PowerShell

Swap Microsoft 365 Licenses with Microsoft Graph

Swap Microsoft 365 Licenses with Microsoft Graph

A few years ago I wrote a post about how to Swap Office 365 Licenses. Microsoft has deprecated the cmdlets that were used in that post specifically Set-MsolUserLicense and has replaced them with Microsoft Graph cmdlets specifically Set-MgUserLicense.

In this post, I will show step-by-step how to swap Microsoft 365 licenses using Microsoft Graph and PowerShell.

Prerequisites

The Process

We need a few more permissions than the default permissions for Microsoft Graph.

  • Run the following command to connect Microsoft Graph to your Microsoft 365 tenant with the necessary permissions Connect-MgGraph -Scopes User.ReadWrite.All, Organization.Read.All

Now let’s find out what SKUs we have to work with.

  • Run the following command to get the list of SKUs in your Microsoft 365 tenant Get-MgSubscribedSku -All | select SkuPartNumber

If you aren’t sure what product the SKU correlates to Microsoft has made a decoder ring, you can find that here.

Now for the license swap part, I’ve created a PowerShell script to do it.

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Microsoft 365 Setup Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

Microsoft 365 Setup Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

Microsoft has been warning about the deprecation of the MS Online and Azure AD PowerShell cmdlets for a while now; the end date is fast approaching, and some of the commands have stopped working. You can read the Microsoft post about the deprecation here.

Microsoft Graph is becoming a day-to-day reality and a tool we’ll need to use to manage items in Microsoft 365 with PowerShell.

In this post, I’ll cover step-by-step how to setup the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to connect to a Microsoft 365 tenant and show how it works and how to secure it.

Installing

To get started with Microsoft Graph we first need to install it.

  • Open PowerShell as Admin
  • Install Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK by running the command Install-Module Microsoft.Graph

Connecting

Now that the Microsoft Graph is installed we can connect to a Microsoft 365 tenant.

  • Run the following PowerShell command to connect to a Microsoft 365 tenant Connect-MgGraph
  • Login with a Global Admin account.

You will now see a screen that lists the permissions that Microsoft Graph needs to function.

Microsoft Graph permissions
  • Select Consent on behalf of your organization and click Accept

It is normal that the Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools shows up as unverified, there is a long-standing issue on GitHub about it. You can read more about Issue #482 on GitHub.

Now you are connected to the Microsoft 365 tenant and can run Microsoft Graph cmdlets.

How it works

I got curious about why the application permissions are needed and what is happening. Here’s what I found out.

When you click Accept it creates an enterprise application in Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) named Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools and has an Application ID of 14d82eec-204b-4c2f-b7e8-296a70dab67e and grants the app delegate permission to the permissions that were listed. By selecting Consent on behalf of your organization allows the app to not have to ask for the permissions every time you use it.

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Microsoft 365 Enable DKIM

Microsoft 365 Enable DKIM

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a way to help validate the authenticity of the emails you send.

DKIM adds a signature to your email by using a private key and a public key. Your public key is your DKIM DNS record and only your email server knows your private key. When you have DKIM setup every email you send gets signed with DKIM.

A DKIM signature is built from the hashed values of some of the email headers, one of which is the hash of the email body itself. With the hashed value of the email headers, DKIM encrypts it by using a private key and a public key and adds the encrypted result to the email as a DKIM header signature. This is similar to how PGP works. If you want to know more about PGP you can read more in my post about PGP.

When the recipient receives an email that was signed with DKIM, the recipient’s email server can validate that the email hasn’t been tampered with by decrypting the DKIM header signature using the sender’s public key. If the message was altered the DKIM header signature wouldn’t exist or the decrypted result wouldn’t match.

In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to enable DKIM on a Microsoft 365 tenant by using the GUI and PowerShell.

GUI Way

  • Login to Microsoft 365 admin center
  • Click on Security
  • Click on Policies & rules
  • Click on Threat policies
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Microsoft 365 Exchange Online 150 MB Message Size

Microsoft 365 Exchange Online 150 MB Message Size

Back in 2015, Microsoft enabled all Microsoft 365 (aka Office 365) Exchange Online tenants the ability to change their message sizes to a maximum size of 150 MB. Originally the default size was 25 MB and previously Microsoft increased that to 35 MB, your tenant will likely be set to one of those values.

The new 150 MB message size limit is not enabled by default you must enable it. In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to change the message size limit in Exchange Online for all existing mailboxes and all new mailboxes.

Prerequisites

The Process

  • Connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell
  • Run the following PowerShell command to see what the current message size limit is Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | Format-List displayname,MaxSendSize,MaxReceiveSize
Checking the current message size limit
  • Run the following PowerShell command to set all existing mailboxes to 150 MB Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -MaxReceiveSize 150MB -MaxSendSize 150MB
Increasing the message size limit
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Base64

Base64

Base64 is a form of binary-to-text encoding that is very widely used, you can encode almost anything into Base64. Learning how to leverage Base64 has been a major eye-opener for me.

I’ve seen Base64 used in countless places such as SSL certificates. Ransomware loves to use it, as a lot of basic Antivirus don’t check to see what’s happening in a Base64 string and ignores it. You can encode an entire PowerShell command with Base64 and just run PowerShell with the -EncodedCommand option to run something that a basic Antivirus might not notice.

Base64 is also widely used in phishing emails, be it the URL or even the username or the entire phishing page being an HTML attachment in an email and everything is in Base64.

