Experts at the European Parliament's IT department in the EU have banned the Microsoft mobile Outlook for mobile devices due to the recent revelation of the app's privacy and security issues.
There have been several reports in recent months about serious security issues with the Microsoft mobile Outlook app, and researcher and head of the development office at GmbH and IBM Champion, René Winkelmeyer, published a report on a security blog, warning about security risks in the new iOS version of the Outlook app. According to the expert, the recent app for mobile devices with iOS operating system, released by Microsoft, allows access to corporate email accounts, but also gives access to the server, without any knowledge of the user and owner of the mobile device.
For this reason, the European Parliament has prohibited politicians from using the app on their mobile phones and portable devices, for security reasons and also to protect the privacy of their private lives. The Parliament's IT department fears that personal data of members, as well as political matters, could be exposed to third parties.
DG ITEC, that is, the Parliament's IT department, asked the members of the EU Parliament to avoid using the app.
The DG ITEC experts also called the staff and informed the employees to uninstall the app if they have installed it and to change the passwords of their professional and personal email accounts.
Officially, Microsoft denied any statement, and according to Acompli, the company that developed the Microsoft mobile Outlook appbefore it was acquired by Microsoft, the service's credentials are double-encrypted and a unique identifier is used per account on the server. This means that the credentials are unique per device and can only be verified by the server and by the device's app when it starts up and runs.
