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...

Sophisticated cybersecurity threats demand collaborative, global response

Microsoft’s response to Solorigate Since December, the United States, its government, and other critical institutions including security firms have been addressing the world’s latest serious nation-state cyberattack, sometimes referred to as ‘Solorigate’ or ‘SUNBURST.’ As we shared earlier this i...

Addressing cybersecurity risk in industrial IoT and OT

As the industrial Internet of Things IIoT and operational technology OT continue to evolve and grow, so too, do the responsibilities of the Chief Information Security Officer CISO. The CISO now needs to mitigate risks from cloud-connected machinery, warehouse systems, and smart devices scattered...

CISO series: Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC—Part 3b: A day in the life

The Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC blog series is designed to share our approach and experience with security operations center SOC operations. We share strategies and learnings from our SOC, which protects Microsoft, and our Detection and Response Team DART, who helps our customers addre...

Changing security incident response by utilizing the power of the cloud—DART tools, techniques, and procedures: part 1

This is the first in a blog series discussing the tools, techniques, and procedures that the Microsoft Detection and Response Team DART use to investigate cybersecurity incidents at our customer organizations. Today, we introduce the team and give a brief overview of each of the tools that utiliz...

Deep learning rises: New methods for detecting malicious PowerShell

Scientific and technological advancements in deep learning, a category of algorithms within the larger framework of machine learning, provide new opportunities for development of state-of-the art protection technologies. Deep learning methods are impressively outperforming traditional methods on...

Making it real—harnessing data gravity to build the next gen SOC

This post was coauthored by Diana Kelley, Cybersecurity Field CTO, andSin John,EMEA Chief Security Advisor, Cybersecurity Solutions Group. In our first blog, Diana and I talked about the concept of data gravity and how it could, conceptually, help organizations take a more cloud-ready approach to...

Small businesses targeted by highly localized Ursnif campaign

Cyber thieves are continuously looking for new ways to get people to click on a bad link, open a malicious file, or install a poisoned update in order to steal valuable data. In the past, they cast as wide a net as possible to increase the pool of potential victims. But attacks that create a lot ...

How artificial intelligence stopped an Emotet outbreak

At 12:46 a.m. local time on February 3, a Windows 7 Pro customer in North Carolina became the first would-be victim of a new malware attack campaign for Trojan:Win32/Emotet. In the next 30 minutes, the campaign tried to attack over a thousand potential victims, all of whom were instantly and...

Microsoft 365 Defender demonstrates 100 percent protection coverage in the 2023 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations: Enterprise

For the fifth consecutive year, Microsoft 365 Defender demonstrated industry-leading extended detection and response XDR capabilities in the independent MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations: Enterprise. The attack used during the test highlights the importance of a unified XDR platform and showcas...

Why endpoint management is key to securing an AI-powered future

The chief information security officer CISO agenda has a new set of priorities. Hybrid work and the resultant architecture updates, so prevalent at the beginning of the pandemic, are no longer top of mind. Instead, the thinking is focused on tackling ever more sophisticated threats and integratin...

North Korean threat actor targets small and midsize businesses with H0lyGh0st ransomware

A group of actors originating from North Korea that Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC tracks as DEV-0530 has been developing and using ransomware in attacks since June 2021. This group, which calls itself H0lyGh0st, utilizes a ransomware payload with the same name for its campaigns and h...

Microsoft named a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM for Azure Sentinel

We’re pleased to announce that in its first year of inclusion in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report, Microsoft Azure Sentinel has been named a Visionary, where we were recognized for our completeness of vision for SIEM.1 Gartner has said that “cloud SIEM will be the future of how many organization...

Becoming resilient by understanding cybersecurity risks: Part 4—navigating current threats

In part three of this blog series on aligning security with business objectives and risk, we explored what it takes for security leaders to shift from looking at their mission as purely defending against technical attacks, to one that focuses on protecting valuable business assets, data, and...

Stopping Carbanak+FIN7: How Microsoft led in the MITRE Engenuity® ATT&CK® Evaluation

In MITRE Engenuity’s recent Carbanak+FIN7 ATT&CK Evaluation, Microsoft demonstrated that we can stop advanced, real-world attacks by threat actor groups with our industry-leading security capabilities. In this year’s evaluation, we engaged our unified Microsoft 365 Defender stack, with...

Forrester Consulting TEI Study: Azure Security Center delivers 219 percent ROI over 3 years and a payback of less than 6 months

Azure Security Center is a critical tool to secure our multi-cloud workloads in the new world of remote work we find ourselves in today. We are excited to share that Forrester Consulting has just conducted a commissioned Total Economic Impact TEI study on behalf of Microsoft, which involved...

