to be.
um updating it and bringing it into the sort
of you know some new functionality and giving
folks on on max and linux uh the ability to do
it too i'm i'm you know i'm hoping to eventually
just have the thing be available in all the stores
right so you can just download it from the store
or whatever um but uh you know baby steps i guess
yeah we'll make sure uh people you follow chris
on linkedin and he'll uh he'll share his updates
there i can imagine so we mentioned linkedin
by the way earlier with with all ai content there
i also saw that linkedin is now providing you
an option in your feed when you click on the
three dots you see an ai post you can click on
the three dots and you can click on this seems
like ai slop they even call it ai slop i like
it so People know that this is there and fine
-tune your timeline so that you only see some
more human and relatable content there. And then
that will ensure that Chris updates content will
not get lost in the AI slot. Yeah, fair enough.
That's a good one. You know what? Actually, while
we're talking about social media, I've actually
been thinking about going back. I haven't logged
into Twitter or X. Oh, at least two and a half
years, I think. I've been thinking recently that
I should, because I don't have the app installed
on my phone anymore or anything like that, but
I've been thinking that I should log in and take
a look. I do feel like I miss out on some news
and stuff, right? I feel like I used to get a
lot more interesting before. it got completely
ruined. So I kind of wonder what the status or
the state of, of Twitter is now. Um, because
tech Twitter, especially cyber Twitter used to
be really good, man. When you, if you follow
the right people, you got some really good information
there. And I try to recreate that on the other
platforms, you know, um, blue sky and stuff,
but I just never caught on quite the way Twitter
did. So, you know, what is there? Yeah, well,
that's it. So I might, um, I might do that in,
excuse me, in the next month. Report back on
what I find, right? Whether the thing is just
all crap again or whether it's with a try. I
did notice that a lot of my, when colleagues
are sending me AI stuff about, like, for example,
how to work with cloud code and how to implement
loop and skills and tasks and whatever, a lot
of the content they are sharing is through X.
So a lot of videos on there, which I couldn't
even find a YouTube account. part for so it made
me log into twitter as well or x again to access
the links they're sending me so apparently the
whole ai technology development stuff is also
hot on on x uh -huh well excellent well that's
good We'll see where we go. But, you know, as
we talk about that, here we go to the end of
another episode. Man, time flies when you're
having fun. Guys, thank you for sharing all about
Perception and all of the cool stuff there. It'd
be interesting to get my hands on that at some
point. Thank you for sharing that. I think that
looks very, very promising. Folks, thank you
for listening. Really appreciate you taking time
to listen to us. And, you know, of course, we're
always open if you have any feedback or anything
specific that you'd like us to look into and
address for you, reach out to us, either one
of us or both of us. We can be found pretty easily
on the socials. And until next time, Cos, enjoy
your remaining bits of summer. I will look forward
to seeing you and speaking with you again very,
very soon. Yeah, see you later, man. Thanks for
listening, everybody. Bye -bye.