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...

Microsoft Security: How to cultivate a diverse cybersecurity team

Boost creative problem solving with a diverse cybersecurity team In cybersecurity, whether we are talking about cryptocurrency mining, supply chain attacks, attacks against IoT, or COVID-19-related phishing lures, we know that gaining the advantage over our adversaries requires greater diversity ...

Rethinking IoT/OT Security to Mitigate Cyberthreats

We live in an exciting time. We’re in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution—first steam, followed by electricity, then computers, and, now, the Internet of Things. A few years ago, IoT seemed like a futuristic concept that was on the distant horizon. The idea that your fridge would be...

Making it easier for your remote workforce to securely access all the apps they need, from anywhere

Since I published my last blog, Five identity priorities for 2020, COVID-19 has upended the way we work and socialize. Now that physical distancing has become essential to protect everyone’s health, more people than ever are going online to connect and get things done. As we all adjust to a new...

Insights from one year of tracking a polymorphic threat

A little over a year ago, in October 2018, our polymorphic outbreak monitoring system detected a large surge in reports, indicating that a large-scale campaign was unfolding. We observed as the new threat attempted to deploy files that changed every 20-30 minutes on thousands of devices. We gave...

Partnerships power the future of better security

This post is authored by Jeremy Dallman, Principal Program Manager. Our goal in building the Microsoft Graph Security API is to enable customers to share insights and take action across security solutions to improve protection and speed response. By creating a connected security ecosystem,...

Guarding AI memory

In this article 1. What AI memory is and why it matters 2. What is an agent memory attack? 3. How Microsoft approaches memory security in Microsoft 365 4. A guiding framework for building safe AI memory 5. Key takeaways 6. Learn more AI memory transforms an AI system from a stateless tool into a...

Stopping attacks against on-premises Exchange Server and SharePoint Server with AMSI

Exchange Server and SharePoint Server are business-critical assets and considered crown jewels for many organizations, making them attractive targets for attacks. To help customers protect their environments and respond to these attacks, Exchange Server and SharePoint Server now integrate with th...

Octo Tempest crosses boundaries to facilitate extortion, encryption, and destruction

Microsoft has been tracking activity related to the financially motivated threat actor Octo Tempest, whose evolving campaigns represent a growing concern for organizations across multiple industries. Octo Tempest leverages broad social engineering campaigns to compromise organizations across the...

Using process creation properties to catch evasion techniques

We developed a robust detection method in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint that can catch known and unknown variations of a process execution class used by attackers to evade detection. This class of stealthy execution techniques breaks some assumptions made by security products and enables...

Catching the big fish: Analyzing a large-scale phishing-as-a-service operation

In researching phishing attacks, we came across a campaign that used a rather high volume of newly created and unique subdomains—over 300,000 in a single run. This investigation led us down a rabbit hole as we unearthed one of the operations that enabled the campaign: a large-scale...

7 ways to harden your environment against compromise

Here at the global Microsoft Compromise Recovery Security Practice CRSP, we work with customers who have experienced disruptive security incidents to restore trust in identity systems and remove adversary control. During 2020, the team responded to many incidents involving ransomware and the...

Microsoft to acquire RiskIQ to strengthen cybersecurity of digital transformation and hybrid work

Organizations are increasingly using the cloud to reimagine every facet of their business. Hybrid work has accelerated this digital transformation, and customers are challenged with the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyberattacks. Today, Microsoft is announcing that we have entered in...

CRSP: The emergency team fighting cyber attacks beside customers

What is CRSP? Microsoft Global Compromise Recovery Security Practice. Who is CRSP? We are a worldwide team of cybersecurity experts operating in most countries, across all organizations public and private, with deep expertise to secure an environment post-security breach and to help you prevent a...

Threat and Vulnerability Management now supports all major platforms

We are swiftly adapting to the lasting reality of a hybrid workforce, with the number of remote workers in the US expected to nearly double over the next five years, compared to pre-pandemic times. As a result, security teams are being challenged to rethink how to secure a growing and increasingl...

How far have we come? The evolution of securing identities

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,...

Protect your SQL Server on-premises, in Azure, and in multicloud

Azure Defender for SQL is now generally available for use with SQL Server on premises, in multicloud deployments on Amazon Web Services AWS, and Google Cloud Platform GCP, and in virtual machines on Azure. Azure Defender for SQL constantly monitors your SQL Server for known vulnerabilities and...