Improve cyber supply chain risk management with Microsoft Azure

For years, Microsoft has tracked threat actors exploiting federal cyber supply chain vulnerabilities. Supply chain attacks target software developers, systems integrators, and technology companies. Tactics often include obtaining source code, build processes, or update mechanisms to compromise...

Thinking about the balance between compliance and security

Today, many organizations still struggle to adhere to General Data Protection Regulation GDPR mandates even though this landmark regulation took effect nearly two years ago. A key learning for some: being compliant does not always mean you are secure. Shifting privacy regulations, combined with...

Microsoft and partners design new device security requirements to protect against targeted firmware attacks

Recent developments in security research and real-world attacks demonstrate that as more protections are proactively built into the OS and in connected services, attackers are looking for other avenues of exploitation with firmware emerging as a top target. In the last three years alone, NIST’s...

Rethinking how we learn security

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on the relative lack of investor and startup interest in addressing a crucial CISO priority—the preparedness of employees on the security team. Considering what seems to be a steady stream of news about breaches, what can be done to encourage more people ...

From alert to driver vulnerability: Microsoft Defender ATP investigation unearths privilege escalation flaw

With Microsoft continuously improving kernel mitigations and raising the bar for exploiting native kernel components, third-party kernel drivers are becoming a more appealing target for attackers and an important area of research for security analysts. A vulnerability in a signed third-party driv...

Take steps to secure your business and users with our security business assessment

Businesses can no longer afford to take cybersecurity for granted. You cant read the news without seeing a splashy headline about a successful hack or data breach at a well-known company. However, this isnt just a problem for large enterprisesincreasingly small and medium-sized businesses are...

March-April 2018 test results: More insights into industry AV tests

In a previous post, in the spirit of our commitment to delivering industry-leading protection, customer choice, and transparency on the quality of our solutions, we shared insights and context into the results of AV-TESTs January-February 2018 test cycle. We released a transparency report to help...

How to manage a side-by-side transition from your traditional SIEM to Azure Sentinel

With every week bringing new headlines about crippling cyberattacks, and with organizations growing increasingly distributed, security teams are constantly asked to do more with less. Moving to cloud-native security information and event management SIEM can help security teams analyze data with t...

Strategies, tools, and frameworks for building an effective threat intelligence team

How to think about building a threat intelligence program 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 Product Marketing Manager Natalia...

BlueVoyant optimizes customer security with Microsoft security services

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. What a year it has been. The rapid and unexpected transition to work from home is one of the biggest issues affecting companies of all sizes and industries in 2020. As companies...

NERC CIP Compliance in Azure vs. Azure Government cloud

As discussed in my last blog post on North American Electric Reliability Corporation—Critical Infrastructure Protection NERC CIP Compliance in Azure, U.S. and Canadian utilities are now free to benefit from cloud computing in Azure for many NERC CIP workloads. Machine learning, multiple data...

Discover and manage shadow IT with Microsoft 365

While IT teams methodically plan corporate adoption of cloud services, the rest of us have dived in headfirst. Ten years ago, a vendor shared a video file with me via Dropbox because it was too big to email. It was my first experience with a cloud file sharing service, and when I realized I could...

CISO series: Building a security-minded culture starts with talking to business managers

Cybersecurity is everyones business; protecting the company and its users against data leaks is no longer just the responsibility of IT and security operations. Everyone from the board to Firstline Workers has an important role to play. A culture that encourages individuals to believe they have a...

Attending Black Hat USA 2018? Here’s what to expect from Microsoft.

Black Hat USA 2018 brings together professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. This is an exciting time as our Microsoft researchers, partners, and security experts will showcase t...

Enable your users to work securely from anywhere, anytime, across all of their devices

This blog 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, Assessing...

P = NP: Cloud data protection in vulnerable non-production environments

Data is the holy grail of your cloud workloads for attackers. Data breaches are the kind of breaches that make the news. With the recent European Union General Data Protection Regulations GDPR, they will make even bigger headlines. From an enterprise point of view, the most challenging aspect of...

From package to postinstall payload: Inside the Mastra npm supply chain compromise by Sapphire Sleet

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 1. Discovery and initial indicators 2. Dependency injection: the poisoned package.json 3. Typosquat analysis: easy-day-js 4. Staged delivery pattern 5. Obfuscation and payload analysis 6. TLS bypass to self-deletion 7. Timeline analysis 2. Who is Sapphire...

Securing IoT devices against attacks that target critical infrastructure

South Staffordshire PLC, a company that supplies water to over one million customers in the United Kingdom, notified its customers in August of being a target of a criminal cyberattack. This incident highlights the sophisticated threats that critical industries face today. According to South...

