Microsoft showcases the future of comprehensive security at RSA 2022

The last time the RSA Conference was held as an in-person event was in 2020. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. RSA is once again going forward as an in-person and digital event in San Francisco, from June 6 to 9, 2022. After two years of remote interactions, we’re excited to exchange...

Discover the anatomy of an external cyberattack surface with new RiskIQ report

The internet is now part of the network. That might sound like hyperbole, but the massive shift to hybrid and remote work and a multicloud environment means security teams must now defend their entire online ecosystem. Recent ransomware attacks against internet-facing systems have served as a...

Measure the effectiveness of your Microsoft security with AttackIQ

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. To improve an organization’s cybersecurity readiness, you need to test that your detection and prevention technologies work as intended and that your security program is performing a...

Microsoft Zero Trust solutions deliver 92 percent return on investment, says new Forrester study

In the last two years, we’ve seen a staggering increase in the adoption of cloud-based services, remote work solutions, bring your own device BYOD, and IoT devices as organizations digitally transform themselves to enable a hybrid workforce.1 Zero Trust has become the essential security strategy...

New research shows IoT and OT innovation is critical to business but comes with significant risks

The need for much improved IoT and operational technology OT cybersecurity became clearer this year with recent attacks on network devices,1 surveillance systems,2 an oil pipeline,3 and a water treatment facility,4 to name a few examples. To better understand the challenges customers are facing,...

Stay safe online this holiday shopping season with tips from Microsoft

You may have already noticed this holiday shopping season feels different than those we’ve had before. Headlines about supply chain issues, worker shortages, costs rising—all while the pandemic continues to impact our lives. In my own inbox, I saw emails from brands touting Black Friday sales as...

How Microsoft Defender for IoT can secure your IoT devices

Cybersecurity threats are always evolving, and today we’re seeing a new wave of advanced attacks specifically targeting IoT devices used in enterprise environments as well as operational technology OT devices used in industrial systems and critical infrastructure like ICS/SCADA. It’s not surprisi...

Microsoft achieves a Leader placement in Forrester Wave for XDR

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester New Wave: Extended Detection and Response XDR, Q4, 2021,1 receiving one of the highest scores in the strategy category. Microsoft 365 Defender was rated as “differentiated” in seven criteria including detection,...

How to prepare for CMMC compliance as a defense industrial base supplier using the Microsoft cloud

In 2020, the US Department of Defense DoD began the phased rollout of a new framework for protecting their supply chain, known as the defense industrial base DIB. This new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification1 CMMC system requires regular audits that will bolster the security of the DIB,...

Microsoft Joins Open Source Security Foundation

Microsoft has invested in the security of open-source software for many years and today I’m excited to share that Microsoft is joining industry partners to create the Open Source Security Foundation OpenSSF, a new cross-industry collaboration hosted at the Linux Foundation. The OpenSSF brings...

Phishing Abuses RMM Tools for Persistent Access

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. Learn More In July 2026, Microsoft Defender Experts observed phishing campaigns targeting organizations across multiple industries that distributed a masqueraded MSP360 Remote Monitoring and Management RMM installer...

Hunting MacSync Stealer infrastructure through behavioral pivots

In this article 1. Activity overview 2. Discovery of additional rotating infrastructure 3. Attack chain overview 4. Mitigation and protection guidance 5. References 6. Learn more MacSync Stealer is a macOS-focused information stealer that relies on changing infrastructure to deliver payloads,...

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...

Defending consumer web properties against modern DDoS attacks

If you own, create, or maintain online services and web portals, you’re probably aware of the dramatic upswing in DDoS attacks on your domains. AI has democratized tooling not just for us but for threat actors as well. DDoS in this era has extended from simple bandwidth saturation to sophisticate...

Case study: How predictive shielding in Defender stopped GPO-based ransomware before it started

In this article 1. The growing threat: GPO abuse in ransomware operations 2. The incident 3. The results 4. The hardening dilemma: Why threat actors love operational mechanisms 5. Predictive shielding: Contextual, just-in-time hardening 6. Closing the gap 7. References Summary Microsoft Defender...

Observability for AI Systems: Strengthening visibility for proactive risk detection

Adoption of Generative AI GenAI and agentic AI has accelerated from experimentation into real enterprise deployments. What began with copilots and chat interfaces has quickly evolved into powerful business systems that autonomously interact with sensitive data, call external APIs, connect to...

OAuth redirection abuse enables phishing and malware delivery

Microsoft observed phishing-led exploitation of OAuth’s by-design redirection mechanisms. The activity targets government and public-sector organizations and uses silent OAuth authentication flows and intentionally invalid scopes to redirect victims to attacker-controlled infrastructure without...

