The biggest challenges—and important role—of application security

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 Tanya Janca, Founder of We Hack Purple...

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...

TLS version enforcement capabilities now available per certificate binding on Windows Server 2019

At Microsoft, we often develop new security features to meet the specific needs of our own products and online services. This is a story about how we solved a very important problem and are sharing the solution with customers. As engineers worldwide work to eliminate their own dependencies on TLS...

Building on experience: a framework for cybersecurity policy

Each year, more and more governments are developing policies to address security challenges presented by an increasingly digitized world. And to support those efforts, Im excited today to announce the release of Microsofts new Cybersecurity Policy Framework, a resource for policymakers that...

Security baselines should underpin efforts to manage cybersecurity risk across sectors

This post is authored byAngela McKay, Director of Cybersecurity Policy and Amanda Craig, Senior Cybersecurity Strategist, CELA. Organizations are leveraging technology to transform their operations, products, and services, and governments are increasingly focusing on how to enable such dynamic...

How a national cybersecurity agency can help avoid a national cybersecurity quagmire

This last October we saw more countries than ever participate in initiatives to raise cybersecurity awareness. What was once largely a US approach has evolved into events and initiatives around the world by governments, civil society groups, and private sector partners. This increased breadth and...

Email threat landscape: Q1 2026 trends and insights

In this article 1. Tycoon2FA disruption impact 2. QR code phishing attacks 3. CAPTCHA tactics 4. Malicious payloads 5. Business email compromise 6. Defending against email threats 7. Microsoft Defender detections During the first quarter of 2026 January-March, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detect...

2022 holiday DDoS protection guide

The holiday season is an exciting time for many people as they get to relax, connect with friends and family, and celebrate traditions. Organizations also have much to rejoice about during the holidays for example, more sales for retailers and more players for gaming companies. Unfortunately, cyb...

How Microsoft Purview and Priva help simplify data protection

At Microsoft Security, we understand how challenging it is to protect your most important asset, your data, in today’s threat landscape. You’re faced with evolving challenges—from empowering employees for greater productivity to eliminating gaps in your infrastructure—all while trying to protect...

Sharing the first SimuLand dataset to expedite research and learn about adversary tradecraft

Last month, we introduced the SimuLand project to help security researchers around the world deploy lab environments to reproduce well-known attack scenarios, actively test detections, and learn more about the underlying behavior and implementation of adversary techniques. Since the release of th...

Hart and Microsoft announce partnership to incorporate ElectionGuard

On Thursday, June 3, 2021, via a joint press release on Microsoft Stories, Hart InterCivic and Microsoft have announced a partnership to incorporate ElectionGuard software developed by Microsoft into Hart’s Verity voting systems. The partnership makes Hart the first major voting machine...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Cybersecurity challenged to meet diversity goals

Organizations often know they need to identify and address their cybersecurity blind spots. They also know the technology exists to help them do that. However, they don’t often understand how to communicate this need within their organization to justify the expense, nor do they know how to share...

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...

Managing cybersecurity like a business risk: Part 1—Modeling opportunities and threats

In recent years, cybersecurity has been elevated to a C-suite and board-level concern. This is appropriate given the stakes. Data breaches can have significant impact on a company’s reputation and profits. But, although businesses now consider cyberattacks a business risk, management of cyber ris...

Microsoft identity acronyms—what do they mean and how do they relate to each other?

As a security advisor working with one to three Chief Information Security Officers CISOs each week, the topic of identity comes up often. These are smart people who have often been in industry for decades. They have their own vocabulary of acronyms that only security professionals know such as...

NERC CIP compliance in Azure

When I did my first North American Electric Reliability Corporation—Critical Infrastructure Protection NERC CIP compliance project it was 2009. NERC CIP was at version 3. It was the first mandatory cybersecurity standard that the utility I was working for had to meet. As it does today, the Bulk...

Microsoft Intelligent Security Association grows to more than 80 members

Sometimes an idea sparks, and it feels so natural, so organic, that it takes on a life of its own and surprises you by how fast it grows. The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA was one of these ideas. It was born out of a desire to be easy to do business with and be a better partner ...

