Microsoft Incident Response lessons on preventing cloud identity compromise

Microsoft observed a surge in cyberattacks targeting identities in 2023, with attempted password-based attacks increasing by more than tenfold in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. Threat actors leverage compromised identities to achieve a significant level of access t...

3 reasons why now is the time to go cloud native for device management

The post 3 reasons why now is the time to go cloud native for device management appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog...

Protecting credentials against social engineering: Cyberattack Series

Our story begins with a customer whose help desk unwittingly assisted a threat actor posing as a credentialed employee. In this fourth report in our ongoing Cyberattack Series, we look at the steps taken to discover, understand, and respond to a credential phishing and smishing text-based phishin...

Forrester names Microsoft Intune a Leader in the 2023 Forrester Wave™ for Unified Endpoint Management

Maintaining a secure and optimized digital environment allows new ideas to flourish wherever they occur. In the modern workplace, where devices and locations are no longer fixed, Microsoft Intune eases the task of managing and protecting the endpoints of businesses everywhere. It helps secure...

Diamond Sleet supply chain compromise distributes a modified CyberLink installer

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has uncovered a supply chain attack by the North Korea-based threat actor Diamond Sleet ZINC involving a malicious variant of an application developed by CyberLink Corp., a software company that develops multimedia software products. This malicious file is a legitima...

Microsoft named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management for the 7th year​​

Protecting identity from compromise is top of mind for security professionals as identity attacks continue to intensify. Earlier this year we reported that we had observed a nearly three-fold increase in password attacks per second in the last two years, from 579 in 2021 to 4,000 in 2023.1 Identi...

Social engineering attacks lure Indian users to install Android banking trojans

Microsoft has observed ongoing activity from mobile banking trojan campaigns targeting users in India with social media messages designed to steal users’ information for financial fraud. Using social media platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, attackers are sending messages designed to lure users...

Microsoft unveils expansion of AI for security and security for AI at Microsoft Ignite

The future of security with AI The increasing speed, scale, and sophistication of recent cyberattacks demand a new approach to security. Traditional tools are no longer enough to keep pace with the threats posed by cybercriminals. In just two years, the number of password attacks detected by...

Microsoft shares threat intelligence at CYBERWARCON 2023

At the CYBERWARCON 2023 conference, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts are presenting several sessions detailing analysis across multiple sets of threat actors and related activity. This blog is intended to summarize the content of the research covered in these presentations and demonstrates Microso...

Insights from Microsoft Security Copilot early adopters

To understand why customers are adopting generative AI solutions like Microsoft Security Copilot, we have to go back to the cyberthreat landscape—which continues to get more challenging. Organizations are facing a surge in cyberattacks while also dealing with a global shortage of security talent...

Digital security sessions at Microsoft Ignite to prepare you for the era of AI

Thousands of security professionals will join us for Microsoft Ignite 2023 from November 14 to 17, 2023, where we will share how to embrace the AI era confidently, with protection for people, data, devices, and apps that extends across clouds and platforms. With more than 45 security sessions,...

Automatic Conditional Access policies in Microsoft Entra streamline identity protection

Extending our commitment to help customers be secure by default, today were announcing the auto-rollout of Microsoft Entra Conditional Access policies that will automatically protect tenants based on risk signals, licensing, and usage. Weve designed these policies based on our deep knowledge of t...

Announcing Microsoft Secure Future Initiative to advance security engineering

Today Microsoft’s Vice Chair and President Brad Smith shared insight on the global cybersecurity landscape and introduced our Secure Future Initiative. These engineering advances anticipate future cyberthreats, such as increasing digital attacks on identity systems. They also address how we will...

Starting your journey to become quantum-safe

There’s no doubt we are living through a time of rapid technological change. Advances in ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence transform nearly every aspect of work and life. As the world moves forward with new advancements and distributed technologies, so too does the need to understand...

From classroom to cyberfront: Unlocking the potential of the next generation of cyber defenders

In a world where the digital frontier is expanding and cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated with speed and scale, the guardians of our virtual realms have never been in greater demand.1 It’s important to leverage this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month to celebrate the people who keep u...

An integrated incident response solution with Microsoft and PwC

Today Microsoft Incident Response is excited to announce a new collaboration with PwC to expand our joint incident response and recovery capability. In this global alliance, Microsoft begins the initial containment and investigation, bringing a deep understanding of a company’s infrastructure to...

Octo Tempest crosses boundaries to facilitate extortion, encryption, and destruction

Microsoft has been tracking activity related to the financially motivated threat actor Octo Tempest, whose evolving campaigns represent a growing concern for organizations across multiple industries. Octo Tempest leverages broad social engineering campaigns to compromise organizations across the...

Top insights and best practices from the new Microsoft Data Security Index report

A whopping 74 percent of organizations recently surveyed experienced at least one data security incident with their business data exposed in the previous year. That’s just one of our interesting insights from Microsoft’s new Data Security Index: Trends, insights, and strategies to secure data...

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...

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now stops human-operated attacks on its own

Defenders need every edge they can get in the fight against ransomware. Today, were pleased to announce that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers will now be able automatically to disrupt human-operated attacks like ransomware early in the kill chain without needing to deploy any other...

Expanded Microsoft Security Experts offerings provide comprehensive protection

Since we first introduced Microsoft Security Experts in May 2022, we’ve worked hard to expand our new security services category. In the past 16 months, we’ve launched new services, expanded our capabilities, and introduced new ways to buy. Our customers face an unprecedented number of security...

Defending new vectors: Threat actors attempt SQL Server to cloud lateral movement

Microsoft security researchers recently identified a campaign where attackers attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through a SQL Server instance. This attack technique demonstrates an approach weve seen in other cloud services such as VMs and Kubernetes cluster, but not in SQL Serve...