Phishing actors exploit complex routing and misconfigurations to spoof domains

Phishing actors are exploiting complex routing scenarios and misconfigured spoof protections to effectively spoof organizations’ domains and deliver phishing emails that appear, superficially, to have been sent internally. Threat actors have leveraged this vector to deliver a wide variety of...

Microsoft named an overall leader in KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Generative AI Defense

Today, we are proud to share that Microsoft has been recognized as an overall leader in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Generative AI Defense GAD, an independent report from a leading European analyst firm. This recognition reinforces the work we’ve been doing to deliver enterprise-ready...

Shai-Hulud 2.0: Guidance for detecting, investigating, and defending against the supply chain attack

The Shai‑Hulud 2.0 supply chain attack represents one of the most significant cloud-native ecosystem compromises observed recently. Attackers maliciously modified hundreds of publicly available packages, targeting developer environments, continuous integration and continuous delivery CI/CD...

Microsoft named a leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security

We’re honored to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security. We believe this recognition highlights the value of Microsoft Defender for Office 365’s innovative capabilities in addressing today’s complex email security challenges. Protect...

SesameOp: Novel backdoor uses OpenAI Assistants API for command and control

Microsoft Incident Response – Detection and Response Team DART researchers uncovered a new backdoor that is notable for its novel use of the OpenAI Assistants Application Programming Interface API as a mechanism for command-and-control C2 communications. Instead of relying on more traditional...

Microsoft raises the bar: A smarter way to measure AI for cybersecurity

ExCyTIn-Bench is Microsoft’s newest open-source benchmarking tool designed to evaluate how well AI systems perform real-world cybersecurity investigations.1 It helps business leaders assess language models by simulating realistic cyberthreat scenarios and providing clear, actionable insights into...

Investigating targeted “payroll pirate” attacks affecting US universities

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed a financially motivated threat actor that we track as Storm-2657 compromising employee accounts to gain unauthorized access to employee profiles and divert salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts. These types of attacks have been dubbed “payroll...

AI vs. AI: Detecting an AI-obfuscated phishing campaign

Microsoft Threat Intelligence recently detected and blocked a credential phishing campaign that likely used AI-generated code to obfuscate its payload and evade traditional defenses. Appearing to be aided by a large language model LLM, the activity obfuscated its behavior within an SVG file,...

Discover how automatic attack disruption protects critical assets while ensuring business continuity

Traditional security solutions often operate in a one-size-fits-all alert model that treats every detection equally, regardless of how important the asset is. But not all assets are equal. Critical assets are systems governing access, identity, or sensitive data. They are essential to an...

14 secure coding tips: Learn from the experts at Microsoft Build

Hey friends! If you are a developer, you know that writing clean and efficient code is just the starting point. Now, with AI playing a bigger role, secure coding isn't just a 'nice-to-have'—it's a must. Whether you're building web apps, working on cloud services, or adding AI to your projects,...

Threat actors misuse Node.js to deliver malware and other malicious payloads

Since October 2024, Microsoft Defender Experts DEX has observed and helped multiple customers address campaigns leveraging Node.js to deliver malware and other payloads that ultimately lead to information theft and data exfiltration. While traditional scripting languages like Python, PHP, and...

Top insights and best practices from the new Microsoft Data Security Index report

A whopping 74 percent of organizations recently surveyed experienced at least one data security incident with their business data exposed in the previous year. That’s just one of our interesting insights from Microsoft’s new Data Security Index: Trends, insights, and strategies to secure data...

Flax Typhoon using legitimate software to quietly access Taiwanese organizations

Summary Microsoft has identified a nation-state activity group tracked as Flax Typhoon, based in China, that is targeting dozens of organizations in Taiwan with the likely intention of performing espionage. Flax Typhoon gains and maintains long-term access to Taiwanese organizations networks with...

How Microsoft and Sonrai integrate to eliminate attack paths

Cloud development challenges conventional thinking about risk. A “perimeter” was always the abstraction that security teams could start from—defining their perimeter and exposing the cracks in firewalls and network access. With more and more infrastructure represented as ephemeral code, protectin...

Join our digital event to learn what’s new in Microsoft Entra

Editors note 6/15/2023: This blog has been updated to reflect the new date for this event, which is now July 11, 2023. It was previously scheduled for June 20, 2023. In today’s interconnected world, there’s virtually no limit to what technology can help us achieve. Millions of connections happen...

