Microsoft Security Experts discuss evolving threats in roundtable chat

I don’t know about you, but we’re still catching our breath after 2022. Microsoft Security blocked more than 70 billion email and identity threats last year.1 In the same 12-month span, ransomware attacks impacted more than 200 large organizations in the United States alone, spanning government,...

Detect active network reconnaissance with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

The Microsoft Compromise Recovery Security Practice has observed how the security industry has evolved over the last few years as consumers, businesses, and industry professionals continue to adapt to the changing landscape. We have seen the emergence of new frameworks, such as the Cybersecurity...

Stay safe online this holiday shopping season with tips from Microsoft

You may have already noticed this holiday shopping season feels different than those we’ve had before. Headlines about supply chain issues, worker shortages, costs rising—all while the pandemic continues to impact our lives. In my own inbox, I saw emails from brands touting Black Friday sales as...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2021 Enterprise Email Security Wave

Today, organizations face an evolving threat landscape and an exponentially increasing attack surface. Email represents the primary attack vector for cybercrime, and security teams are in search of efficient and cost-effective means to minimize the risk of these threats and the impact they have o...

Becoming resilient by understanding cybersecurity risks: Part 3—a security pro’s perspective

In part two of this blog series on aligning security with business objectives and risk, we explored the importance of thinking and acting holistically, using the example of human-operated ransomware, which threatens every organization in every industry. As we exited 2020, the Solorigate attack...

A “quick wins” approach to securing Azure Active Directory and Office 365 and improving your security posture

In the last post, we discussed Office 365 and how enabling certain features without understanding all the components can lead to a false sense of security. We demonstrated how implementing a break glass account, multi-factor authentication MFA, and the removal of legacy authentication can help...

Empowering employees to securely work from anywhere with an internet-first model and Zero Trust

Like many this year, our Microsoft workforce had to quickly transition to a work from the home model in response to COVID-19. While nobody could have predicted the world’s current state, it has provided a very real-world test of the investments we have made implementing a Zero Trust security mode...

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...

How Microsoft tools and partners support GDPR compliance

This post is authored by Daniel Grabski,Executive Security Advisor, Microsoft Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. As an Executive Security Advisor for enterprises in Europe and the Middle East, I regularly engage with Chief Information Security Officers CISOs, Chief Information Officers CIOs and Data...

Detecting and mitigating a multi-stage AiTM phishing and BEC campaign

Microsoft Defender Experts uncovered a multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle AiTM phishing and business email compromise BEC attack against banking and financial services organizations. The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and...

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...

​​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...

Implementing Zero Trust access to business data on BYOD with Trustd MTD and Microsoft Entra

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. As more employees work remotely on a variety of devices and networks, businesses need a security model that supports this new operational efficiency. An expanding perimeter poses...

Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting demonstrates industry-leading protection in the 2022 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations for Managed Services

Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, our newest managed threat hunting service, delivered industry-leading results during the inaugural MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations for Managed Services. We provided a seamless, comprehensive, and rapid response to the simulated attack using expert-led...

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...

One Microsoft manager’s entrepreneurial vision for multicloud identity and access

In July 2021, Microsoft acquired CloudKnox, a leader in cloud infrastructure entitlement management CIEM. Over the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the founder and chief executive officer CEO, Balaji Parimi, who is now the Partner General Manager of Permissions Management ...

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...

How to investigate service provider trust chains in the cloud

In a recent Microsoft blog post, we documented technical guidance for organizations to protect themselves from the latest NOBELIUM activity that was found to target technology service providers, which are privileged in their downstream customer tenants, as a method to gain access to their...

Simplifying the complex: Introducing Privacy Management for Microsoft 365

The data privacy regulation landscape is more complex than ever. With new laws emerging in countries like China and India, shifts in Europe and the United Kingdom, and currently 26 different laws across the United States, staying ahead of regulations can feel impossible. But this work is...

