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...

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...

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...

Zero Trust framework to enable remote work

Zero Trust Assessment tool now live! With such a large influx of employees working remotely, many of the traditional network-based security controls are unable to protect the organization. For many organizations, there are two options: route all remote traffic through a strained legacy network...

Rethinking cyber learning—consider gamification

As promised, I’m back with a follow-up to my recent post, Rethinking how we learn security, on how we need modernize the learning experience for cybersecurity professionals by gamifying training to make learning fun. Some of you may have attended the recent Microsoft Ignite events in Orlando and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Join Microsoft for a security in a day workshop

Let's talk about an integrated security experience. Many of our customers are in various stages of cybersecurity maturity: Initializing Firefighting No formal security program Developing Point solutions/tools for basic controls Pockets of expertise Defining Aligned to frameworks Documented contro...

New macOS vulnerability, Migraine, could bypass System Integrity Protection

A new vulnerability, which we refer to as “Migraine” for its involvement with macOS migration, could allow an attacker with root access to automatically bypass System Integrity Protection SIP in macOS and perform arbitrary operations on a device. We shared these findings with Apple through...

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...

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...

Threat matrix for storage services

The move to cloud is happening faster than ever before and organizations are increasing their dependency on cloud storage services. In fact, Microsoft Azure Storage services are one of the most popular services in the cloud. Companies need effective threat protection and mitigation strategies and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft Defender ATP can help you secure your remote workforce

As the number of home-based workers has accelerated in the last few weeks, it’s introduced new challenges. You may want to expand the number and types of devices employees can use to access company resources. You need to support a surge in SaaS usage. And it’s important to adjust security policie...

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 ...

Experts on demand: Your direct line to Microsoft security insight, guidance, and expertise

Microsoft Threat Experts is the managed threat hunting service within Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection ATP that includes two capabilities: targeted attack notifications and experts on demand. Today, we are extremely excited to share that experts on demand is now generally available a...

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...

Take these steps to stay safe from counterfeit software and fraudulent subscriptions

This post is authored by Matt Lundy, Assistant General Counsel, Microsoft. Software piracy and fraudulent subscriptions are serious, industry-wide problems affecting consumers and organizations around the world. In 2016, 39 percent of all software installed on computers was not properly licensed,...

Tips for getting started on your security deployment

This blog is part of a series that responds to common questions we receive from customers about how to most effectively deploy Microsoft 365 Security. In this series youll find context, answers, and guidance for deployment and driving adoption within your organization. This past year, weve been...

When prompts become shells: RCE vulnerabilities in AI agent frameworks

In this article 1. A representative case study: Semantic Kernel 2. CVE-2026-26030: In-Memory Vector Store 3. CVE-2026-25592: Arbitrary file write through SessionsPythonPlugin 4. The vulnerability 5. Attack chain overview 6. Defending the agentic edge 7. Not bugs, but developed by design 8. CTF...

Cybersecurity’s next fight: How to protect employees from online harassment

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 Godyla talks with Leigh Honeywell, CEO and Co-founder of Ta...

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...

Identity governance: The power of “Why not?”

Innovation requires the courage to take risks and the leadership skills to show others that risks are worth taking. That’s why I love working with people like Joe Dadzie, a partner group program manager in identity governance. Joe has a long history of championing disruptive technology...

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...

3 investments Microsoft is making to improve identity management

As a large enterprise with global reach, Microsoft has the same security risks as its customers. We have a distributed, mobile workforce who access corporate resources from external networks. Many individuals struggle to remember complex passwords or reuse one password across many accounts, which...

Collaborate securely

This is a blog 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 Protecting user identities, the...

Protecting user identities

This is a blog series that responds to common questions we receive from customers about the 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 Cybersecurity threats: How ...

Perspectives of a former CISO: Disrupted security in digitalization

My passion is the connection of security to the business objectives, and it has been a part of my work with many CISOs across industries as well as my experience as a CISO. This blog series a compilation of my learnings as a CISO, as well as learnings from peers and customers who are actively...

Getting the most value out of your security deployment

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 Now that y...

Best practices for securely moving workloads to Microsoft Azure

Azure is Microsofts cloud computing environment. It offers customers three primary service delivery models including infrastructure as a service IaaS, platform as a service PaaS, and software as a service SaaS. Adopting cloud technologies requires a shared responsibility model for security, with...

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...

DEV-0537 criminal actor targeting organizations for data exfiltration and destruction

March 24, 2022 update - As Microsoft continues to track DEV-0537’s activities, tactics, and tools, were sharing new detection, hunting, and mitigation information to give you additional insights on remaining vigilant against these attacks. In recent weeks, Microsoft Security teams have been...

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...

How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Another day, another data breach. If the regular drumbeat of leaked and phished accounts hasn't persuaded you to switch to Multi-Factor Authentication MFA already, maybe the usual January rush of 'back to work' password reset requests is making you reconsider. When such an effective option for...

GALLIUM: Targeting global telecom

Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center MSTIC is raising awareness of the ongoing activity by a group we call GALLIUM, targeting telecommunication providers. When Microsoft customers have been targeted by this activity, we notified them directly with the relevant information they need to protect...

Patching as a social responsibility

In the wake of the devastating NotPetya attack, Microsoft set out to understand why some customers weren’t applying cybersecurity hygiene, such as security patches, which would have helped mitigate this threat. We were particularly concerned with why patches hadn’t been applied, as they had been...

Building the security operations center of tomorrow—harnessing the law of data gravity

This post was coauthored by Diana Kelley, Cybersecurity Field CTO, and Sin John, EMEA Chief Security Advisor, Cybersecurity Solutions Group. Youve got a big dinner planned and your dishwasher goes on the fritz. You call the repair company and are lucky enough to get an appointment for that...

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...

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...

Inside an AI‑enabled device code phishing campaign

In this article 1. Attack chain overview 2. Mitigation and protection guidance 3. Indicators of compromise IOC 4. References 5. Learn more Microsoft Defender Security Research has observed a widespread phishing campaign leveraging the Device Code Authentication flow to compromise organizational...