Discover a new era of security with Microsoft at RSAC 2023

We’re thrilled to participate and connect with you at RSA Conference 2023 RSAC from April 23 to 27, 2023, in San Francisco. Join your security peers as we welcome you to the new era of security—shaped by the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI—and introduce to you the recently announced Microso...

Do more with less with Microsoft Security—3 strategies to get you started

Relentless bad actors, evolving attack tactics, and numerous surfaces and endpoints that attackers may try to exploit. With the average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of USD4.35 million in 2022,1 protecting your people and data from adversaries is more important than ever. Plus,...

Do more with less—Discover the latest Microsoft Entra innovations

It has certainly been another intense year. From the ongoing pandemic to the Great Reshuffle to economic uncertainty, it’s truly felt like the only constant is change.1 In this economy, many organizations are looking for efficiencies. This is putting pressure on security teams, along with everyon...

How one Microsoft product manager acts as champion for identity security

A technology career embodies the ancient Roman saying that “luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Few industries are as dynamic, fast-paced, or intense as technology. With so many challenges to solve, opportunities are everywhere, but as I’ve learned myself through the years, the best...

Improving AI-based defenses to disrupt human-operated ransomware

Microsoft’s deep understanding of human-operated ransomware attacks, which are powered by a thriving cybercrime gig economy, continuously informs the solutions we deliver to protect customers. Our expert monitoring of threat actors, investigations into real-world ransomware attacks, and the...

This World Password Day consider ditching passwords altogether

Did you know that May 5, 2022, is World Password Day?1 Created by cybersecurity professionals in 2013 and designated as the first Thursday every May, World Password Day is meant to foster good password habits that help keep our online lives secure. It might seem strange to have a day set aside to...

The future of compliance and data governance is here: Introducing Microsoft Purview

The worldwide shift to a hybrid workplace has pushed us all to embrace ubiquitous connectivity. Those new connections have helped us become more collaborative; routinely editing and sharing documents in real-time from wherever we happen to be working. Instant messaging went from being a tool of...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2022 Enterprise Detection and Response Wave™ report

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2022. Microsoft received one of the highest scores in the strategy category and strength of current offering category. In the Forrester Wave assessment, Microsoft Defender f...

Cyber Signals: Defending against cyber threats with the latest research, insights, and trends

We’re excited to introduce Cyber Signals, a cyber threat intelligence brief informed by the latest Microsoft threat data and research. This content, which will be released quarterly, offers an expert perspective into the current threat landscape, discussing trending tactics, techniques, and...

What you need to know about how cryptography impacts your security strategy

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyber threats. In the latest post of our Voice of the Community blog series post, Microsoft Security Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Taurus SA Co-founder...

How Open Systems uses Microsoft tools to improve security maturity

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. We’ve all seen it happen—an organization has all the top-notch security tools in place and still, they get breached. In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, complexity leads to...

How to assess and improve the security culture of your business

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 Security Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Cygenta Co-founder and Co-Chief...

Encouraging women to embrace their cybersecurity superpowers

The cybersecurity challenges of today require a diversity of skills, perspectives, and experiences, yet women remain underrepresented in this field. On International Women’s Day, some Microsoft Security women leaders penned a powerful blog highlighting the underrepresentation of women in...

Improve your threat detection and response with Microsoft and Wortell

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. The way of working is changing rapidly. Many workloads are moving to the cloud and the pandemic accelerated organizations to provide infrastructure to aid employees working from...

Accelerate your adoption of SIEM using Azure Sentinel and a new offer from Microsoft

Take advantage of the efficiency benefits of Cloud-native SIEM using Azure Sentinel Today, security needs are evolving faster than ever—and the importance of being agile and cost-effective has never been clearer. Security teams need to get more done, faster, with less budget. On-premises security...

Recommendations for deploying the latest Attack surface reduction rules for maximum impact

The keystone to good security hygiene is limiting your attack surface. Attack surface reduction is a technique to remove or constrain exploitable behaviors in your systems. In this blog, we discuss the two attack surface reduction rules introduced in the most recent release of Windows and cover...

Securing the modern workplace with Microsoft 365 threat protection – part 2

This post is authored by Debraj Ghosh, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft 365 Security. Protecting the modern workplace against Ransomware Last week, we shared the roots of Microsoft 365 threat protection. This week, we want to share how Microsoft 365 threat protection services work...

First things first: Envisioning your security deployment

This blog post is part of a series that responds to common questions we receive from customers about deployment of Microsoft 365 Security solutions. In this series youll find context, answers, and guidance for deployment and driving adoption within your organization. Check out our last blog...