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...

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...

Securing Azure datacenters with continuous IoT/OT monitoring

Figure 1: Industrial cooling system for datacenters. As more intelligent devices and machinery become connected to the internet, Operational Technology OT and the Internet of Things IoT have become part of your enterprise network infrastructure—and a growing security risk. With every new factory...

What we like about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. It’s no secret that the security industry generally likes Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. After a few months of using and integrating it with our platform here at Expel, we feel the...

Forrester Consulting TEI Study: Azure Security Center delivers 219 percent ROI over 3 years and a payback of less than 6 months

Azure Security Center is a critical tool to secure our multi-cloud workloads in the new world of remote work we find ourselves in today. We are excited to share that Forrester Consulting has just conducted a commissioned Total Economic Impact TEI study on behalf of Microsoft, which involved...

Turning the page on Solorigate and opening the next chapter for the security community

The recent SolarWinds attack is a moment of reckoning. Today, as we close our own internal investigation of the incident, we continue to see an urgent opportunity for defenders everywhere to unify and protect the world in a more concerted way. We also see an opportunity for every company to adopt...

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...

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:...

A playbook for modernizing security operations

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

Web shell attacks continue to rise

One year ago, we reported the steady increase in the use of web shells in attacks worldwide. The latest Microsoft 365 Defender data shows that this trend not only continued, it accelerated: every month from August 2020 to January 2021, we registered an average of 140,000 encounters of these threa...

Why threat protection is critical to your Zero Trust security strategy

The corporate network perimeter has been completely redefined. Many IT leaders are adopting a Zero Trust security model where identities play a critical role in helping act as the foundation of their modern cybersecurity strategy. As a result, cybercriminals have shifted their focus and identitie...

Sophisticated cybersecurity threats demand collaborative, global response

Microsoft’s response to Solorigate Since December, the United States, its government, and other critical institutions including security firms have been addressing the world’s latest serious nation-state cyberattack, sometimes referred to as ‘Solorigate’ or ‘SUNBURST.’ As we shared earlier this i...

Automating and operationalizing data protection with Dataguise and Microsoft Information Protection

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. In technical literature, the terms data discovery, classification, and tagging are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are real differences in what they actually mean—and each...

Modernizing your network security strategy

From the global pandemic to recent cyberattacks, our world has faced many challenges during the past 12 months. Some of these challenges we can’t change. However, I’m pleased about the ones we can, and are changing across the cybersecurity landscape. For example, to facilitate remote work and...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Privacy, the pandemic, and protecting our cyber future

Much of our everyday life has moved online with the pandemic continuing to play a role in how we work and communicate with others. This migration has meant that security and privacy continue to remain top-of-mind for both security professionals and those who may not have given these cyber issues ...

Recent enhancements for Microsoft Power Platform governance

An emerging trend in digital transformation efforts has been the rise of low-code development platforms. Of course, these low-code platforms must be grounded in best-of-breed governance capabilities which include security and compliance features. Without strong governance, the full benefits of...

What tracking an attacker email infrastructure tells us about persistent cybercriminal operations

From March to December 2020, we tracked segments of a dynamically generated email infrastructure that attackers used to send more than a million emails per month, distributing at least seven distinct malware families in dozens of campaigns using a variety of phishing lures and tactics. These...

Why operational resilience will be key in 2021, and how this impacts cybersecurity

The lessons we have learned during the past 12 months have demonstrated that the ability to respond to and bounce back from adversity in general, can impact the short-and long-term success of any organization. It can even dictate the leaders and laggards in any industry. When we take into...

ZINC attacks against security researchers

In recent months, Microsoft has detected cyberattacks targeting security researchers by an actor we track as ZINC. The campaign originally came to our attention after Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detected an attack in progress. Observed targeting includes pen testers, private offensive securit...

5 identity priorities for 2021—strengthening security for the hybrid work era and beyond

When I outlined the five identity priorities for 2020, the world was a very different place. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed how organizations run their businesses. It’s also changed the way we work, learn, and collaborate. What hasn’t changed is the critical role identity...

The state of apps by Microsoft identity: Azure AD app gallery apps that made the most impact in 2020

2020 was an unprecedented year, to say the least. The COVID-19 global pandemic drastically changed how we work, learn, and collaborate. Organizations had to find new ways to connect and maintain productivity while providing secure access to critical apps and resources. Our own Microsoft services,...

Announcing the general availability of Azure Defender for IoT

As businesses increasingly rely on connected devices to optimize their operations, the number of IoT and Operational Technology OT endpoints is growing dramatically—industry analysts have estimated that CISOs will soon be responsible for an attack surface multiple times larger than just a few yea...

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...

Microsoft surpasses $10 billion in security business revenue, more than 40 percent year-over-year growth

I joined Microsoft a little more than six months ago—amid a global pandemic and a new norm of remote work, as well as one of the most rapidly evolving threat landscapes in history. We’ve witnessed more sophisticated attacks, like the recent SolarWinds incident, as well as an increase in attack...

