Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise: New Security Baseline Launched

Microsoft is beefing up its enterprise defenses this week with a major security and compliance update for Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise version 2512. This new baseline strengthens Excel, PowerPoint, and core system settings to help enterprises stay protected against evolving cyber threats. Specifically, the latest baseline updates several Microsoft 365 Apps components, especially Excel, PowerPoint, and core system settings. These updates address new attacker techniques, customer feedback, and secure‑by‑design principles. Excel security enhancements According to Microsoft, File Block now includes external link files, which prevent external links in blocked workbooks from refreshing. “Attempts to create or update links to blocked files return an error. This prevents data ingestion from untrusted or potentially malicious sources,” Microsoft explained. Blocking insecure protocols This new security baseline also blocks all non‑HTTPS protocols when opening documents. This capability helps to eliminate unsafe downgrade paths and enforces TLS‑secure communication across apps and cloud services. Additional hardening Lastly, Microsoft’s new security baseline blocks risky automation interfaces such as MSGraph.Application and MSGraph.Chart. Microsoft 365 Apps will render them as static images instead to address a risky automation interface. Moreover, this baseline disables the legacy OrgChart add‑in for security reasons. It also prevents fallback to FrontPage Server Extensions RPC to ensure the usage of modern, authenticated file‑access methods.