A one-prompt attack that breaks LLM safety alignment

Large language models LLMs and diffusion models now power a wide range of applications, from document assistance to text-to-image generation, and users increasingly expect these systems to be safety-aligned by default. Yet safety alignment is only as robust as its weakest failure mode. Despite...

Analysis of active exploitation of SolarWinds Web Help Desk

The Microsoft Defender Research Team observed a multi‑stage intrusion where threat actors exploited internet‑exposed SolarWinds Web Help Desk WHD instances to get an initial foothold and then laterally moved towards other high-value assets within the organization. However, we have not yet confirm...

From runtime risk to real‑time defense: Securing AI agents

AI agents, whether developed in Microsoft Copilot Studio or on alternative platforms, are becoming a powerful means for organizations to create custom solutions designed to enhance productivity and automate organizational processes by seamlessly integrating with internal data and systems. From a...

XCSSET evolves again: Analyzing the latest updates to XCSSET’s inventory

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified yet another XCSSET variant in the wild that introduces further updates and new modules beyond those detailed in our March 2025 blog post. The XCSSET malware is designed to infect Xcode projects, typically used by software developers, and run while an...

How MSRC coordinates vulnerability research and disclosure while building community

In an era where discovering and rapidly mitigating security vulnerabilities is more important than ever before, the Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC is at the center of this work. MSRC focuses on investigating vulnerabilities, coordinating their disclosure, and releasing security updates t...

Malvertising campaign leads to info stealers hosted on GitHub

In early December 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detected a large-scale malvertising campaign that impacted nearly one million devices globally in an opportunistic attack to steal information. The attack originated from illegal streaming websites embedded with malvertising redirectors, leadi...

Moonstone Sleet emerges as new North Korean threat actor with new bag of tricks

Microsoft has identified a new North Korean threat actor, now tracked as Moonstone Sleet formerly Storm-1789, that uses both a combination of many tried-and-true techniques used by other North Korean threat actors and unique attack methodologies to target companies for its financial and...

Automatic disruption of human-operated attacks through containment of compromised user accounts

Our experience and insights from real-world incidents tell us that the swift containment of compromised user accounts is key to disrupting hands-on-keyboard attacks, especially those that involve human-operated ransomware. In these attacks, lateral movement follows initial access as the next...

New security features in Windows 11 protect users and empower IT

While attacks are getting more sophisticated, so are our defenses. With recent innovations like secured-core PCs that are 60 percent more resilient to malware than non-secured-core PCs,1 and the Microsoft Pluton Security Processor that adds more protection by isolating sensitive data like...

Microsoft AI Red Team building future of safer AI

An essential part of shipping software securely is red teaming. It broadly refers to the practice of emulating real-world adversaries and their tools, tactics, and procedures to identify risks, uncover blind spots, validate assumptions, and improve the overall security posture of systems. Microso...

Microsoft Inspire: Partner resources to prepare for the future of security with AI

Cybersecurity is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. With an ever-changing threat landscape and siloed data across multiple security point solutions, defenders have limited visibility. It’s difficult to stay current and find cybersecurity professionals amid the global talent shortage...

How automation is evolving SecOps—and the real cost of cybercrime

This post is coauthored by Rob May, Founder and Managing Director, ramsac 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...

Cyber Signals: Shifting tactics fuel surge in business email compromise

Today we released the fourth edition of Cyber Signals highlighting a surge in cybercriminal activity around business email compromise BEC. Microsoft has observed a 38 percent increase in cybercrime as a service CaaS targeting business email between 2019 and 2022.1 Successful BEC attacks cost...

Improve supply chain security and resiliency with Microsoft

Let’s start with the bad news. Cybersecurity breaches can be particularly devastating for supply chains, which involve multiple parties and sensitive information. As operational technology OT devices become increasingly connected, blurring the gap between IT and OT environments, the risk of hacke...

Latest Microsoft Entra advancements strengthen identity security

If you read behind the attention-grabbing headlines, most novel techniques rely on compromised identities.1 In fact, of all the ways an attacker can get into your digital estate, identity compromise is still the most common.2 This makes identity your first line of defense. In many organizations,...

Secure your endpoints with Transparity and Microsoft

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Endpoint protection platforms EPPs are dead and no longer sufficient to protect your organization, right? Wrong. When it comes to cybersecurity, the ability to normalize and correlat...

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...

