The science behind Microsoft Threat Protection: Attack modeling for finding and stopping evasive ransomware

The linchpin of successful cyberattacks, exemplified by nation state-level attacks and human-operated ransomware, is their ability to find the path of least resistance and progressively move across a compromised network. Determining the full scope and impact of these attacks is one the most...

Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC—Part 3c: A day in the life part 2

This is the sixth blog in the Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC series designed to share our approach and experience from the front lines of our security operations center SOC protecting Microsoft and our Detection and Response Team DART helping our customers with their incidents. For a visu...

Turning collaboration and customer engagement up with a strong identity approach

In these challenging times, it’s even more apparent that modern companies are managing a blended workforce that encompasses not only their full-time staff and customers but also their contractors, consultants, subsidiaries, suppliers, partners, and soon-to-be customers. Balancing friction-less...

Guarding against supply chain attacks—Part 3: How software becomes compromised

Do you know all the software your company uses? The software supply chain can be complex and opaque. It’s comprised of software that businesses use to run operations, such as customer relationship management CRM, enterprise resource planning ERP, and project management. It also includes the...

Data privacy is about more than compliance—it’s about being a good world citizen

Happy Data Privacy Day! Begun in 2007 in the European Union E.U. and adopted by the U.S. in 2008, Data Privacy Day is an international effort to encourage better protection of data and respect for privacy. It’s a timely topic given the recent enactment of the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA...

How to secure your IoT deployment during the security talent shortage

Businesses across industries are placing bigger and bigger bets on the Internet of Things IoT as they look to unlock valuable business opportunities. But time and time again, as I meet with device manufacturers and businesses considering IoT deployments, there are concerns over the complexity of...

​​What’s new in Microsoft Security: June 2026

As organizations scale AI and agents across environments, security teams need protection that covers every surface. The Microsoft vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. This month’s updates help security and IT teams strengthen identity and...

Contagious Interview: Malware delivered through fake developer job interviews

Microsoft Defender Experts has observed the Contagious Interview campaign, a sophisticated social engineering operation active since at least December 2022. Microsoft continues to detect activity associated with this campaign in recent customer environments, targeting software developers at...

New Microsoft Secure Future Initiative (SFI) patterns and practices: Practical guides to strengthen security

Building on the momentum of our initial launch of the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative SFI patterns and practices, this second installment continues our commitment to making security implementation practical and scalable. The first release introduced a foundational library of actionable guidanc...

Automatic Conditional Access policies in Microsoft Entra streamline identity protection

Extending our commitment to help customers be secure by default, today were announcing the auto-rollout of Microsoft Entra Conditional Access policies that will automatically protect tenants based on risk signals, licensing, and usage. Weve designed these policies based on our deep knowledge of t...

Defending new vectors: Threat actors attempt SQL Server to cloud lateral movement

Microsoft security researchers recently identified a campaign where attackers attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through a SQL Server instance. This attack technique demonstrates an approach weve seen in other cloud services such as VMs and Kubernetes cluster, but not in SQL Serve...

How Microsoft can help you go passwordless this World Password Day

It’s that time of year again. World Password Day is May 4, 2023.1 There’s a reason it’s still going strong 10 years after being created by cybersecurity professionals. A recent study that analyzed more than 15 billion passwords found that the top 10 most popular passwords still include...

Microsoft Entra delivers 240 percent ROI, according to new Forrester study

Every day we easily move between apps and devices while identity professionals work hard behind the scenes to improve technologies that make this digital experience more secure. With nearly 50 percent of data breaches caused by stolen credentials, its important for identity professionals to arm...

Microsoft supports the DoD’s Zero Trust strategy

The Department of Defense DoD released its formal Zero Trust strategy today, marking a major milestone in its goal of achieving enterprise-wide implementation by 2027. The strategy comes at a critical time as United States government networks continue to face nearly half the global nation-state...

