Hardware-based threat defense against increasingly complex cryptojackers

Even with the dip in the value of cryptocurrencies in the past few months, cryptojackers – trojanized coin miners that attackers distribute to use compromised devices’ computing power for their objectives – continue to be widespread. In the past several months, Microsoft Defender Antivirus detect...

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...

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...

Protect against phishing with Attack Simulation Training in Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Sophisticated cyberattacks are on the rise, with email phishing as the most common attack vector. We’ve seen it all over the news with stories like Hafnium that targeted Exchange servers1 or the Nobelium attack against SolarWinds,2 which show just how easy it is for bad actors to distribute a...

The importance of identity and Microsoft Azure Active Directory resilience

I love hearing my colleagues explain how they came to the industry because so many of their stories are unusual. I’m surprised how often I hear that people got into computer science by some fortuitous accident. Although he loved computers from the time he was a kid, Oren Melzer never expected to...

#BeCyberSmart: When we learn together, we’re more secure together

2021 has been a watershed year in cybersecurity. The pandemic continued to bring new challenges as attackers took advantage of overstretched security teams to unleash new human-operated ransomware1, malware, and nation-state attacks like those against Colonial Pipeline2 and JBS Food3. With the mo...

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...

How a positive hybrid work culture can help you to mitigate insider risk

As Vasu Jakkal recently shared, we are operating in the most sophisticated threat landscape ever seen, and coupled with the next great disruption—hybrid work—security is more challenging than ever. Protecting from external threats is only one part of the challenge, though. You also must protect...

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...

Empowering employees to securely work from anywhere with an internet-first model and Zero Trust

Like many this year, our Microsoft workforce had to quickly transition to a work from the home model in response to COVID-19. While nobody could have predicted the world’s current state, it has provided a very real-world test of the investments we have made implementing a Zero Trust security mode...

Microsoft announces new Project OneFuzz framework, an open source developer tool to find and fix bugs at scale

Microsoft is dedicated to working with the community and our customers to continuously improve and tune our platform and products to help defend against the dynamic and sophisticated threat landscape. Earlier this year, we announced that we would replace the existing software testing experience...

3 ways Microsoft 365 can help you reduce helpdesk costs

With more people than ever working remotely, organizations must maximize employee productivity while protecting an ever-growing digital footprint. Many have stitched together specialized security solutions from different vendors to improve their cybersecurity posture, but this approach is expensi...

Force firmware code to be measured and attested by Secure Launch on Windows 10

You cannot build something great on a weak foundation – and security is no exception. Windows is filled with important security features like Hypervisor-protected code integrity HVCI and Windows Defender Credential Guard that protect users from advanced hardware and firmware attacks. For these...

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...

Seeing the big picture: Deep learning-based fusion of behavior signals for threat detection

The application of deep learning and other machine learning methods to threat detection on endpoints, email and docs, apps, and identities drives a significant piece of the coordinated defense delivered by Microsoft Threat Protection. Within each domain as well as across domains, machine learning...

Modernizing the security operations center to better secure a remote workforce

The response to COVID-19 has required many security operations centers SOCs to rethink how they protect their organizations. With so many employees working remotely, IT groups are routing more traffic directly to cloud apps, rather than through the network. In this model, traditional network...

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,...

CISO stress-busters: post #1 overcoming obstacles

As part of the launch of the U.S. space program’s moon shot, President Kennedy famously said we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The same can be said for the people responsible for security at their organizations; it is not a job one takes because it is easy...

Steer clear of tax scams

In the month of February, we saw an average of 300,000 phishing attempts across Microsoft’s browsing platforms daily. Our security experts expect these attempted scams to become increasingly more prevalent through the April 15 Tax Day, especially in the two weeks leading up to it, when about 25...

Malicious AI Assistant Extensions Harvest LLM Chat Histories

Microsoft Defender has been investigating reports of malicious Chromium‑based browser extensions that impersonate legitimate AI assistant tools to harvest LLM chat histories and browsing data. Reporting indicates these extensions have reached approximately 900,000 installs. Microsoft Defender...