New security features for Windows 11 will help protect hybrid work

Attackers haven’t wasted any time capitalizing on the rapid move to hybrid work. Every day cybercriminals and nation-states alike have improved their targeting, speed, and accuracy as the world adapted to working outside the office. These changes have put "cybersecurity issues and risks” at the t...

Microsoft shares 4 challenges of protecting sensitive data and how to overcome them

Breaches of sensitive data are extremely costly for organizations when you tally data loss, stock price impact, and mandated fines from violations of General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA, or other regulations. They also can diminish the trust of those who...

Gartner® names Microsoft a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Information Archiving

With data doubling every two years, it is more critical than ever to have simple and integrated tools to understand and manage risks to an organization. As more people work remotely, users collaborate and store data in different locations. These secular trends offer new possibilities in how work...

AI-driven adaptive protection against human-operated ransomware

In human-operated ransomware attacks, threat actors use predictable methods to enter a device but eventually rely on hands-on-keyboard activities to move inside a network. To fortify our existing cloud-delivered automated protection against complex attacks like human-operated ransomware, we...

Microsoft is a 5-time Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management

We are honored that Gartner recognized Microsoft as a Leader in Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Access Management in Microsoft Azure Active Directory Azure AD. In addition, Microsoft has placed the farthest right on the “Completeness of Vision” axis. None of this is possible without you, our...

3 trends shaping identity as the center of modern security

I recently returned from Kenya, where I visited our Microsoft Nairobi development center. Like many of you, I’ve mostly worked from home for the past year and more, so it was refreshing to meet members of our global team and inspiring to feel their passion for our mission: delivering identity...

Why diversity is important for a strong cybersecurity team

Medicine. Aeronautics. Academia. When you’re a cybersecurity professional, the colleague next to you could have started in one of these industries—or just about any other you can imagine. The backgrounds of cybersecurity professionals are more diverse than those of professionals in other...

CISO Stressbusters Post #3: 3 ways to share accountability for security risk management

Jim Eckart, former Chief Information Security Officer CISO of The Coca-Cola Company and current Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft shares his advice for relieving stress in today’s CISO Stressbuster post. If you are a CISO, it can feel like the responsibility for keeping the company secure rests...

Gartner names Microsoft a Leader in the 2019 Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) Magic Quadrant

In Gartner’s third annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers CASB, Microsoft was named a Leader based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the CASB market. Microsoft was also identified as strongest in execution. Gartner led the industry when they defined the term...

Building a world without passwords

Nobody likes passwords. They are inconvenient, insecure, and expensive. In fact, we dislike them so much that weve been busy at work trying to create a world without them a world without passwords. In this blog, we will provide a brief insight into how we at Microsoft think about solving this...

Application fuzzing in the era of Machine Learning and AI

Proactively testing software for bugs is not new. The earliest examples date back to the 1950s with the term fuzzing. Fuzzing as we now refer to it is the injection of random inputs and commands into applications. It made its debut quite literally on a dark and stormy night in 1988. Since then,...

The hidden network: Inside the phishing infrastructure ecosystem powering global cybercrime

In this article 1. Uncovering the shadow world of a phishing kit ecosystem 2. Storm-3119: YAM Store, the power broker 3. Storm-2990: The Iron Man System phishing kit 4. Downstream activity from Storm-2990 phishing kits 5. Mitigation and protection guidance 6. Microsoft Defender detections 7...

Threat matrix: Mapping threats across cloud web applications

In this article 1. Overview 2. Technique Catalog 3. Privilege Escalation 4. Mitigation and protection guidance 5. References 6. Learn more Microsoft introduces the cloud web applications threat matrix, a MITRE ATT &CK-aligned framework that helps defenders understand, prioritize, and mitigate...

Microsoft named a Leader in the Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, 2026

Security teams are overwhelmed with findings but still struggle to answer a simple question: which risks matter right now? A vulnerability alone is rarely the problem. The same vulnerability running in production, exposed through a misconfiguration or over-permissioned identity, is a real path to...

Advance Zero Trust for AI: New tools and guidance to secure AI agents and DevSecOps

The calculus of cybersecurity has changed. AI is reshaping how organizations build, deploy, operate, and defend digital systems. AI-powered development tools, agents, and autonomous workflows are accelerating innovation but they are also introducing new attack surfaces, new trust boundaries, and...

Microsoft Entra ID security updates: Passkeys are the default authentication method in Entra ID

As identity attacks grow more sophisticated in the AI era, organizations need stronger authentication methods that protect users from phishing, credential theft, and social engineering. To address these evolving threats, Microsoft Entra ID is updating its authentication experience by making...

