Afternoon Cyber Tea: Cybersecurity has become a pillar of the business

In a famous two-part episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the Cardassians. During a pivotal scene, a Cardassian interrogator shows Picard four bright lights and demands that he “see” five lights. Picard resists, culminating with him shouting, “There...

Surface expands its Secured-core portfolio with the new Surface Laptop 4 powered by AMD Ryzen™ Mobile Processors

As operating systems are becoming more secure and resistant to compromise, advanced vectors like firmware, kernel and hardware direct memory access DMA have emerged as new favored targets for threat actors. Recent trends indicate a substantial growth in the number of hardware and firmware exploit...

Microsoft unifies SIEM and XDR to help stop advanced attacks

For all of us in security, the last twelve months have been an incredible series of challenges—from balancing remote work with family priorities, to helping build resilient businesses, and protecting against the latest attacks. 2020 showed us that while we have made great progress, there is still...

Microsoft listed as a Representative Vendor in 2020 Gartner Market Guide for Insider Risk Management Solutions

While organizations have long prioritized external cybersecurity risks, many have not paid enough attention to the risks posed by trusted insiders in their organizations. This is a mistake. Insiders often already have access to sensitive data, and the risks, whether malicious or inadvertent, can...

The dynamic duo: How to build a red and blue team to strengthen your cybersecurity, Part 1

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyber threats. In the first post of our new Voice of the Community blog series, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Jake Williams, Founder of...

IoT security: how Microsoft protects Azure Datacenters

Azure Sphere first entered the IoT Security market in 2018 with a clear mission—to empower every organization on the planet to connect and create secure and trustworthy IoT devices. Security is the foundation for durable innovation and business resilience. Every industry investing in IoT must...

MSRT September 2016 release feature: Prifou

As part of our ongoing effort to provide better malware protection, the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool MSRT release this September includes detections for: BrowserModifier:Win32/Prifou TrojanClicker:Win32/NightClick Trojan:Win32/Suweezy Trojan:Win32/Xadupi This blog discusses...

Insights from Microsoft Security Copilot early adopters

To understand why customers are adopting generative AI solutions like Microsoft Security Copilot, we have to go back to the cyberthreat landscape—which continues to get more challenging. Organizations are facing a surge in cyberattacks while also dealing with a global shortage of security talent...

New Microsoft Security innovations expand multicloud visibility and enhance multiplatform protection

With more than 90 percent of organizations adopting a multicloud strategy1 and cloud-based cyberattacks growing 48 percent year over year,2 securing multicloud and hybrid environments is more important than ever. To successfully protect multicloud infrastructure—where customers are utilizing two ...

How to connect with Microsoft Security at Black Hat USA 2023

Now in its twenty-sixth year, Black Hat USA takes place August 5 to 10, 2023, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing together security professionals for the latest in information security research, development, and trends. Microsoft Security is pleased to have a presence at Black Hat, wit...

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked number one in market share in the IDC Worldwide Corporate Endpoint Security Market Shares report, 2022

Microsoft security researchers tracked a 130.4 percent increase in organizations that have encountered ransomware over the last year. Endpoints are an important attack vector and ensuring that organizations have modern endpoint security as part of a broader extended detection and response strateg...

Microsoft Security innovations from 2022 to help you create a safer world today

The start of a new year is always a great time for reflection—to be grateful for all we have and the progress security teams have made as well as look ahead to how we can reshape the security landscape. I use this time to think about goals for the future, and to reflect on the highlights,...

Hardware-based threat defense against increasingly complex cryptojackers

Even with the dip in the value of cryptocurrencies in the past few months, cryptojackers – trojanized coin miners that attackers distribute to use compromised devices’ computing power for their objectives – continue to be widespread. In the past several months, Microsoft Defender Antivirus detect...

Detecting malicious key extractions by compromised identities for Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL cloud database service for modern app development. It offers a variety of advanced built-in features, such as automatic worldwide data replication, lightning-fast response types, and a variety of APIs. In this blog post, we describe security practices for...

Securing your IoT with Edge Secured-core devices

A recent study conducted by Microsoft in partnership with Ponemon Institute included a survey of companies that have adopted IoT solutions and 65 percent of them mentioned that security is a top priority when implementing IoT. Attacks targeting IoT devices put businesses at risk. Impacted devices...

Android apps with millions of downloads exposed to high-severity vulnerabilities

Microsoft uncovered high-severity vulnerabilities in a mobile framework owned by mce Systems and used by multiple large mobile service providers in pre-installed Android System apps that potentially exposed users to remote albeit complex or local attacks. The vulnerabilities, which affected apps...