Automated incident response in Office 365 ATP now generally available

Security teams responsible for investigating and responding to incidents often deal with a massive number of signals from widely disparate sources. As a result, rapid and efficient incident response continues to be the biggest challenge facing security teams today. The sheer volume of these...

Beyond the buzzwords

When I was a kid, Gilligan’s Island reruns aired endlessly on TV. The character of the Professor was supposed to sound smart, so he’d use complex words to describe simple concepts. Instead of saying, “I’m nearsighted” he’d say, “My eyes are ametropic and completely refractable.” Sure, it was funn...

Cross‑tenant helpdesk impersonation to data exfiltration: A human-operated intrusion playbook

In this article 1. Risk to enterprise environments 2. Attack chain overview 1. Stage 1: Initial contact via Teams T1566.003 Spearphishing via Service 2. Stage 2: Remote assistance foothold 3. Stage 3: Interactive reconnaissance and access validation 4. Stage 4: Payload placement and trusted...

Inside the attack chain: Threat activity targeting Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage, like any object data service, is a high-value target for threat actors due to its critical role in storing and managing massive amounts of unstructured data at scale across diverse workloads. Organizations of all sizes use Blob Storage to support key workloads—such as AI, high...

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,...

How to protect your CAD data files with MIP and HALOCAD

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Computer-aided design CAD files are used by design professionals in the manufacturing, engineering, architecture, surveying, and construction industries. These highly valuable files...

Zero Trust: 7 adoption strategies from security leaders

Microsoft considers Zero Trust an essential component of any organization’s security plan. We have partnered with Cloud Security Alliance, a not-for-profit organization that promotes cloud computing best practices, to bring together executive security leaders to discuss and share insights about...

XLM + AMSI: New runtime defense against Excel 4.0 macro malware

We have recently expanded the integration of Antimalware Scan Interface AMSI with Office 365 to include the runtime scanning of Excel 4.0 XLM macros, to help antivirus solutions tackle the increase in attacks that use malicious XLM macros. This integration, an example of the many security feature...

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...

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:...

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...

Go inside the new Azure Defender for IoT including CyberX

In 2020, the move toward digital transformation and Industry 4.0 took on new urgency with manufacturing and other critical infrastructure sectors under pressure to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. But the cybersecurity model for operational technology OT was already shown to be...

Cybersecurity best practices to implement highly secured devices

Almost three years ago, we published The Seven Properties of Highly Secured Devices, which introduced a new standard for IoT security and argued, based on an analysis of best-in-class devices, that seven properties must be present on every standalone device that connects to the internet in order ...

Unifying security policy across all mobile form-factors with Wandera and Microsoft

The way we work is evolving—technology enables more effective employees by helping them to be productive where and when they choose. Businesses have also been enjoying the productivity benefits of an always-on and always-connected workforce. While new business applications and device form-factors...

Azure Security Benchmark—90 security and compliance best practices for your workloads in Azure

The Azure security team is pleased to announce that the Azure Security Benchmark v1 ASB is now available. ASB is a collection of over 90 security best practices recommendations you can employ to increase the overall security and compliance of all your workloads in Azure. The ASB controls are base...

Going in-depth on the Windows 10 random number generation infrastructure

Throughout the years, we've had ongoing conversations with researchers, developers, and customers around our implementation of certain security features within the Windows operating system. Most recently, we have open-sourced our cryptography libraries as a way to contribute and show our continue...

Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC—Part 1: Organization

We’re frequently asked how we operate our Security Operations Center SOC at Microsoft particularly as organizations are integrating cloud into their enterprise estate. This is the first in a three part blog series designed to share our approach and experience, so you can use what we learned to...

How Office 365 learned to reel in phish

Today's post was coauthored by Debraj Ghosh, Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Jason Rogers, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft. We recently reported how we measure catch rates of malicious emails for Office 365 Exchange Online Protection EOP available with any Office 365 subscripti...

