Norsk Hydro responds to ransomware attack with transparency

Last March, aluminum supplier Norsk Hydro was attacked by LockerGoga, a form of ransomware. The attack began with an infected email and locked the files on thousands of servers and PCs. All 35,000 Norsk Hydro employees across 40 countries were affected. In the throes of this crisis, executives ma...

#AVGater vulnerability does not affect Windows Defender Antivirus, MSE, or SCEP

On November 10, 2017, a vulnerability called AVGater was discovered affecting some antivirus products. The vulnerability requires a non-administrator-level account to perform a restore of a quarantined file. Windows Defender Antivirus and other Microsoft antimalware products, including System...

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

AI agents are now running on employee devices, cloud platforms, and across developer workflows. Security teams need to see those agents, govern what they can reach, and contain them when something goes wrong. This month's updates help you discover and control local AI agents, extend Zero Trust to...

​​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...

Turning threat intelligence into decisive action with Defender Experts

In this article 1. Upstream: See the campaign before it reaches you 1. In your environment: Follow the threat everywhere it moves 2. See it live at Black Hat USA Security teams have never had more visibility, yet rarely have they felt more uncertain. Signal pours in from endpoints, identities,...

GigaWiper: Anatomy of a destructive backdoor assembled from multiple malware

In this article 1. A wiper inside a backdoor 2. Backdoor capabilities 3. How GigaWiper was assembled 4. Conclusion: Multiple destructive capabilities consolidated into a single implant 5. Defending against destructive threats 6. Microsoft Defender detections 7. Indicators of compromise In October...

Accelerating detection engineering using AI-assisted synthetic attack logs generation

In this article 1. Core Idea: From TTPs to Logs 2. Approaches for Synthetic Attack Log Generation 3. Evaluation Datasets 4. References 5. Learn more Logs and telemetry are the foundation of modern cybersecurity. They enable threat detection, incident response, forensic investigation, and complian...

Undermining the trust boundary: Investigating a stealthy intrusion through third-party compromise

In this article 1. Abuse of trusted relationships as an attack delivery mechanism 2. Methods, tools, and access strategies 3. Campaign conclusion 4. Microsoft Defender detection and hunting guidance In recent years, many sophisticated intrusions have increasingly avoided using noisy exploits,...

Simplifying AWS defense with Microsoft Sentinel UEBA

In this article 1. Under the hood: The tables 2. Traditional vs. new approach 3. Real-world attack scenarios: Microsoft Sentinel UEBA in action 4. Practical implementation: Getting started 5. Limitations and constraints 6. From raw logs to behavioral context With the expansion of Microsoft Sentin...

Making opportunistic cyberattacks harder by design

This is part of a series of blogs and interviews conducted with our Microsoft Deputy CISOs , in which we surface a number of mission-critical security recommendations and best practices that businesses can enact right now and derive real meaningful benefits from. In this article, Ilya Grebnov,...

WhatsApp malware campaign delivers VBScript and MSI backdoors

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. Hunting queries 4. Indicators of compromise Microsoft Defender Experts observed a campaign beginning in late February 2026 that uses WhatsApp messages to deliver malicious Visual Basic Script VBS files. Once execute...

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...

How Microsoft builds privacy and security to work hand-in-hand

The Deputy CISO blog series is where Microsoft Deputy Chief Information Security Officers CISOs share their thoughts on what is most important in their respective domains. In this series, you will get practical advice, tactics to start and stop deploying, forward-looking commentary on where the...

Quantum-safe security: Progress towards next-generation cryptography

Quantum computing promises transformative advancements, yet it also poses a very real risk to today’s cryptographic security. In the future scalable quantum computing could break public-key cryptography methods currently in use and undermine digital signatures, resulting in compromised...

How to deploy AI safely

In this blog you will hear directly from Corporate Vice President and Deputy Chief Information Security Officer CISO for AI, Yonatan Zunger, about how to build a plan to deploy AI safely. This blog is part of a new ongoing series where our Deputy CISOs share their thoughts on what is most importa...

