1667 matches found
StilachiRAT analysis: From system reconnaissance to cryptocurrency theft
In November 2024, Microsoft Incident Response researchers uncovered a novel remote access trojan RAT we named StilachiRAT that demonstrates sophisticated techniques to evade detection, persist in the target environment, and exfiltrate sensitive data. Analysis of the StilachiRAT’s...
Strengthening identity protection in the face of highly sophisticated attacks
The post Strengthening identity protection in the face of highly sophisticated attacks appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog...
Applying security fundamentals to AI: Practical advice for CISOs
What to know about the era of AI The first thing to know is that AI isn’t magic The best way to think about how to effectively use and secure a modern AI system is to imagine it like a very new, very junior person. It’s very smart and eager to help but can also be extremely unintelligent. Like a...
Resurgence of a multi‑stage AiTM phishing and BEC campaign abusing SharePoint
Microsoft Defender Researchers uncovered a multi‑stage adversary‑in‑the‑middle AiTM phishing and business email compromise BEC campaign targeting multiple organizations in the energy sector, resulting in the compromise of various user accounts. The campaign abused SharePoint file‑sharing services...
From awareness to action: Building a security-first culture for the agentic AI era
The insights gained from Cybersecurity Awareness Month, right through to Microsoft Ignite 2025, demonstrate that security remains a top priority for business leaders. It serves as a strategic lever for organizational growth, fosters trust, and facilitates the advancement of AI innovation. The Wor...
How to build forward-thinking cybersecurity teams for tomorrow
We are witnessing something unprecedented in cybersecurity: the democratization of advanced cyberattack capabilities. What once required nation-state resources sophisticated social engineering, polymorphic malware, coordinated infrastructure now fits in a prompt window. AI is no longer a futurist...
Whisper Leak: A novel side-channel attack on remote language models
Microsoft has discovered a new type of side-channel attack on remote language models. This type of side-channel attack could allow a cyberattacker a position to observe your network traffic to conclude language model conversation topics, despite being end-to-end encrypted via Transport Layer...
Securing critical infrastructure: Why Europe’s risk-based regulations matter
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...
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...
Announcing public preview: Phishing triage agent in Microsoft Defender
Intelligent triage for a more agile, autonomous SOC At Microsoft Secure 2025, we introduced a new wave of innovations across Microsoft Defender aimed at redefining what AI can do for security operations. At the center of these announcements was the launch of 11 Security Copilot agents, each...
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...
Microsoft announces the 2025 Security Excellence Awards winners
In today’s rapidly evolving digital world, security requires a global community of defenders working together as a team to build a safer world for all. That’s why we’re thrilled to recognize the extraordinary individuals and organizations who have gone above and beyond in the fight against...
US Department of Labor’s journey to Zero Trust security with Microsoft Entra ID
For several years, Microsoft has been helping United States federal and state government groups, including military departments and civilian agencies, transition to a Zero Trust security model. Advanced features in Microsoft Entra ID have helped these organizations meet requirements to employ...
How the Microsoft Incident Response team helps customers remediate threats
Each year, organizations face tens of billions of malware, phishing, and credential threats—with real-world impacts. When an attack succeeds, it can result in grave impacts on any industry. For example, it could delay a police or fire department’s response to an emergency, prevent a hospital from...
How one Microsoft software engineer works to improve access management
There’s still a perception that the most successful computer scientists learn programming at a young age, study engineering at a top school, and then get a software development job right out of college. While that’s how many people enter the field, it’s not the only path. Microsoft Software...
How to disrupt attacks caused by social engineering
This post is authored by Milad Aslaner, Senior Program Manager, Windows & Devices Group. A decade ago, most cyber-attacks started with a piece of malware or a complex method to directly attack the infrastructure of a company. But this picture has changed and today all it takes is a sophisticated...
From guidance to action: Security fundamentals that materially reduce risk
AI has already made fundamental changes to the operating environment for cybersecurity. Cyberattackers are testing more paths, adapting their techniques, and moving across digital environments with greater speed and persistence. The weaknesses they exploit remain familiar: excessive permissions,...
