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...

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...

Cybersecurity awareness tips from Microsoft to empower your team to #BeCyberSmart

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and I’m excited about what Microsoft and our partners in the industry have planned to help everyone stay CyberSmart. 2022 may have offered some respite from the previous year’s rush to enable a remote and hybrid workforce, but the increased use of persona...

Cybersecurity awareness tips from Microsoft to empower your team to #BeCyberSmart

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and I’m excited about what Microsoft and our partners in the industry have planned to help everyone stay CyberSmart. 2022 may have offered some respite from the previous year’s rush to enable a remote and hybrid workforce, but the increased use of persona...

Analyzing attacks using the Exchange vulnerabilities CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082

October 1, 2022 update – Added information about Exploit:Script/ExchgProxyRequest.A, Microsoft Defender AV’s robust detection for exploit behavior related to this threat. We also removed a section on MFA as a mitigation, which was included in a prior version of this blog as standard guidance...

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...

ZINC weaponizing open-source software

In recent months, Microsoft has detected a wide range of social engineering campaigns using weaponized legitimate open-source software by an actor we track as ZINC. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC observed activity targeting employees in organizations across multiple industries includi...

CSO perspective: Why a strong IAM strategy is key to an organization’s cybersecurity approach

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 Alissa “Dr. Jay”...

Malicious OAuth applications abuse cloud email services to spread spam

Microsoft researchers recently investigated an attack where malicious OAuth applications were deployed on compromised cloud tenants and then used to control Exchange Online settings and spread spam. The investigation revealed that the threat actor launched credential stuffing attacks against...

Rewards plus: Fake mobile banking rewards apps lure users to install info-stealing RAT on Android devices

Our analysis of a recent version of a previously reported info-stealing Android malware, delivered through an ongoing SMS campaign, demonstrates the continuous evolution of mobile threats. Masquerading as a banking rewards app, this new version has additional remote access trojan RAT capabilities...

The art and science behind Microsoft threat hunting: Part 2

We discussed Microsoft Detection and Response Team’s DART threat hunting principles in part 1 of The art and science behind Microsoft threat hunting blog series. In this follow-up post, we will talk about some general hunting strategies, frameworks, tools, and how Microsoft incident responders wo...

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...

Test your team’s security readiness with the Gone Phishing Tournament

Why should you care about the behavioral risk of your employees? Eighty-two percent of breaches include and often start with user behavior.1 Not all are phishing, but a majority of them are just that. Phishing is, and has been for many years, the cheapest and most reliable way for an attacker of...

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...

Secure your endpoints with Transparity and Microsoft

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Endpoint protection platforms EPPs are dead and no longer sufficient to protect your organization, right? Wrong. When it comes to cybersecurity, the ability to normalize and correlat...

The art and science behind Microsoft threat hunting: Part 1

At Microsoft, we define threat hunting as the practice of actively looking for cyberthreats that have covertly or not so covertly penetrated an environment. This involves looking beyond the known alerts or malicious threats to discover new potential threats and vulnerabilities. Why do incident...

Microsoft investigates Iranian attacks against the Albanian government

Shortly after the destructive cyberattacks against the Albanian government in mid-July, the Microsoft Detection and Response Team DART was engaged by the Albanian government to lead an investigation into the attacks. At the time of the attacks and our engagement by the Albanian government,...

Profiling DEV-0270: PHOSPHORUS’ ransomware operations

Microsoft threat intelligence teams have been tracking multiple ransomware campaigns and have tied these attacks to DEV-0270, also known as Nemesis Kitten, a sub-group of Iranian actor PHOSPHORUS. Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that DEV-0270 conducts malicious network operations,...

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 ...

Vulnerability in TikTok Android app could lead to one-click account hijacking

Microsoft discovered a high-severity vulnerability in the TikTok Android application, which could have allowed attackers to compromise users’ accounts with a single click. The vulnerability, which would have required several issues to be chained together to exploit, has been fixed and we did not...

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...

Cyber Signals: 3 strategies for protection against ransomware

The “as a service” business model has gained widespread popularity as growing cloud adoption has made it possible for people to access important services through third-party providers. Given the convenience and agility of service offerings, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the “as a servic...

Microsoft Security highlights from Black Hat USA 2022

Black Hat USA 2022 marked the twenty-fifth year that security researchers, security architects, and other security professionals have gathered to share the latest research, developments, and trends. Microsoft was among the companies participating in the conference, which was from August 6 to 11,...

MERCURY leveraging Log4j 2 vulnerabilities in unpatched systems to target Israeli organizations

In recent weeks, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC and Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team detected Iran-based threat actor MERCURY leveraging exploitation of Log4j 2 vulnerabilities in SysAid applications against organizations all located in Israel. MSTIC assesses with high...

MagicWeb: NOBELIUM’s post-compromise trick to authenticate as anyone

Updated August 26, 2022: Added instructions to enable collection of AD FS event logs in order to search for Event ID 501, and added a new resource for AD FS audit logging in Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft security researchers have discovered a post-compromise capability we’re calling MagicWeb, whi...

