Delivering Intrinsic, Intelligent and Informed Security: VMware Completes Acquisition of Carbon Black

Editor's Note: This blog also appears on VMware's Newsroom. We are delighted to announce that VMware has completed its acquisition of endpoint security leader Carbon Black. With this move, VMware is launching a new Security Business Unit under the leadership of Patrick Morley, who has led Carbon...

In hot pursuit of elusive threats: AI-driven behavior-based blocking stops attacks in their tracks

Our experience in detecting and blocking threats on millions of endpoints tells us that attackers will stop at nothing to circumvent protections. Even one gap in security can be disastrous to an organization. At Microsoft, we don’t stop finding new ways to fill in gaps in security. We go beyond...

ManaTI - A Web-Based Tool To Assist The Work Of The Intuitive Threat Analysts

Machine Learning for Threat Intuitive Analysis The goal of the ManaTI project is to develop machine learning techniques to assist an intuitive threat analyst to speed the discovery of new security problems. The machine learning will contribute to the analysis by finding new relationships and...

Azure Sentinel—the cloud-native SIEM that empowers defenders is now generally available

Machine learning enhanced with artificial intelligence AI holds great promise in addressing many of the global cyber challenges we see today. They give our cyber defenders the ability to identify, detect, and block malware, almost instantaneously. And together they give security admins the abilit...

Open Sourcing StringSifter

Malware analysts routinely use the Strings program during static analysis in order to inspect a binary's printable characters. However, identifying relevant strings by hand is time consuming and prone to human error. Larger binaries produce upwards of thousands of strings that can quickly evoke...

Deep learning rises: New methods for detecting malicious PowerShell

Scientific and technological advancements in deep learning, a category of algorithms within the larger framework of machine learning, provide new opportunities for development of state-of-the art protection technologies. Deep learning methods are impressively outperforming traditional methods on...

Showing Vulnerability to a Machine: Automated Prioritization of Software Vulnerabilities

Introduction If a software vulnerability can be detected and remedied, then a potential intrusion is prevented. While not all software vulnerabilities are known, 86 percent of vulnerabilities leading to a data breach were patchable, though there is some risk of inadvertent damage when applying...

From unstructured data to actionable intelligence: Using machine learning for threat intelligence

The security community has become proficient in using indicators of compromise IoC feeds for threat intelligence. Automated feeds have simplified the task of extracting and sharing IoCs. However, IoCs like IP addresses, domain names, and file hashes are in the lowest levels of the threat...

Cylance Antivirus Products Susceptible to Concatenation Bypass

Overview The Cylance AI-based antivirus product, prior to July 21, 2019, contains flaws that allow an adversary to craft malicious files that the AV product will likely mistake for benign files. Description Cylance PROTECT is an endpoint protection system. It contains an antivirus functionality...

CISO series: Better cybersecurity requires a diverse and inclusive approach to AI and machine learning

Artificial Intelligence AI and machine learning have created lots of buzz with vendors. Being cast as the superheroes of technology is great for getting attention. But even Superman and Supergirl had their kryptonite. Could the lack of diversity and inclusiveness in the design teams and data type...

Will XDR Improve Security?

Cybercriminals and malicious hackers have been shifting their tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs to improve their ability to infiltrate an organization and stay under the radar of security professionals and solutions. Moving to more targeted attack methods appears to be a mainstay among...

New machine learning model sifts through the good to unearth the bad in evasive malware

We continuously harden machine learning protections against evasion and adversarial attacks. One of the latest innovations in our protection technology is the addition of a class of hardened malware detection machine learning models called monotonic models to Microsoft Defender ATP's Antivirus...

Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Python affects Watson Machine Learning Services (CVE-2018-14647)

Summary Python is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by a flaw in the elementtree C accelerator. By using a specially-crafted XML document, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a resource exhaustion. Vulnerability Details CVE-ID: CVE-2018-14647 DESCRIPTION: Python’s...

Where Will Ransomware Go In The Second Half Of 2019?

Ransomware has been an evolutionary malware family that continues to shift and change over the years. From the first fakeAV, to police ransomware, to the now oft-used crypto-ransomware, this threat just will not go away. Based on the latest trends, we predict this threat will grow in the second...

5 principles driving a customer-obsessed identity strategy at Microsoft

The cloud era has fundamentally changed the way businesses must think about security. For a long time, we built security around the perimeter. But today, the boundaryless landscape demands that we start with the individual. In our journey with customers co-designing our products and services,...

Inside out: Get to know the advanced technologies at the core of Microsoft Defender ATP next generation protection

While Windows Defender Antivirus makes catching 5 billion threats on devices every month look easy, multiple advanced detection and prevention technologies work under the hood to make this happen. Windows Defender Antivirus is the next-generation protection component of Microsoft Defender Advance...

Data, Surveillance, and the AI Arms Race

According to foreign policy experts and the defense establishment, the United States is caught in an artificial intelligence arms race with China -- one with serious implications for national security. The conventional version of this story suggests that the United States is at a disadvantage...

Learning to Rank Strings Output for Speedier Malware Analysis

Reverse engineers, forensic investigators, and incident responders have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to dissect malicious software binaries. When performing malware analysis, they successively apply these tools in order to gradually gather clues about a binary’s function, design detectio...

Q&A with Ashley Fidler, Chief Product Officer at eSentire: Women in Cybersecurity

In a few short weeks, Carbon Black will be hosting our annual user conference, CBConnect19, in sunny San Diego. This year, we’re bringing together a group of powerhouse women from across a variety of industries for our annual Women in Cybersecurity Panel to share their knowledge and experience fr...

Visiting the NSA

Yesterday, I visited the NSA. It was Cyber Command's birthday, but that's not why I was there. I visited as part of the Berklett Cybersecurity Project, run out of the Berkman Klein Center and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. BERKman hewLETT -- get it? We have a web page, but it's badly out of...