Join us at InfoSec Jupyterthon 2021

We’re excited to invite our community of infosec analysts and engineers to the second annual InfoSec Jupyterthon taking place on December 2-3, 2021. This is an online event organized by our friends in the Open Threat Research Forge, together with folks from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Cente...

Identity at Microsoft Ignite: Strengthening Zero Trust defenses in the era of hybrid work

We’re now a year into our new reality, and two trends stand out. First, people need even more flexibility as we work, learn, and collaborate in a world without perimeters. And second, bad actors are getting even more sophisticated. They’re adding new attack vectors and combining them in new...

Terranova Security Gone Phishing Tournament reveals continued weak spot in cybersecurity

The Terranova Security annual Gone Phishing Tournament wrapped up in October 2020, spanning 98 countries and industries including healthcare, consumer goods, transport, energy, IT, finance, education, manufacturing, and more. Using templates created from actual phishing attacks created by Microso...

Protecting customers from being intimidated into making an unnecessary purchase

There has been an increase in free versions of programs that purport to scan computers for various errors, and then use alarming, coercive messages to scare customers into buying a premium version of the same program. The paid version of these programs, usually called cleaner or optimizer...

Detonating a bad rabbit: Windows Defender Antivirus and layered machine learning defenses

Windows Defender Antivirus uses a layered approach to protection: tiers of advanced automation and machine learning models evaluate files in order to reach a verdict on suspected malware. While Windows Defender AV detects a vast majority of new malware files at first sight, we always strive to...

Improved scripts in .lnk files now deliver Kovter in addition to Locky

Cybercriminals are using a combination of improved script and well-maintained download sites to attempt installing Locky and Kovter on more computers. A few months ago, we reported an email campaign distributing .lnk files with a malicious script that delivered Locky ransomware. Opening the...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2023 Zero Trust Platform Providers Wave™ report

Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report. At Microsoft, we understand modernizing security is a complex task in this era of ever-evolving cyberthreats and complex digital environments. Serious threats have necessitated a...

Microsoft Entra expands into Security Service Edge and Azure AD becomes Microsoft Entra ID

A year ago when we announced the Microsoft Entra product family, we asked what the world could achieve if we had trust in every digital experience and interaction.1 This question inspired us to offer a vision for securing the millions and millions of connections that happen every second between...

A closer look at Qakbot’s latest building blocks (and how to knock them down)

Multiple Qakbot campaigns that are active at any given time prove that the decade-old malware continues to be many attackers’ tool of choice, a customizable chameleon that adapts to suit the needs of the multiple threat actor groups that utilize it. Since emerging in 2007 as a banking Trojan,...

Deliver productive and seamless user experiences with Azure Active Directory

Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are still working remotely, and our organizations are still adjusting. Top of mind for every IT leader in this current landscape is meeting users’ needs for seamless access to resources while safeguarding the business from cyber threats. The...

Making Microsoft Edge the most secure browser with Windows Defender Application Guard

Innovation in the attack space is constant as adversaries increase in both determination and sophistication. In response to increased investments in defense, attackers are adapting and improving tactics at breakneck speed. The good news is that defenders are also innovating and disrupting long...

Microsoft shares threat intelligence at CYBERWARCON 2023

At the CYBERWARCON 2023 conference, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts are presenting several sessions detailing analysis across multiple sets of threat actors and related activity. This blog is intended to summarize the content of the research covered in these presentations and demonstrates Microso...

Microsoft shifts to a new threat actor naming taxonomy

April 19, 2023 update – We have published a JSON file mapping old threat actor names with their new names in the updated taxonomy, summarized here: https://aka.ms/threatactors. We also added hunting queries that Microsoft customers can use while transitioning to the new taxonomy. See the Resource...

Cyber Signals: Defend against the new ransomware landscape

Today, Microsoft is excited to publish our second edition of Cyber Signals, spotlighting security trends and insights gathered from Microsoft’s 43 trillion security signals and 8,500 security experts. In this edition, we pull back the curtain on the evolving cybercrime economy and the rise of...

Malicious IIS extensions quietly open persistent backdoors into servers

Attackers are increasingly leveraging Internet Information Services IIS extensions as covert backdoors into servers, which hide deep in target environments and provide a durable persistence mechanism for attackers. While prior research has been published on specific incidents and variants, little...

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021

In this new world of hybrid work, organizations face an increasing volume of data, ever-evolving regulations around how that data is protected, and an evolving complexity and frequency of data security breaches. To help our customers navigate this complex data landscape, we are focused on...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Evaluating individual and organizational cyber risk in a pandemic

Cybersecurity professionals find themselves in high demand as organizations worldwide continue to grapple with how to secure millions of remote workers. James Turner is an industry analyst at CISO Lens and served as an adjudicator from 2017 to 2019 for the Australian government’s cyber war games:...

