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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

IIS modules: The evolution of web shells and how to detect them

Web exploitation and web shells are some of the most common entry points in the current threat landscape. Web servers provide an external avenue directly into your corporate network, which often results in web servers being an initial intrusion vector or mechanism of persistence. Monitoring for...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft announces new innovations in security, compliance, and identity at Ignite

Today, at the Microsoft Ignite Conference, we’re announcing new innovations designed to help customers across their security, compliance, and identity needs. With so much going on at Ignite this week, I want to highlight the top 10 announcements: 1. Azure Sentinel—We’re introducing new connectors...

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...

Get security beyond Microsoft products with Microsoft 365

Over time, organizations and individuals acquire stuff. Things we love and things we need. Things we don’t need but can’t seem to get rid of. I was confronted with this challenge when we bought a 1908 craftsman home. How could I make my beloved modern furniture and mandatory kid-friendly gear wor...

Microsoft Secure: Explore innovations transforming the future of security

Building a more secure future requires an end-to-end approach. There is no question that technology plays an essential role, but security will always be human-centered. That’s what Microsoft Secure is all about. It’s about sharing knowledge, best practices, and technology innovations that empower...

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...

Zero Trust Adoption Report: How does your organization compare?

From the wide adoption of cloud-based services to the proliferation of mobile devices. From the emergence of advanced new cyberthreats to the recent sudden shift to remote work. The last decade has been full of disruptions that have required organizations to adapt and accelerate their security...

Behind the scenes of business email compromise: Using cross-domain threat data to disrupt a large BEC campaign

Microsoft 365 Defender researchers recently uncovered and disrupted a large-scale business email compromise BEC infrastructure hosted in multiple web services. Attackers used this cloud-based infrastructure to compromise mailboxes via phishing and add forwarding rules, enabling these attackers to...

The dynamic duo: How to build a red and blue team to strengthen your cybersecurity, Part 2

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyber threats. In the first post of our new Voice of the Community blog series, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Jake Williams, Founder of...

Finding a common language to describe AI security threats

As artificial intelligence AI and machine learning systems become increasingly important to our lives, it’s critical that when they fail we understand how and why. Many research papers have been dedicated to this topic, but inconsistent vocabulary has limited their usefulness. In collaboration wi...

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...

4 best practices to help you integrate security into DevOps

Microsoft’s transition of its corporate resources to the cloud required us to rethink how we integrate security into the agile development environment. In the old process, we often worked on 6- to 12-month development cycles for internal products. The security operations team was separate from th...

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 ...

Adding transparency and context into industry AV test results

Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson recently shared his insights on how Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Windows Defender ATP evolved to achieve important quality milestones. Our Windows Defender ATP team is committed to delivering industry-leading protection, customer choice, and...

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,...

Accelerate your security deployment with FastTrack for Microsoft 365

This blog is part of a series that responds to common questions we receive from customers about Microsoft 365 Security and Enterprise Mobility + Security. In this series youll find context, answers, and guidance for deployment and driving adoption within your organization. Inpart one of this...

StealC and Amadey: Breaking down infostealers and the cybercrime services that deliver them

In this article 1. The role of infostealers: From credential theft to intrusion 2. StealC: Infostealer for rent 3. Amadey: Malware-as-a-service for delivery of infostealers 4. Defending against StealC and Amadey intrusions 5. Microsoft Defender detections 6. Indicators of compromise Infostealers...

Storm-0978 attacks reveal financial and espionage motives

Microsoft has identified a phishing campaign conducted by the threat actor tracked as Storm-0978 targeting defense and government entities in Europe and North America. The campaign involved the abuse of CVE-2023-36884, which included a remote code execution vulnerability exploited before disclosu...

Microsoft acquires ReFirm Labs to enhance IoT security

Modern computing devices can be thought of as a collection of discrete microprocessors each with a dedicated function like high-speed networking, graphics, Disk I/O, AI, and everything in between. The emergence of the intelligent edge has accelerated the number of these cloud-connected devices th...

Finalists announced in second annual Microsoft Security 20/20 awards

2020 was a transformational year. Seemingly overnight, COVID-19 reshaped our perspective on work, home life, and security. Setting up home offices and powering through online presentations in our pajama bottoms with cameos by pets and children, our industry rose to the challenge. All that...