Looking for the ‘Sliver’ lining: Hunting for emerging command-and-control frameworks

Microsoft has observed the Sliver command-and-control C2 framework now being adopted and integrated in intrusion campaigns by nation-state threat actors, cybercrime groups directly supporting ransomware and extortion, and other threat actors to evade detection. We’ve seen these actors use Sliver...

Data governance: 5 tips for holistic data protection

Your data is a strategic asset. To benefit your business, data requires strict controls around structure, access, and lifecycle. However, most security leaders have doubts about data security—nearly 70 percent of chief information security officers CISOs expect to have their data compromised in a...

A multidimensional approach to journalism security

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 Runa Sandvik, Former...

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Endpoint Management Tools

This month, Microsoft has been recognized by Gartner® as a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management UEM Tools. This blog post outlines the “so what” for IT leaders, and why we believe this Gartner analysis deserves your focus right now. As you see in the Magic Quadrant in...

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...

Uncovering a ChromeOS remote memory corruption vulnerability

Microsoft discovered a memory corruption vulnerability in a ChromeOS component that can be triggered remotely, allowing attackers to perform either a denial-of-service DoS or, in extreme cases, remote code execution RCE. Following our D-Bus blog post that focused on Linux, we searched for similar...

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...

Connect with Microsoft Security experts at the 2022 Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit

The transition to a remote and hybrid workforce happened fast during a time of uncertainty, and IT professionals rose to the challenge with ingenuity and dedication. But two years in, many IT teams are still responding with patchwork solutions to enforce identity and access management IAM across ...

Disrupting SEABORGIUM’s ongoing phishing operations

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC has observed and taken actions to disrupt campaigns launched by SEABORGIUM, an actor Microsoft has tracked since 2017. SEABORGIUM is a threat actor that originates from Russia, with objectives and victimology that align closely with Russian state...

IT security: An opportunity to raise corporate governance scores

What is a corporate governance score? Corporate governance scoring is increasingly important to boards of directors, executive leadership, and the investment community. If we want to enlist the support of a stakeholder, we have to talk about the things that are important to them. Sales revenue is...

How IT and security teams can work together to improve endpoint security

For executives in the IT and security spaces, the current climate offers reasons to worry. As workers become accustomed to new flexibility in the workplace, hybrid and remote work options present more challenges. Users want to access corporate resources from their own devices without the...

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...

Microsoft announces new solutions for threat intelligence and attack surface management

Uncover adversaries with new Microsoft Defender threat intelligence products The threat landscape is more sophisticated than ever and damages have soared—the Federal Bureau of Investigations 2021 IC3 report found that the cost of cybercrime now totals more than USD6.9 billion.1 To counter these...

Industrial systems: What it takes to secure and staff them

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 Patrick C. Miller,...

Untangling KNOTWEED: European private-sector offensive actor using 0-day exploits

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC and the Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC found a private-sector offensive actor PSOA using multiple Windows and Adobe 0-day exploits, including one for the recently patched CVE-2022-22047, in limited and targeted attacks against European and...

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...

How one Microsoft product manager acts as champion for identity security

A technology career embodies the ancient Roman saying that “luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Few industries are as dynamic, fast-paced, or intense as technology. With so many challenges to solve, opportunities are everywhere, but as I’ve learned myself through the years, the best...

Discover 5 lessons Microsoft has learned about compliance management

Compliance management is a complex process—one that gets increasingly more complicated the larger an organization grows. Microsoft knows this firsthand, not only because of our experience providing Security and Compliance solutions to customers but also because of the global reach and...

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...

How Microsoft Security partners are helping customers do more with less

There has never been a greater demand for specialized cybersecurity expertise—or a greater opportunity for our partners to support our customers with new services and solutions. Over the last year, the permanent shift to hybrid work has empowered businesses to be remote and mobile. Increased...

North Korean threat actor targets small and midsize businesses with H0lyGh0st ransomware

A group of actors originating from North Korea that Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC tracks as DEV-0530 has been developing and using ransomware in attacks since June 2021. This group, which calls itself H0lyGh0st, utilizes a ransomware payload with the same name for its campaigns and h...

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in UEM Software 2022 IDC MarketScape reports

Competition for talent has increased pressure to lead in the digital space, and business decisions now weigh user experience for employees heavily among costs and benefits. Workers insist on experiences that mirror their personal experiences, often on their own devices. As enterprise computing ha...

Uncovering a macOS App Sandbox escape vulnerability: A deep dive into CVE-2022-26706

Microsoft uncovered a vulnerability in macOS that could allow specially crafted codes to escape the App Sandbox and run unrestricted on the system. We shared these findings with Apple through Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure CVD via Microsoft Security Vulnerability Research MSVR in October...

From cookie theft to BEC: Attackers use AiTM phishing sites as entry point to further financial fraud

A large-scale phishing campaign that used adversary-in-the-middle AiTM phishing sites stole passwords, hijacked a user’s sign-in session, and skipped the authentication process even if the user had enabled multifactor authentication MFA. The attackers then used the stolen credentials and session...

Introducing security for unmanaged devices in the Enterprise network with Microsoft Defender for IoT

How many IoT devices are used at your company? If yours is like most organizations, there are probably printers, scanners, and fax machines scattered around the office. Perhaps smart TVs are mounted at reception or in the break room to guide visitors and keep employees up-to-date on company event...