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...

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...

Microsoft is a Leader in the 2021 Forrester Endpoint Security Software as a Service Wave

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Endpoint Security Software as a Service, Q2 20211, receiving one of the highest scores in the strategy category and among the top three scores in the current offering category. Forrester notes that “the focus on...

How to apply a Zero Trust approach to your IoT solutions

For many, 2020 was a year of survival as they rapidly transformed their businesses in response to a new normal. From enabling new remote and hybrid work models to implementing new technology to help optimize operations, the last year has seen a significant uptick in the proliferation and role of...

Center for Threat-Informed Defense teams up with Microsoft, partners to build the ATT&CK® for Containers matrix

The MITRE ATT&CK® for Containers matrix was published today, establishing an industry knowledge base of attack techniques associated with containerization and related technologies that are increasingly more ubiquitous in the current computing landscape. Microsoft is happy to have contributed and...

Automating threat actor tracking: Understanding attacker behavior for intelligence and contextual alerting

As seen in recent sophisticated cyberattacks, especially human-operated campaigns, it’s critical to not only detect an attack as early as possible but also to rapidly determine the scope of the compromise and predict how it will progress. How an attack proceeds depends on the attacker’s goals and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Meet the Microsoft Pluton processor – The security chip designed for the future of Windows PCs

The role of the Windows PC and trust in technology are more important than ever as our devices keep us connected and productive across work and life. Windows 10 is the most secure version of Windows ever, built with end-to-end security for protection from the edge to the cloud all the way down to...

3 ways Microsoft helps build cyber safety awareness for all

This tumultuous year has brought paradigm shifts across every facet of daily life. A global pandemic has pushed much of our lives online—work, school, entertainment, shopping, and socializing. But one thing remains unchanged: people everywhere share a common need for safety. Today, our need for...

Zero Trust: From security option to business imperative overnight

Not long ago when I spoke with customers about Zero Trust, our conversations focused on discussing the principles, defining scope, or sharing our own IT organization’s journey. Zero Trust was something interesting to learn about, and most organizations were very much in the exploratory phase. As...

Data governance matters now more than ever

Knowing, protecting, and governing your organizational data is critical to adhere to regulations and meet security and privacy needs. Arguably, that’s never been truer than it is today as we face these unprecedented health and economic circumstances. To help organizations to navigate privacy duri...

Secure the software development lifecycle with machine learning

Every day, software developers stare down a long list of features and bugs that need to be addressed. Security professionals try to help by using automated tools to prioritize security bugs, but too often, engineers waste time on false positives or miss a critical security vulnerability that has...

Introducing Microsoft Application Inspector

Modern software development practices often involve building applications from hundreds of existing components, whether they’re written by another team in your organization, an external vendor, or someone in the open source community. Reuse has great benefits, including time-to-market, quality, a...

The evolution of Microsoft Threat Protection, April update

Microsoft Threat Protection continues to energize the threat protection market with our most recent announcements. Customers are excited about the launch of Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection ATP, which extends Microsoft’s best in class endpoint security to Mac and adds powerful new...

Defend your digital landscape with Microsoft 365

What is it about the middle of the night that brings our fears to the surface? For me, it’s the unknown dangers that may confront my young daughter and how I will protect her. Fear of the unknown can also disrupt the sleep of a chief information security officer CISO who worries about the...

Solving the TLS 1.0 problem

The use of Transport Layer Security TLS encryption for data in transit is a common way to help ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data transmitted between devices, such as a web server and a computer. However, in recent years older versions of the protocol have been shown to have...

Here is Homeland Security, black swans, and thwarted cyberattacks

Last week, I had the honor of addressing The Homeland Security Training Institute HSTI at the College of DuPage as part of the HSTI Live educational series. The event featured other prominent speakers at the forefront of cybersecurity defense, including: Dave Tyson, CEO of CISO Insights, a global...

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...

Analysis of Storm-0558 techniques for unauthorized email access

Executive summary On July 11, 2023, Microsoft published two blogs detailing a malicious campaign by a threat actor tracked as Storm-0558 that targeted customer email that weve detected and mitigated: Microsoft Security Response Center and Microsoft on the Issues. As we continue our investigation...

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...

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...

How security leaders can help their teams avoid burnout

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 Voice of the Community blog series, Microsoft Security Senior Product Marketing Manager Brooke Lynn Weenig talks with Maria...

Practical tips on how to use application security testing and testing standards

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 Daniel Cuthbert, Global Head of Security...

Protecting SAP applications with the new Azure Sentinel SAP threat monitoring solution

As one of the leading solution providers for applications that manage business processes, SAP is the custodian for massive amounts of sensitive data in many of the biggest organizations in the world. Since these applications are business-critical, an SAP security breach can be catastrophic. Yet,...

How to secure your hybrid work world with a Zero Trust approach

We are operating in the most complex cybersecurity landscape we’ve ever seen. Sophisticated and determined attackers are the norm. And we all are preparing for the next great disruption—hybrid work. Security has never been more important, and as I shared in another Security blog today, it’s clear...

