​​Microsoft Entra: 5 identity priorities for 2023

Welcome to 2023. After the pandemic upended how we work, learn, play, and manage our lives, we find ourselves more connected than ever, with more convenient access to an ever-wider range of online tools and experiences. But as our global digital footprint continues to grow, so does the risk of...

Learn about 4 approaches to comprehensive security that help leaders be fearless

The last 18 months have put unprecedented pressure on organizations to speed up their digital transformation as remote and hybrid work continue to become the new normal. Yet even with all the change and uncertainty, having the right security support system in place means your organization can sti...

MVP Health Care secures member portal access with Microsoft Azure Active Directory B2C

Hello! I’m Sue Bohn, Microsoft Vice President of Program Management for Identity and Network Access. In today’s Voice of the Customer blog post, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer David Swits of MVP Health Care shares how Microsoft Azure Active Directory B2C helped th...

Microsoft delivers comprehensive solution to battle rise in consent phishing emails

Microsoft threat analysts are tracking a continued increase in consent phishing emails, also called illicit consent grants, that abuse OAuth request links in an attempt to trick recipients into granting attacker-owned apps permissions to access sensitive data. This blog offers a look into the...

Microsoft Azure Active Directory again a “Leader” in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management

Howdy folks, I’m proud to announce that for the fourth year in a row, Microsoft Azure Active Directory Azure AD has been recognized as a “Leader” in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management, Worldwide. Earlier this year, my boss, Joy Chik, CVP of Identity Engineering shared Microsoft’s guidin...

Windows Defender ATP thwarts Operation WilySupply software supply chain cyberattack

Several weeks ago, the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Windows Defender ATP research team noticed security alerts that demonstrated an intriguing attack pattern. These early alerts uncovered a well-planned, finely orchestrated cyberattack that targeted several high-profile technology...

Forrester names Microsoft Intune a Leader in the 2023 Forrester Wave™ for Unified Endpoint Management

Maintaining a secure and optimized digital environment allows new ideas to flourish wherever they occur. In the modern workplace, where devices and locations are no longer fixed, Microsoft Intune eases the task of managing and protecting the endpoints of businesses everywhere. It helps secure...

Expanded Microsoft Security Experts offerings provide comprehensive protection

Since we first introduced Microsoft Security Experts in May 2022, we’ve worked hard to expand our new security services category. In the past 16 months, we’ve launched new services, expanded our capabilities, and introduced new ways to buy. Our customers face an unprecedented number of security...

Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting proactively hunts threats

Today, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting to support organizations and their cybersecurity employees with proactive threat hunting. Defender Experts for Hunting was created for customers who have a robust security operations center but want Microsoft t...

The final report on NOBELIUM’s unprecedented nation-state attack

This is the final post in a four-part series on the NOBELIUM nation-state cyberattack. In December 2020, Microsoft began sharing details with the world about what became known as the most sophisticated nation-state cyberattack in history. Microsoft’s four-part video series “Decoding NOBELIUM” pul...

Franken-phish: TodayZoo built from other phishing kits

A phishing kit built using pieces of code copied from other kits, some available for sale through publicly accessible scam sellers or are reused and repackaged by other kit resellers, provides rich insight into the state of the economy that drives phishing and email threats today. We uncovered th...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Learn how to stop misinformation threats from nation-state bad actors

Information has long been wielded as an instrument of national power and influence. In today’s digital world, misinformation can also be just as powerful. On a special episode of Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann Johnson, Sandra Joyce, Executive Vice President and Head of Mandiant Intelligence at...

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...

Mitigate OT security threats with these best practices

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyber threats. In the latest Voice of the Community blog series post, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Chris Sistrunk, Technical Manager in...

Collaborative innovation on display in Microsoft’s insider risk management strategy

The disrupted work environment, in which enterprises were forced to find new ways to enable their workforce to work remotely, changed the landscape for operations as well as security. One of the top areas of concern is managing insider risks, a complex undertaking even before the pandemic, and ev...

Understanding influences shaping the cybersecurity landscape, enabling digital transformation, and helping to protect our planet

The accelerated rate of digital transformation we have seen this past year presents both challenges and endless opportunities for individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments around the world. Cybersecurity is the underpinning of helping protect these opportunities. By examining the...