System Management Mode deep dive: How SMM isolation hardens the platform

Ensuring that the platform firmware is healthy and trustworthy is fundamental to guaranteeing that powerful platform security features like Hypervisor-protected code integrity HVCI and Windows Defender Credential Guard are functioning as expected. Windows 10 achieves this by leveraging a...

Misconfigured Kubeflow workloads are a security risk

Azure Security Center ASC monitors and defends thousands of Kubernetes clusters running on top of AKS. Azure Security Center regularly searches for and research for new attack vectors against Kubernetes workloads. We recently published a blog post about a large scale campaign against Kubernetes...

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...

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...

Jumpstart your Microsoft Graph Security API integration with the new JavaScript sample app

The Microsoft Graph Security API, which launched this spring, is a unified REST API for integrating data and intelligence from Microsoft products, services, and partners. Using Microsoft Graph, developers can easily build applications that consolidate and correlate security alerts from multiple...

From the ground up to the cloud: Microsoft’s Intelligent Security supporting CISOs’ cloud transformation

Its no secret that Microsoft has embraced the cloud in a big wayfrom enterprise solutions like Microsoft Azure to Office 365 and Windows. But a recent research report by Forrester focuses on an equally important shift in our approach to securityintegrating workforce and cloud security in ways tha...

Working towards a more diverse future in security

Last year I embarked on an exercise to examine diversity in cybersecurity. As one full year has passed, I decided to revisit this topic and the ongoing challenges of recruiting AND retaining diverse talent in the cybersecurity field. This past year saw the MeToo movement in the spotlight, and whi...

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...

Protecting customers from being intimidated into making an unnecessary purchase

There has been an increase in free versions of programs that purport to scan computers for various errors, and then use alarming, coercive messages to scare customers into buying a premium version of the same program. The paid version of these programs, usually called cleaner or optimizer...

AI security risk assessment using Counterfit

Today, we are releasing Counterfit, an automation tool for security testing AI systems as an open-source project. Counterfit helps organizations conduct AI security risk assessments to ensure that the algorithms used in their businesses are robust, reliable, and trustworthy. AI systems are...

Securing our approach to domain fronting within Azure

Every single day our teams analyze the trillions of signals we see to understand attack vectors, and then take those learnings and apply them to our products and solutions. Having that understanding of the threat landscape is key to ensuring our customers are kept safe every day. However, being a...

Secure containerized environments with updated threat matrix for Kubernetes

Last April, we released the first version of the threat matrix for Kubernetes. It was the first attempt to systematically map the threat landscape of Kubernetes. As we described in the previous post, we chose to adapt the structure of MITRE ATT&CK® framework which, became almost an industry...

Modernizing your network security strategy

From the global pandemic to recent cyberattacks, our world has faced many challenges during the past 12 months. Some of these challenges we can’t change. However, I’m pleased about the ones we can, and are changing across the cybersecurity landscape. For example, to facilitate remote work and...

The dynamic duo: How to build a red and blue team to strengthen your cybersecurity, Part 1

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyber threats. In the first post of our new Voice of the Community blog series, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Jake Williams, Founder of...

New Forrester study shows customers who deploy Microsoft Azure AD benefit from 123% ROI.

Over the past six months, organizations around the world have accelerated digital transformation efforts to rapidly enable a remote workforce. As more employees than ever access apps via their home networks, the corporate network perimeter has truly disappeared, making identity the control plane...

Inside Microsoft Threat Protection: Correlating and consolidating attacks into incidents

Cybersecurity incidents are never contained to just one of your organization’s assets. Most attacks involve multiple elements across domains, including email, endpoints, identities, and applications. To rapidly understand and address incidents, your Security Operations Center SOC analysts need to...

Azure Sentinel uncovers the real threats hidden in billions of low fidelity signals

Cybercrime is as much a people problem as it is a technology problem. To respond effectively, the defender community must harness machine learning to compliment the strengths of people. This is the philosophy that undergirds Azure Sentinel. Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM that exploits...

Go passwordless to strengthen security and reduce costs

We all know passwords are inherently unsecure. They’re also expensive to manage. Users struggle to remember them. It’s why we’re so passionate about eliminating passwords entirely. Passwordless solutions, such as Windows Hello, FIDO2 security keys, and the Microsoft Authenticator app, provide mor...

Further enhancing security from Microsoft, not just for Microsoft

Legacy infrastructure. Bolted-on security solutions. Application sprawl. Multi-cloud environments. Company data stored across devices and apps. IT and security resource constraints. Uncertainty of where and when the next attack or leak will come, including from the inside. These are just a few of...