Medius’ small IT team supports distributed workforce with Azure Active Directory

In today’s Voice of the Customer blog post, IT Manager Jacob Andersson and IT Systems Architect Fredrik Frööjd of Medius share how Azure Active Directory Azure AD has inspired employees to live by the cloud commitment the company encourages from customers and helped their small team support a...

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...

Deliver productive and seamless user experiences with Azure Active Directory

Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are still working remotely, and our organizations are still adjusting. Top of mind for every IT leader in this current landscape is meeting users’ needs for seamless access to resources while safeguarding the business from cyber threats. The...

Microsoft Intelligent Security Association expands to include managed security service providers

We’d planned a splashy party at Microsoft Inspire to announce our newest Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA members and introduce them to association members, but given our world today, I am instead picturing you reading this announcement curled up in a chair with a cup of coffee...

The world is your authentication and identity oyster

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association guest blog series. To learn more about MISA, go here. The world is your authentication/identity oyster If you’re older than 10 years of age you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “The world is your oyster.” This basically mean...

Microsoft Build brings new innovations and capabilities to keep developers and customers secure

As both organizations and developers adapt to the new reality of working and collaborating in a remote environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that their experiences are secure and trusted. As part of this week’s Build virtual event, we’re introducing new Identity innovation to help...

Alternative ways for security professionals and IT to achieve modern security controls in today’s unique remote work scenarios

With the bulk of end users now working remotely, legacy network architectures that route all remote traffic through a central corporate network are suddenly under enormous strain. The result can be poorer performance, productivity, and user experience. Many organizations are now rethinking their...

Welcoming and retaining diversity in cybersecurity

I doubt I’d be in the role I am now if leaders at one of my first jobs hadn’t taken an interest in my career. Although I taught myself to code when I was young, I graduated from college with a degree in English Literature and began my post-college career in editorial. I worked my way up to...

Changing the monolith—Part 2: Whose support do you need?

In Changing the monolith—Part 1: Building alliances for a secure culture, I explored how security leaders can build alliances and why a commitment to change must be signaled from the top. But whose support should you recruit in the first place? In Part 2, I address considerations for the...

Rethinking cyber scenarios—learning (and training) as you defend

In two recent posts I discussed with Circadence the increasing importance of gamification for cybersecurity learning and how to get started as a practitioner while being supported by an enterprise learning officer or security team lead. In this third and final post in the series, Keenan and I...

Updating your cybersecurity strategy to enable and accelerate digital transformation

This post is authored by Cyril Voisin, Chief Security Advisor, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. Nowadays every company is becoming a digital company to some extent. Digital transformation changes the way business is done. For example, it puts more control into the hands of employees, who now deman...

From open lures to cloaked gates: How a macOS ClickFix campaign learned to hide

In this article 1. Activity overview 2. How ClickFix works 3. Campaign overview 4. ClickFix moved from open pages to fingerprinting gates 5. The fingerprinting gate 6. Mitigation and protection guidance 7. Indicators of compromise IOC 8. References 9. Learn more Microsoft Threat Intelligence...

What’s new in Microsoft Security: May 2026

At Microsoft, security innovations are purpose-built to help every organization protect end-to-end with the speed and scale of AI. Our vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. As organizations accelerate AI adoption, security teams are navigating...

Defense at AI speed: Microsoft’s new multi-model agentic security system tops leading industry benchmark

In this article 1. AI-powered vulnerability discovery at hyper-scale 2. Codename: MDASH—Microsoft Security’s new multi-model agentic scanning harness 3. Using codename MDASH for security research 4. The 5.12.2026 Patch Tuesday cohort 5. Two deep dives 1. CVE-2026-33827—Remote unauthenticated UAF ...

Signed malware impersonating workplace apps deploys RMM backdoors

In February 2026, Microsoft Defender Experts identified multiple phishing campaigns attributed to an unknown threat actor. The campaigns used workplace meeting lures, PDF attachments, and abuse of legitimate binaries to deliver signed malware. Phishing emails directed users to download malicious...

The future of AI agents—and why OAuth must evolve

I believe we're at the beginning of something extraordinary. Today's AI agents are already impressive—they're helping software engineers write code, assisting site reliability teams in troubleshooting systems, and handling a variety of analytical tasks. Yet, as capable as these specialized agents...

​​How the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative brings Zero Trust to life

In this blog, you'll learn more about how the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative SFI—a real-world case study on Zero Trust—aligns with Zero Trust strategies. We’ll share key updates from the April 2025 SFI progress report and practical Zero Trust guidance to help you strengthen your organization’...

Microsoft Security innovations from 2022 to help you create a safer world today

The start of a new year is always a great time for reflection—to be grateful for all we have and the progress security teams have made as well as look ahead to how we can reshape the security landscape. I use this time to think about goals for the future, and to reflect on the highlights,...

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...