Cybersecurity IR Workshop: The workshop you shouldn’t miss
In this article 1. What is the Cybersecurity Incident Response Readiness Workshop? 2. Our approach: How we assess your maturity 3. Learn more Cybersecurity incidents can unfold in hours, but response plans often fail at the point of execution: ownership is unclear, investigation findings is...
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,...
What’s new, updated, or recently released in Microsoft Security
New capabilities in Microsoft Agent 365; new Microsoft Defender and GitHub integration At Microsoft, security innovations are purpose-built to help every organization protect end-to-end with the speed and scale of AI. Our vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the ...
Identity security is the new pressure point for modern cyberattacks
Identity attacks no longer hinge on who a cyberattacker compromises, but on what that identity can access. As organizations manage growing numbers of human, non-human, and agentic identities, their access fabric multiplies across apps, resources, and environments, which increases both operational...
Detecting and analyzing prompt abuse in AI tools
This second post in our AI Application Security series is all about moving from planning to practice. AI Application Series 1: Security considerations when adopting AI tools established how AI adoption expands the attack surface and our threat-modelling guidance on the Microsoft security blog...
Microsoft Security success stories: Why integrated security is the foundation of AI transformation
AI is transforming how organizations operate and how they approach security. In this new era of agentic AI, every interaction, digital or human, must be built on trust. As businesses modernize, they’re not just adopting AI tools, they're rearchitecting their digital foundations. And that means...
Microsoft named a Leader in IDC MarketScape for Unified AI Governance Platforms
As organizations rapidly embrace generative and agentic AI, ensuring robust, unified governance has never been more critical. That’s why Microsoft is honored to be named a Leader in the2025-2026 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Unified AI Governance Platforms Vendor Assessment US53514825, December...
Explore the latest Microsoft Incident Response proactive services for enhanced resilience
As cyberthreats become faster, harder to detect, and more sophisticated, organizations must focus on building resilience—strengthening their ability to prevent, withstand, and recover from cybersecurity incidents. Resilience can mean the difference between containing an incident with minimal...
Imposter for hire: How fake people can gain very real access
In the latest edition of our Cyberattack Series, we dive into a real-world case of fake employees. Cybercriminals are no longer just breaking into networks—they’re gaining access by posing as legitimate employees. This form of cyberattack involves operatives posing as legitimate remote hires,...
Harden your identity defense with improved protection, deeper correlation, and richer context
In today’s digital-first enterprise, identities have become the new corporate security perimeter. Hybrid work and cloud-first strategies have dissolved traditional network boundaries and dramatically increased the complexity of identity fabrics. Security teams are left managing a constellation of...
Extortion and ransomware drive over half of cyberattacks
In 80% of the cyber incidents Microsoft’s security teams investigated last year, attackers sought to steal data—a trend driven more by financial gain than intelligence gathering. According to the latest Microsoft Digital Defense Report, written with our Chief Information Security Officer Igor...
The importance of hardening customer support tools against cyberattacks
The Deputy CISO blog series is whereMicrosoft 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...
Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Security starts with you
At Microsoft, security is our number one priority, and we believe that cybersecurity is as much about people as it is about technology. As we move into October and kick off Cybersecurity Awareness Month, this time of year really makes me think about how important online safety is—not just at work...
Protecting customers from Octo Tempest attacks across multiple industries
In recent weeks, Microsoft has observed Octo Tempest, also known as Scattered Spider, impacting the airlines sector, following previous activity impacting retail, food services, hospitality organizations, and insurance between April and July 2025. This aligns with Octo Tempest’s typical patterns ...
Planning your move to Microsoft Defender portal for all Microsoft Sentinel customers
In November 2023, Microsoft announced our strategy to unify security operations by bringing the best of XDR and SIEM together. Our first step was bringing Microsoft Sentinel into the Defender portal, giving teams a single, comprehensive view of incidents, reducing queue management, enriched threa...
Microsoft announces the 2025 Security Excellence Awards winners
In today’s rapidly evolving digital world, security requires a global community of defenders working together as a team to build a safer world for all. That’s why we’re thrilled to recognize the extraordinary individuals and organizations who have gone above and beyond in the fight against...