Microsoft partners with Global Anti-Scam Alliance to fight cybercrime

Being the victim of a scam can be devastating. Unfortunately, the number of people who can attest to the truth of this statement, either because they themselves have been scammed or because it has happened to someone they know, is growing. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance GASA reports that in 2024...

6 insights from Microsoft’s 2024 state of multicloud risk report to evolve your security strategy

Multicloud computing has become the foundation for digital businesses, with 86% of organizations having already adopted a multicloud approach.1 However, for all its benefits around increased agility, flexibility, and choice, we also see unique challenges with multicloud—including the need to mana...

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...

Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR helps triage, investigate, and respond to cyberthreats

It has been an eventful time since the introduction of Microsoft Security Experts.1 We launched Defender Experts for Hunting, our first-party managed threat hunting service for customers who want Microsoft to help them proactively hunt threats across endpoints, Microsoft Office 365, cloud...

Why a proactive detection and incident response plan is crucial for your organization

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 Matt Suiche, Director...

Get integrated Microsoft Purview Information Protection in Adobe Acrobat—now available

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Data security and compliance are a top priority for leaders as cyberattacks are on the rise. In fact, attacks have increased by 32 percent in the past year, and 1 in 40 organizations...

5 reasons to adopt a Zero Trust security strategy for your business

Adopting Zero Trust security for your enterprise is no longer a wish-list item—it’s a business imperative. The workplace today extends to almost anywhere, anytime, from any device. Siloed, patchwork security solutions leave gaps that threat actors continue to exploit. A comprehensive Zero Trust...

Microsoft shifts to a comprehensive SaaS security solution

Software as a service SaaS apps are ubiquitous, hybrid work is the new normal, and protecting them and the important data they store is a big challenge for organizations. Today, 59 percent of security professionals find the SaaS sprawl challenging to manage1 and have identified cloud...

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...

Microsoft Security reaches another milestone—Comprehensive, customer-centric solutions drive results

Yesterday, we shared some exciting news about the momentum we’re seeing in the security industry. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft Security has surpassed USD20 billion in revenue. I’m grateful to all our customers and partners who have been on this journey...

Digital event highlights new features in Microsoft Purview

Keeping your company and customer data secure has never been more complex. With multiple clouds, legacy on-premises systems, and numerous devices, it can be hard to keep track of what data you have and where it lives. On top of that, ever-changing employee roles make managing who has access to wh...

Cyber Signals: Risks to critical infrastructure on the rise

Today, the third edition of Cyber Signals was released spotlighting security trends and insights gathered from Microsoft’s 43 trillion daily security signals and 8,500 security experts. In this edition, we share new insights on wider risks that converging IT, Internet of Things IoT, and operation...

Rewards plus: Fake mobile banking rewards apps lure users to install info-stealing RAT on Android devices

Our analysis of a recent version of a previously reported info-stealing Android malware, delivered through an ongoing SMS campaign, demonstrates the continuous evolution of mobile threats. Masquerading as a banking rewards app, this new version has additional remote access trojan RAT capabilities...

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 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...

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...

Evolving Zero Trust—Lessons learned and emerging trends

Looking back at the last two years, to say that our security strategies have evolved would be an understatement. Organizations around the world made overnight transitions to remote work models in response to a global pandemic, forcing them to reassess attack surface areas as they underwent an...

Defend against zero-day exploits with Microsoft Defender Application Guard

Zero-day security vulnerabilities—known to hackers, but unknown to software creators, security researchers, and the public—are like gold to attackers. With zero-days, or even zero-hours, developers have no time to patch the code, giving hackers enough access and time to explore and map internal...

Azure LoLBins: Protecting against the dual use of virtual machine extensions

Azure Defender for Resource Manager offers unique protection by automatically monitoring the resource management operations in your organization, whether theyre performed through the Azure portal, Azure REST APIs, Azure CLI, or other Azure programmatic clients. In this blog, we will look into the...

What we like about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. It’s no secret that the security industry generally likes Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. After a few months of using and integrating it with our platform here at Expel, we feel the...

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving

Organizations face an increasing volume of data generated daily and ever-evolving regulations around how that data is managed. To help navigate this complex information landscape, we are focused on delivering integrated, intelligent, and user-centric solutions. Over the past few years, we...