Microsoft’s 5 guiding principles for decentralized identities

Three years ago, as part of Microsoft’s mission to empower people and organizations to achieve more, we announced that we were incubating a new set of decentralized identity technologies based on a simple vision: Each of us needs a digital identity we own, one which securely and privately stores...

How nation-state attackers like NOBELIUM are changing cybersecurity

This is the first post in a four-part series on the NOBELIUM nation-state cyberattack. Microsoft started telling the industry about this extremely advanced cyberattack in December 2020. The NOBELIUM blog series—which mirrors Microsoft’s four-part video series “Decoding NOBELIUM”—will pull the...

How Vodafone Global Security Director creates an inclusive and secure workplace

Moving to more flexible remote work policies has caused telecommunications giant Vodafone to rethink cybersecurity and the potential friction to users. Instead of relying on physical security controls in the office, the company has embraced a Zero Trust strategy that requires authenticating...

Trend-spotting email techniques: How modern phishing emails hide in plain sight

With the massive volume of emails sent each day, coupled with the many methods that attackers use to blend in, identifying the unusual and malicious is more challenging than ever. An obscure Unicode character in a few emails is innocuous enough, but when a pattern of emails containing this obscur...

Secure unmanaged devices with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now

As we have entered into new hybrid work environments, businesses need to think about how they will proactively protect their organizations from the influx of new or “bring your own” BYO connected devices. This new normal has exposed the most challenging cybersecurity landscape we’ve ever...

Compliance joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA)

Like many of you, I’m thrilled to have my 2020 calendar safely in the recycling pile. During that time though, you too might have noticed how, perhaps unknowingly, you were able to turn some of last year’s lemons into lemonade. Maybe you developed a deeper appreciation for everyday moments and th...

How Strata Identity and Microsoft Entra ID solve identity challenges in mergers and acquisitions

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Along with every merger and acquisition between two companies comes the need to combine and strengthen their IT infrastructure. In particular, there is an immediate and profound impa...

New Microsoft Purview features use AI to help secure and govern all your data

In the past few years, we have witnessed how digital and cloud transformation has accelerated the growth of data. With more and more customers moving to the cloud, and with the rise of hybrid work, data usage has moved beyond the traditional borders of business. Data is now stored in multiple clo...

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...

5 reasons to adopt a Zero Trust security strategy for your business

Adopting Zero Trust security for your enterprise is no longer a wish-list item—it’s a business imperative. The workplace today extends to almost anywhere, anytime, from any device. Siloed, patchwork security solutions leave gaps that threat actors continue to exploit. A comprehensive Zero Trust...

Identifying cyberthreats quickly with proactive security testing

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyberthreats. In the latest post of our Community Voices blog series, Microsoft Security Senior Product Marketing Manager Brooke Lynn Weenig talks with Matthew Hickey,...

How to prevent lateral movement attacks using Microsoft 365 Defender

It’s been 10 years since the first version of the Mitigating Pass-the-Hash Attacks and Other Credential Theft whitepaper was made available, but the techniques are still relevant today, because they help prevent attackers from gaining a network foothold and using credential-dumping tools to extra...

Defenders beware: A case for post-ransomware investigations

Ransomware is one of the most pervasive threats that Microsoft Detection and Response Team DART responds to today. The groups behind these attacks continue to add sophistication to their tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs as most network security postures increase. In this blog, we detail a...

Detecting and preventing LSASS credential dumping attacks

Obtaining user operating system OS credentials from a targeted device is among threat actors’ primary goals when launching attacks because these credentials serve as a gateway to various objectives they can achieve in their target organization’s environment, such as lateral movement. One techniqu...

How one product manager builds community at Microsoft Security

I first met Joey Cruz not long after he joined the Microsoft Identity and Network Access IDNA team when he helped create demos for a keynote speech I was delivering. Joey has a way of making you feel that even if something goes sideways, it will all be okay because he will make sure it is. As...