Agents are your newest insiders. Security must move at their speed.
Agents are rapidly becoming part of how work gets done. They can support a range of activities from writing code and researching products to analyzing revenue, processing expenses, and acting across the systems that run the business. To be most useful, they often need access to company data,...
Unauthenticated command injection on internet-facing mail servers: tracking CVE-2026-73570
In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. References 4. Learn More Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified and tracked exploitation of CVE-2026-73570 , an unauthenticated OS command injection vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite SNMP notificatio...
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...
Applying security fundamentals to AI: Practical advice for CISOs
What to know about the era of AI The first thing to know is that AI isn’t magic The best way to think about how to effectively use and secure a modern AI system is to imagine it like a very new, very junior person. It’s very smart and eager to help but can also be extremely unintelligent. Like a...
Access Fabric: A modern approach to identity and network access
Today, most organizations use multiple identity systems and multiple network access solutions from multiple vendors. This happens, either intentionally or organically, when different areas of a company choose different tools, creating a fragmented environment that leaves weaknesses that...
Cybersecurity strategies to prioritize now
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...
Microsoft named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management for the ninth consecutive year
I'm deeply grateful to our customers and partners for their continued trust and collaboration. We’re happy to share that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management for the ninth consecutive year. We feel this recognition underscores the...
Ambient and autonomous security for the agentic era
Over the past year, I've had countless conversations with customers who are striving to unlock human ambition with AI. They are on their journey to become Frontier Firms, where humans and agents push the boundaries of innovation and create new possibilities, empowering humans to become limitless...
The CISO imperative: Building resilience in an era of accelerated cyberthreats
The latest Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 paints a vivid picture of a cyberthreat landscape in flux. The surge in financially motivated cyberattacks and the persistent risk of nation-state actors demand urgent attention. But for those of us in the Office of the Chief Information Security...
Securing and governing the rise of autonomous agents
In this blog, you will hear directly from Corporate Vice President and Deputy Chief Information Security Officer CISO for Identity, Igor Sakhnov, about how to secure and govern autonomous agents. This blog is part of a new ongoing series where our Deputy CISOs share their thoughts on what is most...
Sharing practical guidance: Launching Microsoft Secure Future Initiative (SFI) patterns and practices
We’re excited to launch Microsoft Secure Future Initiative SFI patterns and practices : a new library of actionable guidance designed to help organizations implement security measures at scale. This launch marks the next step in our journey to make our SFI learnings practical for our customers,...
Navigating cyber risks with Microsoft Security Exposure Management eBook
Imagine steering a vessel through Arctic waters where 90% of iceberg mass lies hidden beneath the surface; your lookouts equipped only with telescopes and blind to the submerged threats. This parallels today's cybersecurity landscape: According to the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024, nearly...
New innovations in Microsoft Purview for protected, AI-ready data
The Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview teams are excited to be in Las Vegas from March 31 to April 2, 2025, for the second annual and highly anticipated Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. With more than 200 sessions, 13 focused tracks, 21 hands-on workshops, and two keynotes, attendees ca...
Discover 3 ways to take a holistic approach to data protection
The risk landscape for organizations has changed significantly in the past few years. Traditional ways of identifying and mitigating risks simply don’t work. While traditionally, organizations have focused on external threats, risks from within the organization are just as prevalent and harmful...
3 lessons from frontier AI vulnerability research
In this article 1. Shift 1. From frontier capability to scale 2. Shift 2. From token consumption to reasoning economics 3. Shift 3. Validation and remediation as a continuous learning loop 4. Transferring security research to help open source projects 5. Open-source vulnerability reporting snapsh...
CISO perspectives on managing vulnerability risks in the age of AI
Most of what has been written about AI and vulnerability management focuses on speed: how much faster frontier AI models can scan code, find weaknesses, design patches, and build exploits than any human team. That part is true, and it matters to how we remediate vulnerabilities. The more...
Reimagining the SOC for the agentic era in Microsoft Defender
The physics of cybersecurity are changing. So must the security operations center SOC. Cyberattackers are using agents to automate execution at unprecedented scale. What once required entire teams now requires a single operator and an agent framework. That shift has exposed a hard truth: security...