How artificial intelligence stopped an Emotet outbreak

At 12:46 a.m. local time on February 3, a Windows 7 Pro customer in North Carolina became the first would-be victim of a new malware attack campaign for Trojan:Win32/Emotet. In the next 30 minutes, the campaign tried to attack over a thousand potential victims, all of whom were instantly and...

Defending new vectors: Threat actors attempt SQL Server to cloud lateral movement

Microsoft security researchers recently identified a campaign where attackers attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through a SQL Server instance. This attack technique demonstrates an approach weve seen in other cloud services such as VMs and Kubernetes cluster, but not in SQL Serve...

Microsoft announces the 2023 Microsoft Security Excellence Awards winners

In a world that’s constantly changing and challenging us, we believe that nothing can stop us when we work together. That’s the spirit of collaboration we celebrated on April 24, 2023, at the fourth annual Microsoft Security Excellence Awards. These awards recognize outstanding contributions from...

Microsoft Security reaches another milestone—Comprehensive, customer-centric solutions drive results

Yesterday, we shared some exciting news about the momentum we’re seeing in the security industry. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft Security has surpassed USD20 billion in revenue. I’m grateful to all our customers and partners who have been on this journey...

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...

A guide to combatting human-operated ransomware: Part 1

This blog is part one of a two-part series focused on how Microsoft DART helps customers with human-operated ransomware. For more guidance on human-operated ransomware and how to defend against these extortion-based attacks, refer to our human-operated ransomware docs page. Microsoft’s Detection...

6 strategies to reduce cybersecurity alert fatigue in your SOC

Today, organizations are faced with the increasingly difficult task of trying to protect their expanding digital estate from sophisticated cybersecurity threats. Migration to the cloud and a mobile workforce has dissolved the network boundary and projected the digital estate beyond its traditiona...

Gartner names Microsoft a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers

The past few months have changed the way we work in many ways, working from home, social distancing, and remote operations have all had impacts on our previously known ways of life. At Microsoft, we have been working hard to assist our customers adjust to this rapidly changing and evolving work...

CISO Stressbusters: 7 tips for weathering the cybersecurity storms

An essential requirement of being a Chief Information Security Officer CISO is stakeholder management. In many organizations, security is still seen as a support function; meaning, any share of the budget you receive may be viewed jealously by other departments. Bringing change to an organization...

Starting your journey to become quantum-safe

There’s no doubt we are living through a time of rapid technological change. Advances in ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence transform nearly every aspect of work and life. As the world moves forward with new advancements and distributed technologies, so too does the need to understand...

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...

Leverage cloud-powered security with Microsoft Defender for IoT

Traditionally, operational technology OT and IT have occupied separate sides of enterprise security. But with digital transformation and the advent of Industry 4.0, the old, siloed approach is showing its age.1 The rise of manufacturing execution systems has enabled more “smart factories” to...

Microsoft shifts to a comprehensive SaaS security solution

Software as a service SaaS apps are ubiquitous, hybrid work is the new normal, and protecting them and the important data they store is a big challenge for organizations. Today, 59 percent of security professionals find the SaaS sprawl challenging to manage1 and have identified cloud...

New Windows 11 security features are designed for hybrid work

Attackers are constantly evolving, becoming increasingly sophisticated and destructive—the median time for an attacker to access your private data if you fall victim to a phishing email is 1 hour, 12 minutes.1 Microsoft tracks more than 35 ransomware families and more than 250 unique nation-state...

Implementing a Zero Trust strategy after compromise recovery

What changes after compromise recovery? After a successful compromise recovery effort, you are back in control. Likely, you gave your team a round of applause and took a sigh of relief. Now what? Is everything going back to as it was in the past? Absolutely not! A compromise recovery engagement i...

How Microsoft Purview and Priva support the partner ecosystem

Today, many enterprise organizations are multicloud and multiplatform. Critical enterprise data is located across clouds and platforms, requiring security and compliance no matter where it lives. To solve the complexity that comes with these environments, organizations have invested in multiple...

Microsoft at RSA 2022: Envisioning the future of security

Like most of you, I was glad to see the 2022 RSA Conference return to its in-person roots after a two-year digital hiatus. This year’s event was a great success, drawing 26,000 attendees to three days of cutting-edge security sessions, tutorials, seminars, and special events at Moscone Center in...

How Open Systems uses Microsoft tools to improve security maturity

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. We’ve all seen it happen—an organization has all the top-notch security tools in place and still, they get breached. In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, complexity leads to...