Turn specs into evals for any agent with ASSERT

Today, we’re releasing Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing ASSERT, an open-source framework for turning natural-language behavior specifications into executable evaluations. Every team building an AI system starts with a clear intention for the behaviors they want t...

Typosquatted npm packages used to steal cloud and CI/CD secrets

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 1. The lure: typosquats and spoofed metadata 2. Execution: npm lifecycle hook abuse 3. Gen-1 stager: HTTP C2 beacon and payload drop 4. Gen-2 stager: abusing the legitimate Bun runtime as a loader 5. Credential theft 6. Impact and blast radius 2. Mitigatio...

The Gentlemen ransomware: Dissecting a self-propagating Go encryptor

In this article 1. Pre-encryption 2. File encryption 3. Post-encryption 4. Defending against The Gentlemen ransomware 5. Microsoft Defender detections and hunting guidance 6. Indicators of compromise Ransomware that combines robust encryption with rapid lateral movement significantly increases th...

Stronger together: New Beazley collaboration enhances cyber resilience

Today’s cyberthreat landscape demands more than technical expertise: it requires a unified response team of technical responders, insurers, brokers, and legal counsel. This integrated approach is key to building long-term cyber resilience to help your organization anticipate, withstand, recover...

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Security Platforms, Q1 2023

Organizations need to protect their sensitive data including intellectual property, trade secrets, customer data, and personally identifiable information from both insiders and external cyber attackers. In fact, 80 percent of organizations experience more than one data breach in their lifetime.1...

Rise in XorDdos: A deeper look at the stealthy DDoS malware targeting Linux devices

In the last six months, we observed a 254% increase in activity from a Linux trojan called XorDdos. First discovered in 2014 by the research group MalwareMustDie, XorDdos was named after its denial-of-service-related activities on Linux endpoints and servers as well as its usage of XOR-based...

Secure your healthcare devices with Microsoft Defender for IoT and HCL’s CARE

It wasn’t long ago that medical devices were isolated and unconnected, but the rise of IoT has brought real computing power to the network edge. Today, medical devices are transforming into interconnected, smart assistants with decision-making capabilities. Any device in a medical setting must be...

Microsoft finds new NETGEAR firmware vulnerabilities that could lead to identity theft and full system compromise

The continuous improvement of security solutions has forced attackers to explore alternative ways to compromise systems. The rising number of firmware attacks and ransomware attacks via VPN devices and other internet-facing systems are examples of attacks initiated outside and below the operating...

Meet critical infrastructure security compliance requirements with Microsoft 365

Critical infrastructure operators face a hostile cyber threat environment and a complex compliance landscape. Every operator of an industrial control system also operates an IT network to service its productivity needs. A supervisory control and data acquisition SCADA system operator of a power...

Evolving beyond password complexity as an identity strategy

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 Troy Hunt, founder of Have I Been Pwned,...

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...

Protect your business from email phishing with multi-factor authentication

Cybersecurity has been in the news far more often in the past 12 months than in previous years, as cybercriminals escalated their activity during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. The seismic shift of hundreds of millions of people connecting and working from home every day presented cybercrimina...

New Security Signals study shows firmware attacks on the rise; here’s how Microsoft is working to help eliminate this entire class of threats

Cybersecurity threats are always evolving, and today we’re seeing a new wave of advanced attacks targeting areas of computing that don’t have the protection of the cloud. New data shows that firmware attacks are on the rise, and businesses aren’t paying close enough attention to securing this...

Microsoft brings advanced hardware security to Server and Edge with Secured-core

A cursory look at recent headlines reveals two clear trends. First, organizations around the world are embracing digital transformation using technologies across cloud and edge computing to better serve their customers and thrive in fast-paced environments. Second, attackers are constantly...

4 ways Microsoft is delivering security for all in a Zero Trust world

If there’s one thing the dawning of 2021 has shown, it’s that security isn’t getting any easier. Recent high-profile breach activity has underscored the growing sophistication of today’s threat actors and the complexity of managing business risk in an increasingly connected world. It’s a struggle...