Defenders beware: A case for post-ransomware investigations

Ransomware is one of the most pervasive threats that Microsoft Detection and Response Team DART responds to today. The groups behind these attacks continue to add sophistication to their tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs as most network security postures increase. In this blog, we detail a...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

The evolution of a Mac trojan: UpdateAgent’s progression

Our discovery and analysis of a sophisticated Mac trojan in October exposed a year-long evolution of a malware family—and depicts the rising complexity of threats across platforms. The trojan, tracked as UpdateAgent, started as a relatively basic information-stealer but was observed distributing...

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...

How Microsoft is partnering with vendors to provide Zero Trust solutions

As workplaces around the world embrace hybrid work, Zero Trust provides the guiding strategy that keeps companies secure. However, no two organizations are alike. The Zero Trust journey will look unique for every organization that implements it. This means we must work together to create solution...

Microsoft a Leader in 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Endpoint Management Tools

In today’s changing business world, where flexibility is more crucial than ever, we’re honored that Gartner has again recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management UEM Tools1. Over the last 18 months, millions of employees worldwide have had to shift their...

Microsoft announces recipients of academic grants for AI research on combating phishing

Every day in the ever-changing technology landscape, we see boundaries shift as new ideas challenge the old status quo. This constant shift is observed in the increasingly sophisticated and connected tools, products, and services people and organizations use on a daily basis, but also in the...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021

I am thrilled to share that Forrester Research has named Microsoft Cloud App Security as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021. Additionally, Microsoft received the highest score in the strategy category. People have increasingly used cloud apps to stay productive and...

Securing and governing data in a new hybrid work reality

The past year has led to an evolution in not only how we think about work, but more importantly, where work gets done. Arguably, gone are the days that your organization’s data is limited to the protected confines of your corporate network as your people continue to work remotely, return in some...

Securing Azure datacenters with continuous IoT/OT monitoring

Figure 1: Industrial cooling system for datacenters. As more intelligent devices and machinery become connected to the internet, Operational Technology OT and the Internet of Things IoT have become part of your enterprise network infrastructure—and a growing security risk. With every new factory...

Manage, govern, and get more value out of your data with Azure Purview

Data is the currency of today’s economy. Data is being created faster than ever in more locations than organizations can track. In fact, IDC has predicted that global data will grow to more than 175 zettabytes by 2025. To put that into context, that’s 175 trillion 1GB USB drives. At the same time...

Why we invite security researchers to hack Azure Sphere

Fighting the security battle so our customers don’t have to IoT devices are becoming more prevalent in almost every aspect of our lives—we will rely on them in our homes, our businesses, as well as our infrastructure. In February, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Sphere, an...

Microsoft announces cloud innovation to simplify security, compliance, and identity

2020 will be remembered as a year of historic transformation. The pandemic has changed the way businesses operate and people work. One thing that has not changed is our basic human nature and the need to feel safe. Being safe and feeling safe is what allows us to do more, create more, and have...

Vectra and Microsoft join forces to step up detection and response

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA guest blog series. Click here to learn more about MISA. Traditional security operations center SOC processes typically involve a wide variety of disparate event notification tools that force overworked analysts to battl...

Stopping Active Directory attacks and other post-exploitation behavior with AMSI and machine learning

When attackers successfully breach a target network, their typical next step is to perform reconnaissance of the network, elevate their privileges, and move laterally to reach specific machines or spread as widely as possible. For these activities, attackers often probe the affected network’s...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Revisiting social engineering: The human threat to cybersecurity

Most of us know ‘Improv’ through film, theatre, music or even live comedy. It may surprise you to learn that the skills required for improvisational performance art, can also make you a good hacker? In cybersecurity, while quite a bit of focus is on the technology that our adversaries use, we mus...

Barracuda and Microsoft: Securing applications in public cloud

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association guest blog series. To learn more about MISA, go here. Barracuda Cloud Application Protection CAP platform features integrations with Microsoft Azure Active Directory Azure AD and Azure Security Center. A component of CAP,...