Microsoft announces recipients of academic grants for AI research on combating phishing

Every day in the ever-changing technology landscape, we see boundaries shift as new ideas challenge the old status quo. This constant shift is observed in the increasingly sophisticated and connected tools, products, and services people and organizations use on a daily basis, but also in the...

New cloud-native breadth threat protection capabilities in Azure Defender

As the world adapts to working remotely, the threat landscape is constantly evolving, and security teams struggle to protect workloads with multiple solutions that are often not well integrated nor comprehensive enough. This results in serious threats avoiding detection, as well as security teams...

Manage, govern, and get more value out of your data with Azure Purview

Data is the currency of today’s economy. Data is being created faster than ever in more locations than organizations can track. In fact, IDC has predicted that global data will grow to more than 175 zettabytes by 2025. To put that into context, that’s 175 trillion 1GB USB drives. At the same time...

Uncovering cross-process injection with Windows Defender ATP

Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Windows Defender ATP is a post-breach solution that alerts security operations SecOps personnel about hostile activity. As the nature of attacks evolve, Windows Defender ATP must advance so that it continues to help SecOps personnel uncover and address...

Top insights and best practices from the new Microsoft Data Security Index report

A whopping 74 percent of organizations recently surveyed experienced at least one data security incident with their business data exposed in the previous year. That’s just one of our interesting insights from Microsoft’s new Data Security Index: Trends, insights, and strategies to secure data...

IoT devices and Linux-based systems targeted by OpenSSH trojan campaign

Cryptojacking, the illicit use of computing resources to mine cryptocurrency, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, with attackers building a cybercriminal economy around attack tools, infrastructure, and services to generate revenue from targeting a wide range of vulnerable systems,...

Microsoft continues to innovate to help secure small businesses

Small and medium-sized businesses are at the heart of our economy and are dedicated to driving value for their customers, whether that means trying new recipes, exploring new inventory, expanding services, arranging the shop so it’s easier to navigate, or keeping the shelves stocked with the...

Learn what an AI-driven future means for cybersecurity at Microsoft Secure

Maintaining security across today’s vast digital ecosystem is a team effort. AI and machine learning have helped to detect threats quickly and respond effectively. Yet we all know that the best defense still requires human wisdom and experience. From a frontline security operations admin to the...

Introducing kernel sanitizers on Microsoft platforms

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to continuously raise security baselines, we have been introducing innovations to the foundation of the chip-to-cloud security outlined in the Windows 11 Security Book. Strong foundational security enables us to build defenses from the ground up and develop...

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...

Stop Ransomware with Microsoft Security digital event presents threat intelligence in action

One of the biggest challenges in security today is visibility. And by visibility, I don’t just mean keeping an eye on ever-evolving cyberthreats, but also seeing your own security environment clearly—especially where you’re vulnerable. For defenders who are working hard to manage threats across...

How to improve risk management using Zero Trust architecture

“Compliance is all about risk management and lessening risk, and the same is true of Zero Trust.” —Abbas Kudrati Whats risk management and why is it important? Risk management, the process of developing a strategy for addressing risk throughout its lifecycle, normally involves four phases: risk...

The evolution of a Mac trojan: UpdateAgent’s progression

Our discovery and analysis of a sophisticated Mac trojan in October exposed a year-long evolution of a malware family—and depicts the rising complexity of threats across platforms. The trojan, tracked as UpdateAgent, started as a relatively basic information-stealer but was observed distributing...

Get career advice from 7 inspiring leaders in cybersecurity

Are you currently studying information security? Or are you considering transitioning to a career in cybersecurity? According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, cybersecurity jobs will grow 31 percent from 2019 to 2029—more than six times the national average job growth.1 Cybersecurity skills...

Windows 11 offers chip to cloud protection to meet the new security challenges of hybrid work

As the world has changed over the past 18-months, companies have been wrestling with ways to keep employees and data protected as they support new ways of hybrid working. We built Windows 11 to be the most secure Windows yet with built-in chip to cloud protection that ensures company assets stay...

A guide to combatting human-operated ransomware: Part 2

This blog is part two of a two-part series focused on how Microsoft DART helps customers with human-operated ransomware. For more guidance on human-operated ransomware and how to defend against these extortion-based attacks, refer to our human-operated ransomware docs page. In part one of this bl...