Microsoft Defender email security benchmarking: Key insights from one year of data

Microsoft publishes quarterly email security benchmarking data comparing Microsoft Defender against secure email gateway SEG and integrated cloud email security ICES vendors using real-world threat telemetry. A year ago, we set out to change how email security effectiveness is measured. With our...

World Passkey Day: Advancing passwordless authentication

World Passkey Day is a chance to reflect on progress toward a shared goal: reducing our reliance on passwords and other phishable authentication methods by accelerating passkey adoption. As cyberattacks become more automated and AI-powered, each account is only as secure as its weakest credential...

8 best practices for CISOs conducting risk reviews

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...

Governing AI agent behavior: Aligning user, developer, role, and organizational intent

AI agents increasingly perform tasks that involve reasoning, acting, and interacting with other systems. Building a trusted agent requires ensuring it operates within the correct boundaries and performs tasks consistent with its intended purpose. In practice, this requires aligning several layers...

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...

When tax season becomes cyberattack season: Phishing and malware campaigns using tax-related lures

In this article 1. A wide range of tax-themed campaigns 2. How to protect users and organization against tax-themed campaigns 3. Microsoft Defender detection and hunting guidance 4. Indicators of compromise During tax season, threat actors reliably take advantage of the urgency and familiarity of...

Help on the line: How a Microsoft Teams support call led to compromise

In our eighth Cyberattack Series report, Microsoft Incident Response—the Detection and Response Team DART—investigates a recent identity-first, human-operated intrusion that relied less on exploiting software vulnerabilities and more on deception and legitimate tools. After a customer reached out...

Secure agentic AI for your Frontier Transformation

Today we shared the next step to make Frontier Transformation real for customers across every industry with Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Agent 365, and Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite. Introducing the First Frontier Suite built on Intelligence and Trust As our customers rapidly...

Women’s History Month: Encouraging women in cybersecurity at every career stage

Women’s History Month—and International Women’s Day on March 8, 2026—always gives me pause for reflection. It’s a moment to think about how far we’ve come and think about who we choose to uplift as we look ahead. Throughout my career, I’ve been inspired by extraordinary women leaders—trailblazers...

Signed malware impersonating workplace apps deploys RMM backdoors

In February 2026, Microsoft Defender Experts identified multiple phishing campaigns attributed to an unknown threat actor. The campaigns used workplace meeting lures, PDF attachments, and abuse of legitimate binaries to deliver signed malware. Phishing emails directed users to download malicious...

Threat modeling AI applications

Proactively identifying, assessing, and addressing risk in AI systems We cannot anticipate every misuse or emergent behavior in AI systems. We can , however, identify what can go wrong, assess how bad it could be, and design systems that help reduce the likelihood or impact of those failure modes...

Unify now or pay later: New research exposes the operational cost of a fragmented SOC

Security operations are entering a pivotal moment: the operating model that grew around network logs and phishing emails is now buckling under tool sprawl, manual triage, and threat actors that outpace defender capacity. New research from Microsoft and Omdia shows just how heavy the burden can...

The strategic SIEM buyer’s guide: Choosing an AI-ready platform for the agentic era

As the agentic era reshapes security operations, leaders face a strategic inflection point: legacy security information and event management SIEM solutions and fragmented toolchains can no longer keep pace with the scale, speed, and complexity of modern cyberthreats. Organizations can choose to...

80% of Fortune 500 use active AI Agents: Observability, governance, and security shape the new frontier

Today, Microsoft is releasing the new Cyber Pulse report to provide leaders with straightforward, practical insights and guidance on new cybersecurity risks. One of today’s most pressing concerns is the governance of AI and autonomous agents. AI agents are scaling faster than some companies can s...

New Microsoft Data Security Index report explores secure AI adoption to protect sensitive data

Generative AI and agentic AI are redefining how organizations innovate and operate, unlocking new levels of productivity, creativity and collaboration across industry teams. From accelerating content creation to streamlining workflows, AI offers transformative benefits that empower organizations ...

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...

Azure mandatory multifactor authentication: Phase 2 starting in October 2025

As cyberattacks become increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and damaging, safeguarding your digital assets has never been more critical, and at Microsoft, your security is our top priority. Microsoft research shows that multi-factor authentication MFA can block more than 99.2% of account...