How companies are securing devices with Zero Trust practices

Organizations are seeing a substantial increase in the diversity of devices accessing their networks. With employees using personal devices and accessing corporate resources from new locations in record numbers, IT leaders are seeing an increase in their attack surface area. They’re turning to Ze...

Identity governance: The power of “Why not?”

Innovation requires the courage to take risks and the leadership skills to show others that risks are worth taking. That’s why I love working with people like Joe Dadzie, a partner group program manager in identity governance. Joe has a long history of championing disruptive technology...

Blue Cedar partners with Microsoft to combat BYOD issues

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Bring Your Own Device BYOD has been a divisive topic within corporations for years. Employees wanted the convenience of working on their own smart devices, and business decision-make...

The dynamic duo: How to build a red and blue team to strengthen your cybersecurity, Part 2

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...

Deep dive into the Solorigate second-stage activation: From SUNBURST to TEARDROP and Raindrop

More than a month into the discovery of Solorigate, investigations continue to unearth new details that prove it is one of the most sophisticated and protracted intrusion attacks of the decade. Our continued analysis of threat data shows that the attackers behind Solorigate are skilled campaign...

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...

How IT leaders are securing identities with Zero Trust

The past twelve months have been a remarkable time of digital transformation as organizations, and especially digital security teams, adapt to working remotely and shifting business operations. IT leaders everywhere turned to Zero Trust approaches to alleviate the challenges of enabling and...

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,...

Increasing resilience against Solorigate and other sophisticated attacks with Microsoft Defender

­Even as investigations into the sophisticated attack known as Solorigate are still underway, details and insights about the tools, patterns, and methods used by the attackers point to steps that organizations can take to improve their defenses against similar attacks. Solorigate is a cross-domai...

Azure Active Directory empowers frontline workers with simplified and secure access

Howdy folks, The past year has shown us all just how critical frontline workers are to our communities and our economy. They’re the people behind the counter, in the call centers, in hospital ICUs, on the supermarket floor—doing the critical work that makes the difference in feeding our families,...

New Surface PCs enable virtualization-based security (VBS) by default to empower customers to do more, securely

VBS and HVCI-enabled devices help protect from advanced attacks Escalation of privilege attacks are a malicious actor’s best friend, and they often target sensitive information stored in memory. These kinds of attacks can turn a minor user mode compromise into a full compromise of your OS and...

Privacy breaches: Using Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to minimize impact

GDPR, HIPAA, GLBA, all 50 U.S. States, and many countries have privacy breach reporting requirements. If an organization experiences a breach of customer or employee personal information, they must report it within the required time frame. The size and scope of this reporting effort can be massiv...

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...

Forcepoint and Microsoft: Risk-based access control for the remote workforce

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association MISA guest blog series. Learn more about MISA here. Adopting cloud-based services as part of an organization’s digital transformation strategy is no longer optional, its a necessity. Last year, only 18 percent of the...

Using Microsoft 365 Defender to protect against Solorigate

Microsoft security researchers continue to investigate and respond to the sophisticated cyberattack known as Solorigate also referred to as Sunburst by FireEye involving a supply chain compromise and the subsequent compromise of cloud assets. While the related investigations and impact assessment...

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...

Analyzing Solorigate, the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack, and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers

We, along with the security industry and our partners, continue to investigate the extent of the Solorigate attack. While investigations are underway, we want to provide the defender community with intelligence to understand the scope, impact, remediation guidance, and product detections and...

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...

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...

A breakthrough year for passwordless technology

As 2020 draws to a close, most of us are looking forward to putting this year in the rearview mirror. Since we depend even more on getting online for everything in our lives, we’re more than ready to be done with passwords. Passwords are a hassle to use, and they present security risks for users...

Becoming resilient by understanding cybersecurity risks: Part 2

In part one of this blog series, we looked at how being resilient to cybersecurity threats is about understanding and managing the organizational impact from the evolution of human conflict that has existed since the dawn of humanity. In part two of this series, we further explore the imperative ...

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...

Ensuring customers are protected from Solorigate

Microsoft is monitoring a dynamic threat environment surrounding the discovery of a sophisticated attack that included compromised binaries from a legitimate software. These binaries, which are related to the SolarWinds Orion Platform, could be used by attackers to remotely access devices. We hav...

Siemens USA CISO: 3 essentials to look for in a cloud provider

In the latest episode of my series, The Shiproom, I spoke with Kurt John, Chief Cybersecurity Officer CISO at Siemens USA. Kurt is listed in Security Magazine’s Top 10 most influential cybersecurity leaders, and he also serves on a special cybersecurity committee organized by 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...

Widespread malware campaign seeks to silently inject ads into search results, affects multiple browsers

A persistent malware campaign has been actively distributing an evolved browser modifier malware at scale since at least May 2020. At its peak in August, the threat was observed on over 30,000 devices every day. The malware is designed to inject ads into search engine results pages. The threat...