Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

Sharepoint is one of the worst, most bug-ridden softwares I've worked with.

It has a bug with Solidworks (3D design suite) that sporadically makes files completely un-openable unless you go in and change some metadata. They are aware of this, doesn't seem to be any limitation preventing them from fixing it, and it has sat unfixed for years.

Microsoft's cloud storage as a whole is an insane tangle where you never know where you'll find something you're looking for or whether it will work. Some things work only in browser, some only in the app, zero enumeration of these things anywhere.

Completely unsurprised and I'm sure there are many more vulnerabilities ripe for the picking.

Microsoft Word online deletes text in Firefox Linux (maybe others too) for at least two years now [1]. The one thing you want a text editor to do is be able to write text into a document, and somehow this bug goes unfixed. You would think it would be priority #1 for paying customers of Business Office 365 - and yet nothing.

It ended up being easier just to switch to paid Overleaf and teach our non-tech members how to write LaTeX and/or use the built-in editor. The documents are beautiful, Overleaf doesn't miss a beat and we are very happy with their solution.

Microsoft should be ashamed - I don't know how anybody would ever consider using them for any serious production work.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5216132/...

Every time I need to touch anything made my Microsoft lately I am met with multiple levels of glitchyness, straight up bugs, most frustratingly it’s so excruciatingly slow.

Recently I tried to configure a new subdomain to handle mail on 365 and even finding their DKIM configuration section was a mission. Once finding it, I learned that their DNS check fails to properly handle subdomains for email, so you have to put their DKIM keys against your root domain. Genius!

Not defending Microsoft in any way but my guess of what's happening:

* Too few people use Firefox to access Office online, they don't care

* Your organization is too small for them to care

I am a social worker and SharePoint is unfortunately widely used by nonprofit agencies for storing client records. It's a real shame, but they can't afford anything better.

We sync content to MS hosted Sharepoint using rsync. When the file arrives, they change the internal metadata inside the file, which changes the checksum, which causes rsync to think the content is different and needs syncing again.

Edit to say: this is for MS files like Excel docs

It's such a critical backbone to so many of their services but they treat it like a forgotten stepchild for the most part

I'm working on a gov contract right now and they're forcing everyone to migrate off of Slack and into Teams. I somehow have managed to avoid MS corporate products for the better part of two decades. People's tolerance to UX pain seems to be boundless in corporate/fed worlds.

Firefox is the only browser other than Chrome (and derivatives) on their OS. The web is supposed to be multi-platform. I guess it isn’t that surprising that modern MS is happy to just live in Google’s ecosystem though.

if they will lose data when you're on a rarely used browser, can you really trust them not to lose data in general?

"yes, your car exploded, but you were driving on a dirt drive way. it works just fine on the highway"

How large are the files?

Developed and maintained in China by Chinese nationals, with untechnical escorts overseeing their work.

That bug has been around for years. I always wondered if that was deliberate. I guess that Microsoft support answer settles the question...

>Sorry for that we may have no enough resources about the Linux environment.

But wait! 35% of Microsoft's code is now written by AI so surely it will get better

They've managed to mess up sharepoint even worse lately.

I went there to try to find where company meetings got recorded to.

I went to my sharepoint bookmark, which weirdly is www.office.com after some previous nightmare rebrand.

Except what used to be the way into your sharepoint files, is now just a full page copilot screen with no hint of where the fuck your files are.

Even though you've been visiting this bookmark for years, to get to your sharepoint files.

Ok, so you search bing sign into sharepoint.

Top result is office.com . You ignore it.

Next result is:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/sign-in-to-sharep...

This links you to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/

Ok great. Nope! Redirects you back to copilot.

I do NOT want to ask copilot to dig out my files every time you want a file. I want to get back to the directory listing so I can find the directory listing to find the company meeting recording.

How does MS not understand that replacing all UX with copilot is not an improvement, and is not helping sell copilot.

Is that a supported method?

Kilobytes or single digit megabytes. It happens because Sharepoint sporadically alters created/edited metadata for any (?) file it stores. Most programs don't care about that but Solidworks does.

Supported by who? Microsoft?

If a file server breaks basic Unix tools it should be unplugged and put in the garbage.

Yep, especially after laying off several thousand veteran engineers (who, in many cases, were the only ones with a solid understanding of how a given product works as a whole, and why it is the way it is).

Did you find it eventually?

Yes, via an old way into the system that specified the correct subdomain and folder path that I found from an old teams conversation.

I've no idea how to find the "proper" way into the system.

> teach our non-tech members how to write LaTeX

How did that go? :)

Why not use a file server and/or a simple database, even a CRM database (there must be FOSS ones)? What do you mean by "client records"?

It's one of those semantic riddles. Because, once they know LaTeX they aren't non-tech anymore. :)

Some of it will be about reliability, i.e. the office burns down and Microsoft still hold a copy. Some of it will be about having a third-party that is "trusted" handle the most dangerous part - security. If SharePoint gets compromised there is plausible deniability that "we did everything we should do".

I know for example that some companies will hire subcontractors for high risk parts of a project, just so that there is somebody to blame if anything goes wrong.

> * Too few people use Firefox to access Office online, they don't care

It's pretty much the majority of their Linux users. Firefox is often the default browser on many distros due to the Chrome/Chromium data sharing concern.

> * Your organization is too small for them to care

Then why even have a business tier if not for the support?

The result of Microsoft's current stance is simply that users look elsewhere. I mentioned Overleaf, but Google Docs is also a solid choice. For local editing we are using LibreOffice.

Far easier than it sounds. Essentially the advice was "copy something else that does what you want, and if you run into issues or want something new, just ask". For the most part they were able to edit and generate large parts of the documents without issue.

> That bug has been around for years. I always wondered if that was deliberate. I guess that Microsoft support answer settles the question...

I remember years ago there was a browser demo, some kind of game I think, that would only be played on Internet Explorer. If you changed your User Agent string to be Internet Explorer, the demo would work entirely without issue. I think this was prior to Microsoft getting a large fine for not offering other browser choices.

> >Sorry for that we may have no enough resources about the Linux environment.

That is a difficult to parse sentence. "may" indicates uncertainty about the claim about to be made. "have no enough resources" seems to indicate that there is not enough engineering time available. "about the Linux environment" seems to indicate that it is a knowledge gap. Very strange.

MS has adopted the Winchester Mystery House model for architecture in Sharepoint.