Microsoft shares threat intelligence at CYBERWARCON 2023

At the CYBERWARCON 2023 conference, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts are presenting several sessions detailing analysis across multiple sets of threat actors and related activity. This blog is intended to summarize the content of the research covered in these presentations and demonstrates Microso...

Announcing Microsoft Secure Future Initiative to advance security engineering

Today Microsoft’s Vice Chair and President Brad Smith shared insight on the global cybersecurity landscape and introduced our Secure Future Initiative. These engineering advances anticipate future cyberthreats, such as increasing digital attacks on identity systems. They also address how we will...

The next wave of multicloud security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

With digital transformation in the face of macroeconomic pressures, strategies to optimize both cloud environments and cloud security are increasingly appealing to enterprises. Organizations worry about vulnerabilities in code getting deployed, critical misconfigurations, overprivileged access to...

2023 identity security trends and solutions from Microsoft

Welcome to 2023! I wanted to kick this year off by having a quick look at the trends in identity security, what you can do about it, and what Microsoft is doing to help you. One of the things we talk about on the team is “shiny object syndrome”—there are a ton of innovative and scary attacks and...

Mitigate threats with the new threat matrix for Kubernetes

Today, we are glad to release the third version of the threat matrix for Kubernetes, an evolving knowledge base for security threats that target Kubernetes clusters. The matrix, first released by Microsoft in 2020, was the first attempt to systematically cover the attack landscape of Kubernetes...

Implementing Zero Trust access to business data on BYOD with Trustd MTD and Microsoft Entra

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. As more employees work remotely on a variety of devices and networks, businesses need a security model that supports this new operational efficiency. An expanding perimeter poses...

The many lives of BlackCat ransomware

The BlackCat ransomware, also known as ALPHV, is a prevalent threat and a prime example of the growing ransomware-as-a-service RaaS gig economy. It’s noteworthy due to its unconventional programming language Rust, multiple target devices and possible entry points, and affiliation with prolific...

Easy authentication and authorization in Azure Active Directory with No-Code Datawiza

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. The acceleration of cloud journeys fueled by the pandemic and ever-increasing concerns about data security and information privacy have made access management one of the hottest topi...

The final report on NOBELIUM’s unprecedented nation-state attack

This is the final post in a four-part series on the NOBELIUM nation-state cyberattack. In December 2020, Microsoft began sharing details with the world about what became known as the most sophisticated nation-state cyberattack in history. Microsoft’s four-part video series “Decoding NOBELIUM” pul...

How to investigate service provider trust chains in the cloud

In a recent Microsoft blog post, we documented technical guidance for organizations to protect themselves from the latest NOBELIUM activity that was found to target technology service providers, which are privileged in their downstream customer tenants, as a method to gain access to their...

archTIS and Microsoft: Zero Trust information security for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has seen a surge in growth during the pandemic with over 115 million daily active users and growing.1 With it, customer imperative for enabling safe and trustworthy online collaboration has also increased significantly. The speed and simplicity of Teams business users creating new...

3 steps to prevent and recover from ransomware

On July 14, 2021, the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence1 NCCoE at the National Institute of Standards and Technology2 NIST hosted a virtual workshop3 to seek feedback from government and industry experts on practical approaches to preventing and recovering from ransomware and other...

Advanced protection for web applications in Azure with Radware’s Microsoft Security integration

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA here. The state of application security Companies face a wide range of security challenges, such as Open Source Foundation for Application Security Project OWASP vulnerabilities,...

Microsoft delivers unified SIEM and XDR to modernize security operations

The threat landscape continues to increase in both complexity and the level of sophistication of the attacks we observe. Attackers target the most vulnerable resources in an organization and then traverse laterally to target high-value assets. No longer can you expect to stay safe by protecting...