Unilever CISO on balancing business risks with cybersecurity

Imagine showing up to work every day knowing that your job requires protecting 160,000 employees creating more than 450 products around the world—tea, ice cream, personal care, laundry and dish soaps—across a customer base of more than two and a half billion people every day. Unilever Chief...

Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2020: Cyber Threat Sophistication on the Rise

Today, Microsoft is releasing a new annual report, called the Digital Defense Report, covering cybersecurity trends from the past year. This report makes it clear that threat actors have rapidly increased in sophistication over the past year, using techniques that make them harder to spot and tha...

Microsoft Security: What cybersecurity skills do I need to become a CISO?

Build the business skills you need to advance to Chief Information Security Officer For many cybersecurity professionals, the ultimate career goal is to land a chief information security officer CISO job. A CISO is an executive-level position responsible for cyber risk management and operations...

Microsoft and Corrata integrate to extend cloud app security to mobile endpoints

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association guest blog series. To learn more about MISA, go here. The growth of mobile and remote work and the emergence of the “post perimeter” world has made keeping track of shadow IT a huge challenge for enterprise IT teams. What...

Barracuda and Microsoft: Removing security barriers to faster public cloud adoption

Barracuda’s CloudGen Firewall is tightly integrated with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN, Azure Active Directory Azure AD, Azure Security Center, and Azure Sentinel. Integrated into Azure, Barracuda’s networking and security capabilities enable customers’ secure infrastructure migrations and the use ...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2020 Enterprise Detection and Response Wave

I’m proud to announce that Microsoft is positioned as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020. Among the Leaders in the report, Microsoft received the highest score in the current offering category. Microsoft also received the highest score of all participating...

Machine learning vs. social engineering

Machine learning is a key driver in the constant evolution of security technologies at Microsoft. Machine learning allows Microsoft 365 to scale next-gen protection capabilities and enhance cloud-based, real-time blocking of new and unknown threats. Just in the last few months, machine learning h...

NeedyMantis: Unpacking a post-compromise malware family used in targeted operations

In this article 1. Observed operators and targeting 2. Malware packaging and distribution 3. NeedyMantis architecture and capabilities 4. Mitigation and protection guidance 5. Hunting queries 6. Indicators of compromise Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified NeedyMantis, a modular...

Counterfeit installers to system compromise: Tracking a deceptive software download campaign

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Campaign scope and targeting 3. Mitigation and protection guidance 4. References 5. Learn more Microsoft Defender Experts is tracking an active malware campaign that uses counterfeit software-download websites to impersonate trusted vendors and distribu...

Photo ZIP campaign targeting hospitality industry delivers Node.js implant for persistent access

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. References 4. Learn more Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified an active multi-stage intrusion campaign targeting organizations in the hospitality and hotel industry since April 2026. We’ve observed this...

Investigating Storm-2755: “Payroll pirate” attacks targeting Canadian employees

In this article 1. Storm-2755’s attack chain 2. Defending against Storm-2755 and AiTM campaigns 3. Microsoft Defender detection and hunting guidance 4. Indicators of compromise Microsoft Incident Response – Detection and Response Team DART researchers observed an emerging, financially motivated...

Mitigating the Axios npm supply chain compromise

In this article 1. Analysis of the attack 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. Microsoft Defender detections 4. Indicators of compromise 5. Hunting queries On March 31, 2026, two new npm packages for updated versions of Axios, a popular HTTP client for JavaScript that simplifies making HTTP...

Connect with the security community at Microsoft Ignite 2025

In today’s AI-powered world, security professionals are facing unprecedented challenges—and opportunities. As generative AI reshapes the digital landscape, the need for robust, intelligent, and adaptive security strategies has never been more urgent. At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we will showcase...

Microsoft Build 2023: Announcing new identity, compliance, and security features from Microsoft Security

At Microsoft Build 2023—an event for developers by developers—we’re going to announce exciting new features and technologies, share ideas, and help everyone boost their skills so we can all build a more secure future together. This year’s Microsoft Build offers a full program, both online and...