CyberMDX and Microsoft: Protecting life-saving medical devices

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. While hospitals continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, many are battling other “viruses” behind the scenes. Malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks against healthcare...

Cyberattacks against machine learning systems are more common than you think

Machine learning ML is making incredible transformations in critical areas such as finance, healthcare, and defense, impacting nearly every aspect of our lives. Many businesses, eager to capitalize on advancements in ML, have not scrutinized the security of their ML systems. Today, along with...

Free import of AWS CloudTrail logs through June 2020 and other exciting Azure Sentinel updates

SecOps teams are increasingly challenged to protect assets across distributed environments, analyze the growing volume of security data, and prioritize response to real threats. As a cloud-native SIEM solution security information and event management, Azure Sentinel uses artificial intelligence ...

Microsoft’s 4 principles for an effective security operations center

The Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center CDOC fields trillions of security signals every day. How do we identify and respond to the right threats? One thing that won’t surprise you: we leverage artificial intelligence AI, machine learning, and automation to narrow the focus. But technology i...

How Windows Defender Antivirus integrates hardware-based system integrity for informed, extensive endpoint protection

Detecting and stopping attacks that tamper with kernel-mode agents at the hypervisor level is a critical component of the unified endpoint protection platform in Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection Microsoft Defender ATP. It’s not without challenges, but the deep integration of Windows...

Microsoft to deliver new products and strategies for security innovation at 2018 RSA Conference

At the 2018 RSA Conference, our senior leaders will dissect modern cyber defense strategies, and reveal new products to detect and block cyber attacks when they happen. Our objective is to arm business, government and consumers with deeply integrated intelligence and threat protection capabilitie...

Behavior monitoring combined with machine learning spoils a massive Dofoil coin mining campaign

Update: Further analysis of this campaign points to a poisoned update for a peer-to-peer P2P application. For more information, read Poisoned peer-to-peer app kicked off Dofoil coin miner outbreak. Just before noon on March 6 PST, Windows Defender Antivirus blocked more than 80,000 instances of...

Frozen in transit: Secret Blizzard’s AiTM campaign against diplomats

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has uncovered a cyberespionage campaign by the Russian state actor we track as Secret Blizzard that has been targeting embassies located in Moscow using an adversary-in-the-middle AiTM position to deploy their custom ApolloShadow malware. ApolloShadow has the...

New capabilities to help you secure your AI transformation

AI is transforming our world, unlocking new possibilities to enhance human abilities and to extend opportunities globally. At the same time, we are also facing an unprecedented threat landscape with the speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks increasing rapidly. To meet these challenges, we...

Cadet Blizzard emerges as a novel and distinct Russian threat actor

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues into its second year and Microsoft continues to collaborate with global partners in response, the exposure of destructive cyber capabilities and information operations provide greater clarity into the tools and techniques used by Russian state-sponsored...

Toll fraud malware: How an Android application can drain your wallet

Toll fraud malware, a subcategory of billing fraud in which malicious applications subscribe users to premium services without their knowledge or consent, is one of the most prevalent types of Android malware – and it continues to evolve. Compared to other subcategories of billing fraud, which...

FoggyWeb: Targeted NOBELIUM malware leads to persistent backdoor

Microsoft continues to work with partners and customers to track and expand our knowledge of the threat actor we refer to as NOBELIUM, the actor behind the SUNBURST backdoor, TEARDROP malware, and related components. As we stated before, we suspect that NOBELIUM can draw from significant...

Windows 11 enables security by design from the chip to the cloud

Over the last year, PCs have kept us connected to family, friends, and enabled businesses to continue to run. This new hybrid work paradigm has got us thinking about how we will continue to deliver the best possible quality, experience, and security for the more than 1 billion people who use...

Microsoft unifies SIEM and XDR to help stop advanced attacks

For all of us in security, the last twelve months have been an incredible series of challenges—from balancing remote work with family priorities, to helping build resilient businesses, and protecting against the latest attacks. 2020 showed us that while we have made great progress, there is still...

Microsoft Office 365—Do you have a false sense of cloud security?

Through difficult times, some adversaries will find opportunities and COVID-19 has proven to be a ripe opportunity for them to target a new, expanding, remote workforce. While these threats morph and evolve, Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team DART finds ways to endure and help organizations...

Zero Trust Deployment Guide for Microsoft Azure Active Directory

Microsoft is providing a series of deployment guides for customers who have engaged in a Zero Trust security strategy. In this guide, we cover how to deploy and configure Azure Active Directory Azure AD capabilities to support your Zero Trust security strategy. For simplicity, this document will...