Prevent and detect more identity-based attacks with Azure Active Directory

Security incidents often start with just one compromised account. Once an attacker gets their foot in the door, they can escalate privileges or gather intelligence that helps them reach their goals. This is why we say that identity is the new security perimeter. To reduce the risk of a data breac...

Exploiting a crisis: How cybercriminals behaved during the outbreak

In the past several months, seemingly conflicting data has been published about cybercriminals taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak to attack consumers and enterprises alike. Big numbers can show shifts in attacker behavior and grab headlines. Cybercriminals did indeed adapt their tactics to...

Gartner Names Microsoft a Leader in the 2019 Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) Magic Quadrant

We often hear from customers about the explosion of data, and the challenge this presents for organizations in remaining compliant and protecting their information. We’ve invested in capabilities across the landscape of information protection and information governance, inclusive of archiving,...

Attack inception: Compromised supply chain within a supply chain poses new risks

A new software supply chain attack unearthed by Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Windows Defender ATP emerged as an unusual multi-tier case. Unknown attackers compromised the shared infrastructure in place between the vendor of a PDF editor application and one of its software vendor...

The need and opportunity for adaptive prevention in the cloud

This post is authored by Michael Bargury, Data Scientist, C+E Security. The need The cloud introduces new security challenges, which differ from classic ones by diversity and scale. Once a Virtual Machine VM is up and running with an open internet port, it is almost instantaneously subject to...

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...

CNAPP evolution: How Microsoft aligns with leading cloud risk management platforms

Cloud security is shifting from visibility to context-aware risk reduction, helping security teams understand which exposures matter most, prioritize what can be exploited, and reduce risk across the application lifecycle. As organizations continue to expand across multicloud environments,...

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...

How implementing a trust fabric strengthens identity and network

The identity security landscape is transforming rapidly. Every digital experience and interaction is an opportunity for people to connect, share, and collaborate. But first, we need to know we can trust those digital experiences and interactions. Customers note a massive rise in the sheer number ...

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now stops human-operated attacks on its own

Defenders need every edge they can get in the fight against ransomware. Today, were pleased to announce that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers will now be able automatically to disrupt human-operated attacks like ransomware early in the kill chain without needing to deploy any other...

Getting started with the CDMC framework—Microsoft’s guide to cloud data management

On March 20, 2023, Microsoft announced the successful completion of the Cloud Data Management Capabilities CDMC certification. As a proponent of wider industry standards, I was fortunate to be part of Microsoft’s executive team working to achieve this important milestone. Beginning in 2020, we...

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms

The state of cybersecurity continues to challenge defenders around the world. With hybrid work here to stay and emerging trends like Ransomware as a Service, organizations need a partner that empowers them with not only modern endpoint security but an integrated solution that helps security...

Microsoft 365 Defender demonstrates industry-leading protection in the 2022 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations

For the fourth consecutive year, Microsoft 365 Defender demonstrated its industry-leading protection in MITRE Engenuity’s independent ATT&CK® Enterprise Evaluations, showcasing the value of an integrated XDR-based defense that unifies device and identity protection with a Zero Trust approach:...

MSTICPy January 2022 hackathon highlights

During the month of January 2022, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC ran its inaugural hackathon for the open-source Jupyter and Python Security Tools library, MSTICPy. We asked the security community for their contributions to expand and improve MSTICPy’s features and capabilities, a...

‘Ice phishing’ on the blockchain

The technologies that connect us are continually advancing, and while this brings tremendous new capabilities to users, it also opens new attack surfaces for adversaries and abusers. Social engineering represents a class of threats that has extended to virtually every technology that enables huma...

Adopting a Zero Trust approach throughout the lifecycle of data

Instead of believing everything behind the corporate firewall is safe, the Zero Trust model assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an uncontrolled network. Regardless of where the request originates or what resource it accesses, Zero Trust teaches us to “never trust...