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...

Microsoft Cloud Security solutions provide comprehensive cross-cloud protection

The infrastructure, data, and apps built and run in the cloud are the foundational building blocks for a modern business. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, you likely utilize every layer of the cloud—from infrastructure as a service IaaS to platform as a service PaaS to software as 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...

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...

Overview of rapid cyberattacks

Rapid cyberattacks like Petya and WannaCrypt have reset our expectations on the speed and scope of damage that a cyberattack can inflict. The Microsoft Enterprise Cybersecurity Group Detection and Response team worked extensively to help customers respond to and recover from these kinds of attack...

Microsoft offers several mechanisms to protect against ransomware

The start of a new year is the perfect time to reassess your security strategy and tactics especially when looking back at the new levels of ransomwares reach and damage in 2017. Its no secret that ransomware attacks are increasing. In fact, a business is hit with ransomware every 40 seconds. If...

From package to postinstall payload: Inside the Mastra npm supply chain compromise by Sapphire Sleet

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 1. Discovery and initial indicators 2. Dependency injection: the poisoned package.json 3. Typosquat analysis: easy-day-js 4. Staged delivery pattern 5. Obfuscation and payload analysis 6. TLS bypass to self-deletion 7. Timeline analysis 2. Who is Sapphire...

​​Explore practical best practices to secure your data with Microsoft Purview​​

According to the Microsoft 2024 Data Security Index, organizations experience an average of 156 data security incidents annually, and this cyberthreat continues to be a top concern for data security decision-makers.1 A full 82% of security decision-makers believe a comprehensive, fully integrated...

Microsoft continues to innovate to help secure small businesses

Small and medium-sized businesses are at the heart of our economy and are dedicated to driving value for their customers, whether that means trying new recipes, exploring new inventory, expanding services, arranging the shop so it’s easier to navigate, or keeping the shelves stocked with the...

Raspberry Robin worm part of larger ecosystem facilitating pre-ransomware activity

Microsoft has discovered recent activity indicating that the Raspberry Robin worm is part of a complex and interconnected malware ecosystem, with links to other malware families and alternate infection methods beyond its original USB drive spread. These infections lead to follow-on...

Structured threat hunting: One way Microsoft Threat Experts prioritizes customer defense

Todays threat landscape is incredibly fast-paced. New campaigns surface all the time, and the amount of damage that they can cause is not always immediately apparent. Security operations centers SOCs must be equipped with the tools and insight to identify and resolve potentially high-impact threa...

How nation-state attackers like NOBELIUM are changing cybersecurity

This is the first post in a four-part series on the NOBELIUM nation-state cyberattack. Microsoft started telling the industry about this extremely advanced cyberattack in December 2020. The NOBELIUM blog series—which mirrors Microsoft’s four-part video series “Decoding NOBELIUM”—will pull the...

How Microsoft Security empowers partners to build customer trust

As I reflect on my first year at Microsoft, it was both challenging and exceptional: from my remote onboarding in the middle of a pandemic to dramatic changes in the cyber landscape, to Microsoft’s critical role as a frontline responder in some of the most sophisticated cyberattacks in history an...

International Women’s Day: How to support and grow women in cybersecurity

Today, March 8, we are proud to celebrate International Women’s Day. The United Nations announced this year’s theme as “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.” As a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a leader at Microsoft, this is an important time t...

Compliance joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA)

Like many of you, I’m thrilled to have my 2020 calendar safely in the recycling pile. During that time though, you too might have noticed how, perhaps unknowingly, you were able to turn some of last year’s lemons into lemonade. Maybe you developed a deeper appreciation for everyday moments and th...

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...

Building a Zero Trust business plan

These past six months have been a remarkable time of transformation for many IT organizations. With the forced shift to remote work, IT professionals have had to act quickly to ensure people continue working productively from home—in some cases bringing entire organizations online over a weekend...

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...

Announcing the Zero Trust Deployment Center

Organizations have been digitally transforming at warp speed in response to the way businesses operate and how people work. As a result, digital security teams have been under immense pressure to ensure their environments are resilient and secure. Many have turned to a Zero Trust security model t...

Why integrated phishing-attack training is reshaping cybersecurity—Microsoft Security

Phishing is still one of the most significant risk vectors facing enterprises today. Innovative email security technology like Microsoft Defender for Office 365 stops a majority of phishing attacks before they hit user inboxes, but no technology in the world can prevent 100 percent of phishing...

Making Azure Sentinel work for you

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is the first Security Incident and Event Management SIEM solution built into a major public cloud platform that delivers intelligent security analytics across enterprise environments and offers automatic scalability to meet changing needs. This new white paper outlines be...

Defending the power grid against supply chain attacks—Part 2: Securing hardware and software

Artificial intelligence AI and connected devices have fueled digital transformation in the utilities industry. These technological advances promise to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of energy generation, transmission, and distribution. They’ve also created new vulnerabilities...