Using Zero Trust principles to protect against sophisticated attacks like Solorigate

The Solorigate supply chain attack has captured the focus of the world over the last month. This attack was simultaneously sophisticated and ordinary. The actor demonstrated sophistication in the breadth of tactics used to penetrate, expand across, and persist in affected infrastructure, but many...

Simplify compliance and manage risk with Microsoft Compliance Manager

The cost of non-compliance is more than twice that of compliance costs. Non-compliance with the ever-increasing and changing regulatory requirements can have a significant impact on your organizations brand, reputation, and revenue. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute and Globalscape,...

Building a Zero Trust business plan

These past six months have been a remarkable time of transformation for many IT organizations. With the forced shift to remote work, IT professionals have had to act quickly to ensure people continue working productively from home—in some cases bringing entire organizations online over a weekend...

Healthy security habits to fight credential breaches: Cyberattack Series

Fifty percent of Microsoft cybersecurity recovery engagements relate to ransomware,1 and 61 percent of all breaches involve credentials.2 In this second report in our ongoing Cyberattack Series, we look at the steps taken to discover, understand, and respond to a push-bombing request that targete...

Microsoft named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Information and Event Management

Security operations teams are overwhelmed trying to protect their organizations against an onslaught of cyberattacks, including a 92 percent rise in ransomware attacks.1 Too often, existing security tools are siloed or not designed to meet the needs of today’s hybrid cloud environment. The result...

Optimize security with Azure Firewall solution for Azure Sentinel

Security is a constant balance between proactive and reactive defenses. They are both equally important, and neither can be neglected. Effectively protecting your organization means constantly optimizing both prevention and detection. That’s why we’re excited to announce a seamless integration...

Threat and Vulnerability Management now supports all major platforms

We are swiftly adapting to the lasting reality of a hybrid workforce, with the number of remote workers in the US expected to nearly double over the next five years, compared to pre-pandemic times. As a result, security teams are being challenged to rethink how to secure a growing and increasingl...

Protecting multi-cloud environments with Azure Security Center

We’ve heard from many of you that multi-cloud adoption is becoming a standard operating model for your organization and that it’s challenging to have the right security controls and posture across your environment. Historically, security teams have not had effective tools to secure multi-cloud...

Advice for incident responders on recovery from systemic identity compromises

As Microsoft alongside our industry partners and the security community continues to investigate the extent of the Solorigate attack, our goal is to provide the latest threat intelligence including IOCs and guidance across our products and solutions to help the community fight back against, harde...

Overview of rapid cyberattacks

Rapid cyberattacks like Petya and WannaCrypt have reset our expectations on the speed and scope of damage that a cyberattack can inflict. The Microsoft Enterprise Cybersecurity Group Detection and Response team worked extensively to help customers respond to and recover from these kinds of attack...

DevOps threat matrix

The use of DevOps practices, which enable organizations to deliver software more quickly and efficiently, has been on the rise. This agile approach minimizes the time-to-market of new features and bug fixes. More and more companies are implementing DevOps services, each with its own infrastructur...

2023 identity security trends and solutions from Microsoft

Welcome to 2023! I wanted to kick this year off by having a quick look at the trends in identity security, what you can do about it, and what Microsoft is doing to help you. One of the things we talk about on the team is “shiny object syndrome”—there are a ton of innovative and scary attacks and...

Simplify privacy protection with Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests

The General Data Protection Regulation GDPR came into effect in 2018 and set a new standard for the level of control individuals in the European Union had on the personal data they shared online. Since then, the number of privacy regulations around the world has flourished and impacted the privac...

Widespread credential phishing campaign abuses open redirector links

Microsoft has been actively tracking a widespread credential phishing campaign using open redirector links. Attackers combine these links with social engineering baits that impersonate well-known productivity tools and services to lure users into clicking. Doing so leads to a series of...

Automating security assessments using Cloud Katana

Today, we are open sourcing Cloud Katana, a cloud-native serverless application built on the top of Azure Functions to assess security controls in the cloud and hybrid cloud environments. We are currently covering only use cases in Azure, but we are working on extending it to other cloud provider...

7 ways to harden your environment against compromise

Here at the global Microsoft Compromise Recovery Security Practice CRSP, we work with customers who have experienced disruptive security incidents to restore trust in identity systems and remove adversary control. During 2020, the team responded to many incidents involving ransomware and the...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021

I am thrilled to share that Forrester Research has named Microsoft Cloud App Security as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021. Additionally, Microsoft received the highest score in the strategy category. People have increasingly used cloud apps to stay productive and...