A simpler, more integrated approach to data governance

It’s no secret that the volume of data created by organizations and people multiplies daily. And, in the digital—and hybrid work—world we live in, that data is spread across more tools, platforms, devices, and clouds than ever before, creating regulatory challenges and security risks. Organizatio...

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...

Cyberattacks targeting health care must stop

In recent months, we’ve detected cyberattacks from three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. The targets include leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Kore...

Extend data loss prevention to your devices with Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention, now generally available

Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention Endpoint Data Loss Prevention DLP | What it is and how to set it up in Microsoft 365. Watch today Managing and protecting data is critical to any organization. Data is growing exponentially, and remote work is making it even harder to manage risks around...

Announcing the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection ISO 27001 audit assessment report

The security and privacy of customer data are our top priority. Our goals are simple: to operate our services with the security and privacy you expect from Microsoft, and to give you accurate assurances about our security and privacy practices. In line with our commitment to provide customers the...

Microsoft to remove WoSign and StartCom certificates in Windows 10

Microsoft has concluded that the Chinese Certificate Authorities CAs WoSign and StartCom have failed to maintain the standards required by our Trusted Root Program. Observed unacceptable security practices include back-dating SHA-1 certificates, mis-issuances of certificates, accidental certifica...

Cyber Signals: Sporting events and venues draw cyberthreats at increasing rates

Today we released the fifth edition of Cyber Signals, spotlighting threats to large venues, and sporting and entertainment events, based on our learnings and telemetry from delivering cybersecurity support to critical infrastructure facilities during the State of Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World...

Digital event highlights new features in Microsoft Purview

Keeping your company and customer data secure has never been more complex. With multiple clouds, legacy on-premises systems, and numerous devices, it can be hard to keep track of what data you have and where it lives. On top of that, ever-changing employee roles make managing who has access to wh...

Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management for the 6th year

We are honored to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Access Management for Microsoft Azure Active Directory Azure AD, part of Microsoft Entra. We thank our customers who guide our strategy and product innovation, engage with us deeply in...

Announcing 2022 Microsoft Security Excellence Awards winners

Spirits soared at the Microsoft Security Excellence Awards on June 5, 2022. And is it any wonder? The celebration marked the first time that Microsoft executives and Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA members had gathered in person in more than two years so it was a special night for...

Easy authentication and authorization in Azure Active Directory with No-Code Datawiza

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. The acceleration of cloud journeys fueled by the pandemic and ever-increasing concerns about data security and information privacy have made access management one of the hottest topi...

Center for Threat-Informed Defense, Microsoft, and industry partners streamline MITRE ATT&CK® matrix evaluation for defenders

The MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense, Microsoft, and other industry partners collaborated on a project that created a repeatable methodology for developing a top MITRE ATT&CK® techniques list. The method aims to facilitate navigation of the ATT&CK framework, which could help new defenders...

NICKEL targeting government organizations across Latin America and Europe

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC has observed NICKEL, a China-based threat actor, targeting governments, diplomatic entities, and non-governmental organizations NGOs across Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. MSTIC has been tracking NICKEL since 2016...

Adopting a Zero Trust approach throughout the lifecycle of data

Instead of believing everything behind the corporate firewall is safe, the Zero Trust model assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an uncontrolled network. Regardless of where the request originates or what resource it accesses, Zero Trust teaches us to “never trust...

#BeCyberSmart: When we learn together, we’re more secure together

2021 has been a watershed year in cybersecurity. The pandemic continued to bring new challenges as attackers took advantage of overstretched security teams to unleash new human-operated ransomware1, malware, and nation-state attacks like those against Colonial Pipeline2 and JBS Food3. With the mo...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Microsoft’s cybersecurity response to COVID-19

On February 25, 2020, Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer CISO Bret Arsenault was attending the RSA Conference in San Francisco when the city declared a state of emergency because of COVID-19. Shortly after flying back to Seattle, Bret learned of the first death from the coronavirus in...