Defending the power grid against supply chain attacks: Part 3 – Risk management strategies for the utilities industry

Over the last fifteen years, attacks against critical infrastructure figure1 have steadily increased in both volume and sophistication. Because of the strategic importance of this industry to national security and economic stability, these organizations are targeted by sophisticated, patient, and...

Protecting against coronavirus themed phishing attacks

The world has changed in unprecedented ways in the last several weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic. While it has brought out the best in humanity in many ways, as with any crisis it can also attract the worst in some. Cybercriminals use people’s fear and need for information in phishing attack...

Welcoming more women into cybersecurity: the power of mentorships

From the way our industry tackles cyber threats, to the language we have developed to describe these attacks, I’ve long been a proponent to challenging traditional schools of thought—traditional cyber-norms—and encouraging our industry to get outside its comfort zones. It’s important to expand ou...

Real-life cybercrime stories from DART, the Microsoft Detection and Response Team

When we published our first blog about the Microsoft Detection and Response Team DART in March of 2019, we described our mission as responding to compromises and helping our customers become cyber-resilient. In pursuit of this mission we had already been providing onsite reactive incident respons...

IT executives prioritize Multi-Factor Authentication in 2020

In 2020, many IT executives will roll out or expand their implementation of Multi-Factor Authentication MFA to better safeguard identities. This is one of the key findings of a survey conducted by Pulse Q&A for Microsoft in October 2019.1 Specifically, 59 percent of executives will implement or...

Securing the modern workplace with Microsoft 365 threat protection – part 3

This post is authored by Debraj Ghosh, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft 365 Security. Detecting ransomware in the modern workplace Over the last two weeks, we have shared with you the roots of Microsoft 365 threat protection and how Microsoft 365 threat protect helps protect the modern...

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 23 is now available

As security incidents and events keep making headlines, Microsoft is committed to helping our customers and the rest of the security community to make sense of the risks and offer recommendations. Old and new malware continues to get propagated through massive botnets, attackers are increasing...

​​Microsoft named a Leader in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

As organizations adopt AI, they must secure both cloud and AI environments through a unified security control plane as their attack surface expands. Because modern applications and AI workloads are built and run in the cloud, security teams must understand which exposures matter most, prioritize...

Securing our future: July 2026 progress report on Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative

Security is never finished. That conviction is where the Secure Future Initiative SFI started two years ago and continues to guide us today. AI is reshaping cybersecurity. Cyberattackers can discover vulnerabilities, chain attack paths, and scale exploitation faster than manual approaches allow...

From poisoned search results to GPU mining: A cryptojacking campaign abusing ScreenConnect and Microsoft .NET utilities

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. References 4. Learn more Microsoft Defender Experts identified an active cryptojacking campaign in which malicious download sites are surfaced not only through traditional search engine poisoning, but also through A...

Microsoft unveils expansion of AI for security and security for AI at Microsoft Ignite

The future of security with AI The increasing speed, scale, and sophistication of recent cyberattacks demand a new approach to security. Traditional tools are no longer enough to keep pace with the threats posed by cybercriminals. In just two years, the number of password attacks detected by...

Digital security sessions at Microsoft Ignite to prepare you for the era of AI

Thousands of security professionals will join us for Microsoft Ignite 2023 from November 14 to 17, 2023, where we will share how to embrace the AI era confidently, with protection for people, data, devices, and apps that extends across clouds and platforms. With more than 45 security sessions,...

From classroom to cyberfront: Unlocking the potential of the next generation of cyber defenders

In a world where the digital frontier is expanding and cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated with speed and scale, the guardians of our virtual realms have never been in greater demand.1 It’s important to leverage this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month to celebrate the people who keep u...

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...

Android apps with millions of downloads exposed to high-severity vulnerabilities

Microsoft uncovered high-severity vulnerabilities in a mobile framework owned by mce Systems and used by multiple large mobile service providers in pre-installed Android System apps that potentially exposed users to remote albeit complex or local attacks. The vulnerabilities, which affected apps...