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...

Microsoft Zero Trust deployment guide for your applications

Introduction More likely than not, your organization is in the middle of a digital transformation characterized by increased adoption of cloud apps and increased demand for mobility. In the age of remote work, users expect to be able to connect to any resource, on any device, from anywhere in the...

How can Microsoft Threat Protection help reduce the risk from phishing?

Microsoft Threat Protection can help you reduce the cost of phishing The true cost of a successful phishing campaign may be higher than you think. Although phishing defenses and user education have become common in many organizations, employees still fall prey to these attacks. This is a problem...

UEFI scanner brings Microsoft Defender ATP protection to a new level

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection Microsoft Defender ATP is extending its protection capabilities to the firmware level with a new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface UEFI scanner. Hardware and firmware-level attacks have continued to rise in recent years, as modern security solutio...

Mobile security—the 60 percent problem

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association MISA guest blog series. To learn more about MISA, visit the MISA webpage. Off the top of your head, what percentage of endpoints in your organization are currently protected? Something in the 98 percent+ range? Most...

Mattress Firm deployed Azure Active Directory to securely connect Firstline Workers to their SaaS apps and to each other

Today, we have another interesting story for the Voice of the Customer blog series. Tony Miller and Jon Sider of Mattress Firm deployed Azure Active Directory Azure AD to create a secure authentication experience for employees, including their Firstline Workforce. Much like sleep and a good...

Afternoon Cyber Tea—The State of Cybersecurity: How did we get here? What does it mean?

Every year the number and scale of cyberattacks grows. Marc Goodman, a global security strategist, futurist, and author of the book, Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It, thinks a lot about how we got here and what it means, which is why he w...

How to mitigate rapid cyberattacks such as Petya and WannaCrypt

In the first blog post of this 3-part series, we introduced what rapid cyberattacks are and illustrated how rapid cyberattacks are different in terms of execution and outcome. In the second blog post, we provided some details on Petya and how it worked. In this final blog post, we will share:...

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...

Microsoft is named a leader in the Forrester Wave for XDR

“Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs.”1 This remains a reality for the many organizations that operate across siloed security tools, fueling the demand on security operations SOC teams, as advanced cyberattacks continue to increase in frequency and speed. That’s where extended...

Gain flexibility and scale with a cloud-native DLP solution

We’re living in a seismic era for data security. Chief information security officers CISOs have to contend with a digital landscape that seems to shift daily as more organizations move to remote and hybrid work, redrawing the boundaries for how data is used and shared. The cloud has enabled...

The Microsoft Intune Suite fuels cyber safety and IT efficiency

Today marks a significant shift in endpoint management and security. Were launching the Microsoft Intune Suite, which unifies mission-critical advanced endpoint management and security solutions into one simple bundle. The new Intune Suite can simplify our customers’ endpoint management experienc...

Detecting malicious key extractions by compromised identities for Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL cloud database service for modern app development. It offers a variety of advanced built-in features, such as automatic worldwide data replication, lightning-fast response types, and a variety of APIs. In this blog post, we describe security practices for...

Destructive malware targeting Ukrainian organizations

Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC has identified evidence of a destructive malware operation targeting multiple organizations in Ukraine. This malware first appeared on victim systems in Ukraine on January 13, 2022. Microsoft is aware of the ongoing geopolitical events in Ukraine and...

Widespread credential phishing campaign abuses open redirector links

Microsoft has been actively tracking a widespread credential phishing campaign using open redirector links. Attackers combine these links with social engineering baits that impersonate well-known productivity tools and services to lure users into clicking. Doing so leads to a series of...

Microsoft and NIST collaborate on EO to drive Zero Trust adoption

2020s Nobelium attack sent shock waves through both government and private sectors. 2021 has already seen large-scale nation-state attacks such as Hafnium1 alongside major ransomware attacks2 on critical infrastructure. The breadth and boldness of these attacks show that, far from being deterred,...

The critical role of Zero Trust in securing our world

We are operating in the most complex cybersecurity landscape that we’ve ever seen. While our current ability to detect and respond to attacks has matured incredibly quickly in recent years, bad actors haven’t been standing still. Large-scale attacks like those pursued by Nobelium1 and Hafnium,...