Even though there are malicious things that can be done when using Base64 to obfuscate or even double obfuscate things, there are genuine day-to-day use cases.

Let’s say you need to install a program but you need to use a transform file. The vendor might host the installer publicly but what do you do about the transform file? You could host it somewhere but maybe the transform file has specific information that shouldn’t be public like the SKEY and IKEY for a Duo install.

A solution could be to take the transform file and encode it with Base64 and put that in an install script. Now everything is self-contained. Yes if someone gets ahold of the install script they also have the transform file info. However, I feel like the risk for that is less than publicly publishing the transform file be it an obscure URL or not.

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Distinguished Name

Distinguished Name

Everything in AD (Active Directory) has a Distinguished Name. A Distinguished Name can be used in many situations such as setting up an application to use a service account or adding AD groups or users into applications and so much more.

A Distinguished Name is also known as a DN. A benefit of an using a DN is that no two objects in Active Directory can ever have the same DN.

In this post I’ll show step-by-step how to get the Distinguished Name for the various items in Active Directory via the GUI and PowerShell.

GUI Way

  • Open Active Directory Users and Computers
  • Click on View > Advanced Features
  • Right click on anything in AD and click on Properties
  • Click on the Attribute Editor tab.
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Microsoft 365 Audit Logging

Microsoft 365 Audit Logging

For whatever reason the default fresh setup of Microsoft 365 has no audit logging turned on. Audit logging is very useful for IT troubleshooting and auditors love logs.

Microsoft says that it is enabled by default for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 enterprise organizations. I suspect that means only if you have E1 or higher. The new tenants I’ve made recently are not E1 or higher, that could be why I didn’t see it already on.

Someone asked for clarification about this on GitHub however the replies all say that it is on by default for everything but that isn’t true based on my experience. You can read the GitHub issue here.

Microsoft’s documentation also says to double check that audit logging is enabled which you 100% should be doing as if it’s on or not seems inconcistant.

In this post I will detail how to check if audit logging is enabled and how to enable it via the Web UI or PowerShell.

Prerequisites

The Web UI Way

  • Login to Microsoft 365 Admin center.
  • Click on Security or Compliance (you can get to auditing from either one)
  • From the Security or Compliance admin centers click on Audit

If audit logging isn’t enable the page will look something like this.

  • Click on Start recording user and admin activity

Audit Logging is now enabled it may take a bit for it to actually start working.

The PowerShell Way

  • Connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell
  • Run the following command to check if Audit Logging is enabled Get-AdminAuditLogConfig | FL UnifiedAuditLogIngestionEnabled

In my example the returned result is false so audit logging isn’t enabled and we want to turn that on.

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Microsoft 365 Enable Organization Customization

Microsoft 365 Enable Organization Customization

Right out of the box the initial configuration of Microsoft 365 (aka Office 365) isn’t bad, but there’s a lot more you can do to harden it and to make it fully yours.

By default all Microsoft 365 tenants are in a state that is called dehydrated. Microsoft places all the tenants in this state in order to save space, as there are likely many Microsoft 365 tenants that will never change anything past the defaults, but that’s no fun.

In order to rehydrate our Microsoft 365 tenant to allow for a whole number of customizations we need to enable something that is called organization customizations.

Once we have enabled organization customizations we will be able to customize a lot more things in our Microsoft 365 tenant.

Here’s how to do that.

The Process

  • Connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell
  • Double check the hydration status of your Microsoft 365 tenant by running the following command Get-OrganizationConfig | FL isDehydrated
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Upgrading Duo Authentication for Windows Logon

Upgrading Duo Authentication for Windows Logon

Update

The script below still works. However, the MSI installer for Duo Win Logon does not include the new Microsoft Visual C++ 2022 Redistributable dependency. For a safer upgrade, I created a new PowerShell script that uses the EXE installer for Duo Win Logon, which includes the dependency. My new post Install or Upgrade Duo Authentication for Windows Logon contains all the details about the new script.

Duo Authentication for Windows Logon and RDP is great tool that I like to use to add MFA to Windows systems specifically servers, as it could help prevent lateral movement in the network.

When you only have a few systems running Duo Authentication for Windows Logon and RDP upgrading it is short and painless. When you have many systems it can be a bit of a painful process as the only method seems to be to do it manually.

Naturally to solve this I wrote a PowerShell script to do the work.

PowerShell Script

The PowerShell script will check if Duo Authentication for Windows Logon is installed. If no Duo Authentication for Windows Logon install is found it will just exit.

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Update Teams Machine Wide Installer

Update Teams Machine Wide Installer

Recently I’ve ran into an issue with Microsoft Teams where the user sees a blocking message that says “Teams needs an update”. The user needs to action it before they can use Microsoft Teams again. Typically the user can just click on Update Teams which will take them to a download page for Microsoft Teams, they also need to pick the correct version of Microsoft Teams because now there are two of them.

Let’s have some faith in the user and say they do download the correct version, now they need to run the downloaded file and then it will update Microsoft Teams for them and finally they can use Microsoft Teams again.

That whole process isn’t a good user experience and that’s way too many steps. It’s worse if the user is in a rush because let’s say the system with the outdated version of Microsoft Teams is a meeting room computer and they are trying to load Microsoft Teams for their meeting.

There has to be a way to prevent this and a way to reliably fix the Teams needs an update problem. Here’s what I found in this rabbit hole along with the solutions I found.

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