Changing the Monolith—Part 4: Quick tech wins for a cloud-first world

You may have heard that identity is the “new” perimeter. Indeed, with the proliferation of phishing attacks over the past few years, one of the best ways to secure data is to ensure that identity—the primary way we access data—can be trusted. How do we secure identity? Start by evaluating how use...

Afternoon Cyber Tea—From threat intelligence to chatbots: A look at AI in cybersecurity

I’ve often said our teams should be as diverse as the problems we are trying to solve. Hiring a diverse security team isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also good business. This is a topic I’m very passionate about, so I was delighted to interview Jane Frankland for the second podcast of...

Microsoft and Zscaler help organizations implement the Zero Trust model

While digital transformation is critical to business innovation, delivering security to cloud-first, mobile-first architectures requires rethinking traditional network security solutions. Some businesses have been successful in doing so, while others still remain at risk of very costly breaches...

Microsoft 365 helps governments adopt a Zero Trust security model

For governments to function, the flow of data on a massive scale is required—including sensitive information about critical infrastructure, citizens, and public safety and security. The security of government information systems is subject to constant attempted attacks and in need of a modern...

The quiet evolution of phishing

The battle against phishing is a silent one: every day, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection detects millions of distinct malicious URLs and email attachments. Every year, billions of phishing emails don’t ever reach mailboxes—real-world attacks foiled in real-time. Heuristics, detonation, and...

Unpacking the AsyncAPI npm supply chain compromise and import-time payload delivery

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. How the attack started: GitHub Actions pwn request 3. Mitigation and protection guidance 4. Learn more On July 14, 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified a coordinated supply chain compromise of the @asyncapi npm organization, a widely used set ...

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection

As threats become more coordinated and faster to execute, endpoint protection has become the proving ground for modern defense. For the seventh consecutive time, Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection. We believe this reflects both the...

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...

Exposing Fox Tempest: A malware-signing service operation

In this article 1. Fox Tempest’s role and impact 2. Fox Tempest’s malware signing as a service infrastructure 3. Defending against Fox Tempest-enabled attacks 4. Microsoft Defender detections 5. Indicators of compromise Fox Tempest is a financially motivated threat actor that operates a...

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 ...

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...

Defending against evolving identity attack techniques

In today’s evolving cyber threat landscape, threat actors are committed to advancing the sophistication of their attacks. The increasing adoption of essential security features like multifactor authentication MFA, passwordless solutions, and robust email protections has changed many aspects of th...

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 Strata Identity and Microsoft Entra ID solve identity challenges in mergers and acquisitions

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Along with every merger and acquisition between two companies comes the need to combine and strengthen their IT infrastructure. In particular, there is an immediate and profound impa...

Microsoft named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management for the 7th year​​

Protecting identity from compromise is top of mind for security professionals as identity attacks continue to intensify. Earlier this year we reported that we had observed a nearly three-fold increase in password attacks per second in the last two years, from 579 in 2021 to 4,000 in 2023.1 Identi...

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...

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...

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...

Securing your IoT with Edge Secured-core devices

A recent study conducted by Microsoft in partnership with Ponemon Institute included a survey of companies that have adopted IoT solutions and 65 percent of them mentioned that security is a top priority when implementing IoT. Attacks targeting IoT devices put businesses at risk. Impacted devices...

Protect your business from password sprays with Microsoft DART recommendations

Over the past year, the Microsoft Detection and Response Team DART, along with Microsoft’s threat intelligence teams, have observed an uptick in the use of password sprays as an attack vector. This threat is a moving target with techniques and tools always changing, and Microsoft continues to fin...

Franken-phish: TodayZoo built from other phishing kits

A phishing kit built using pieces of code copied from other kits, some available for sale through publicly accessible scam sellers or are reused and repackaged by other kit resellers, provides rich insight into the state of the economy that drives phishing and email threats today. We uncovered th...

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...

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...

Security Unlocked—A new podcast exploring the people and AI that power Microsoft Security solutions

It’s hard to keep pace with all the changes happening in the world of cybersecurity. Security experts and leaders must continue learning and unlearning to stay ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape. In fact, many of us are in this field because of our desire to continuously challenge...

Taking Transport Layer Security (TLS) to the next level with TLS 1.3

Transport Layer Security TLS 1.3 is now enabled by default on Windows 10 Insider Preview builds, starting with Build 20170, the first step in a broader rollout to Windows 10 systems. TLS 1.3 is the latest version of the internet’s most deployed security protocol, which encrypts data to provide a...

Hello open source security! Managing risk with software composition analysis

When first learning to code many people start with a rudimentary “Hello World” program. Building the program teaches developers the basics of a language as they write the code required to display “Hello World” on a screen. As developers get more skilled, the complexity of the programs they build...

What’s new in Microsoft 365 Compliance and Risk Management

The world has dramatically changed over the past three months. As Satya shared in our recent quarterly earnings, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. With that significant amount of rapid change, it’s more important than ever to make sure your business-critical...