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...

How to organize your security team: The evolution of cybersecurity roles and responsibilities

Digital transformation, cloud computing, and a sophisticated threat landscape are forcing everyone to rethink the functions of each role on their security teams, from Chief Information Security Officers CISOs to practitioners. With billions of people around the globe working from home, changes to...

Empower Firstline Workers with Azure AD and YubiKey passwordless authentication

At the end of February, Microsoft announced the FIDO2 passwordless support for hybrid environments. The integration of FIDO2-based YubiKeys and Azure Active Directory Azure AD is a game changer. It combines the ubiquity of Azure AD, the usability of YubiKey, and the security of both solutions to...

Visionary security partners to be honored at the very first Microsoft Security 20/20 event

Microsoft Security 20/20 is nearly here and our team is putting the final touches on what we think will be a memorable event. Microsoft Security 20/20 will put the spotlight on companies and individuals with a clear-eyed view of the security challenges we face and smart solutions to help solve...

Guarding against supply chain attacks—Part 2: Hardware risks

The challenge and benefit of technology today is that it’s entirely global in nature. This reality is brought into focus when companies assess their supply chains, and look for ways to identify, assess, and manage risks across the supply chain of an enterprise. Part 2 of the “Guarding against...

Understand and improve your security posture with Microsoft 365

I kickstarted 2019 with a “dry,” keto January. And, as so often happens, I found a parallel between my personal life and my chosen industry, cybersecurity. In this case, it was measurement. How do you know if you’re healthy? There are clear indicators when you’re not healthy, such as a sore throa...

CISO series: Lessons learned—4 priorities to achieve the largest security improvements

In my past life as CISO, Ive worked for small companies, state governments, and large enterprises, and one thing that has been true at all of them is that there is an infinite number of security initiatives in each organization you could implement, yet the resources to accomplish those tasks are...

Sharing research and discoveries at PWN2OWN

The annual PWN2OWN exploit contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, brings together some of the top security talent from across the globe in a friendly competition. For the participants, these events are a platform to demonstrate world-class skills and vie for...

AI brands as bait: How threat actors are using the AI hype in social engineering

In this article 1. ChatGPT-themed lure leads to phishing kit collecting credit card data 2. Claude-themed phishing campaign collected credentials and access tokens 3. "Awesome AI Windows Plugin” malvertising deploys Vidar stealer 4. Fake DeepSeek V4 installers on GitHub delivered Vidar Stealer 5...

New Microsoft identity and data security capabilities to accelerate CMMC compliance for the Defense Industrial Base

As Department of Defense DoD Chief Information Officer Hon. John Sherman said recently, Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification CMMC is necessary to ensure that the United States raises the bar for protecting sensitive information.1 The DoD is leading by example towards this goal by implementi...

Unraveling the techniques of Mac ransomware

Ransomware continues to be one of the most prevalent and impactful threats affecting organizations, with attackers constantly evolving their techniques and expanding their tradecraft to cast a wider net of potential targets. This is evident in the range of industries, systems, and platforms...

DEV-0569 finds new ways to deliver Royal ransomware, various payloads

Recent activity from the threat actor that Microsoft tracks as DEV-0569, known to distribute various payloads, has led to the deployment of the Royal ransomware, which first emerged in September 2022 and is being distributed by multiple threat actors. Observed DEV-0569 attacks show a pattern of...

New “Prestige” ransomware impacts organizations in Ukraine and Poland

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC has identified evidence of a novel ransomware campaign targeting organizations in the transportation and related logistics industries in Ukraine and Poland utilizing a previously unidentified ransomware payload. We observed this new ransomware, which...

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...

New insights on cybersecurity in the age of hybrid work

As we approach the last week of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I think about what is top of mind for myself and my peers in security. The past year has continued the 2020s major shift in the way organizations operate. Recent data shows that 81 percent of enterprise organizations have begun the mo...

How cyberattacks are changing according to new Microsoft Digital Defense Report

In 2021, cybercrime has become more sophisticated, widespread, and relentless. Criminals have targeted critical infrastructure—healthcare,1 information technology,2 financial services,3 energy sectors4—with headline-grabbing attacks that crippled businesses and harmed consumers. But there are...