Celebrate 20 years of Cybersecurity Awareness Month with Microsoft and let’s secure our world together

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, when we partner with the National Cybersecurity Alliance, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, and organizations around the world to amplify the importance of cybersecurity best practic...

Join the new Microsoft Security experience at Microsoft Ignite 2023

During the past few years, we’ve managed a lot of change and disruption in our security work, in our lives, and in society at large. This year we’re excited to welcome back security leaders, aspiring leaders, and IT professionals—in person—to Microsoft Ignite from November 14 to 17, 2023, and...

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...

New Microsoft security tools to protect families and businesses

Today marks an exciting milestone in Microsoft’s AI journey. This morning, at an event in New York City, we made several major announcements to empower people across work and life—you can read more about Microsoft Bing and Edge with Copilot, what’s new from Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat...

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...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2023 Zero Trust Platform Providers Wave™ report

Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report. At Microsoft, we understand modernizing security is a complex task in this era of ever-evolving cyberthreats and complex digital environments. Serious threats have necessitated a...

Peach Sandstorm password spray campaigns enable intelligence collection at high-value targets

Since February 2023, Microsoft has observed password spray activity against thousands of organizations carried out by an actor we track as Peach Sandstorm HOLMIUM. Peach Sandstorm is an Iranian nation-state threat actor who has recently pursued organizations in the satellite, defense, and...

Uncursing the ncurses: Memory corruption vulnerabilities found in library

Microsoft has discovered a set of memory corruption vulnerabilities in a library called ncurses, which provides APIs that support text-based user interfaces TUI. Released in 1993, the ncurses library is commonly used by various programs on Portable Operating System Interface POSIX operating...

Malware distributor Storm-0324 facilitates ransomware access

The threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-0324 is a financially motivated group known to gain initial access using email-based initial infection vectors and then hand off access to compromised networks to other threat actors. These handoffs frequently lead to ransomware deployment. Beginnin...

Cloud storage security: What’s new in the threat matrix

Today, we announce the release of a second version of the threat matrix for storage services, a structured tool that assists in identifying and analyzing potential security threats on data stored in cloud storage services. The matrix, first released in April 2021 as detailed in the blog post Thre...

Navigating privacy in a data-driven world with Microsoft Priva

Data protection and privacy have become business imperatives. In a global survey conducted by Microsoft and leaders in the academic privacy space, 90 percent of respondents said they would not buy from an organization that does not properly protect its data.1 More than ever, people have a high...

Flax Typhoon using legitimate software to quietly access Taiwanese organizations

Summary Microsoft has identified a nation-state activity group tracked as Flax Typhoon, based in China, that is targeting dozens of organizations in Taiwan with the likely intention of performing espionage. Flax Typhoon gains and maintains long-term access to Taiwanese organizations networks with...

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...

Multiple high severity vulnerabilities in CODESYS V3 SDK could lead to RCE or DoS

Microsoft’s cyberphysical system researchers recently identified multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in the CODESYS V3 software development kit SDK, a software development environment widely used to program and engineer programmable logic controllers PLCs. Exploitation of the discovered...

New Microsoft Security innovations expand multicloud visibility and enhance multiplatform protection

With more than 90 percent of organizations adopting a multicloud strategy1 and cloud-based cyberattacks growing 48 percent year over year,2 securing multicloud and hybrid environments is more important than ever. To successfully protect multicloud infrastructure—where customers are utilizing two ...

Microsoft Purview data security mitigations for BazaCall and other human-operated data exfiltration attacks

I recently worked with an enterprise customer who experienced a data exfiltration attack using the characteristics of the BazaCall campaign. BazaCall can be both a ransomware and data exfiltration attack that are used together to increase pressure on and damage to the victim. Microsoft Purview ha...

Boost identity protection with Axiad Cloud and Microsoft Entra ID

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. Passwords are a security weakness and phishing attacks to exploit accounts protected by passwords are on the rise. The last 12 months have seen an average of more than 4,000 password...

Adopting guidance from the US National Cybersecurity Strategy to secure the Internet of Things

The recently published United States National Cybersecurity Strategy warns that many popular Internet of Things IoT devices are not sufficiently secure to protect against many of today’s common cybersecurity threats.1 The strategy also cautions that many of these IoT devices are difficult—or, in...

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...

Cyber Signals: Sporting events and venues draw cyberthreats at increasing rates

Today we released the fifth edition of Cyber Signals, spotlighting threats to large venues, and sporting and entertainment events, based on our learnings and telemetry from delivering cybersecurity support to critical infrastructure facilities during the State of Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World...

How to connect with Microsoft Security at Black Hat USA 2023

Now in its twenty-sixth year, Black Hat USA takes place August 5 to 10, 2023, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing together security professionals for the latest in information security research, development, and trends. Microsoft Security is pleased to have a presence at Black Hat, wit...

Cryptojacking: Understanding and defending against cloud compute resource abuse

In cloud environments, cryptojacking – a type of cyberattack that uses computing power to mine cryptocurrency – takes the form of cloud compute resource abuse, which involves a threat actor compromising legitimate tenants. Cloud compute resource abuse could result in financial loss to targeted...

How to build stronger security teams

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 Product Marketing Manager Brooke Lynn Weenig talks with Truesec Chief Chaos...

New Microsoft identity and data security capabilities to accelerate CMMC compliance for the Defense Industrial Base

As Department of Defense DoD Chief Information Officer Hon. John Sherman said recently, Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification CMMC is necessary to ensure that the United States raises the bar for protecting sensitive information.1 The DoD is leading by example towards this goal by implementi...

Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR helps triage, investigate, and respond to cyberthreats

It has been an eventful time since the introduction of Microsoft Security Experts.1 We launched Defender Experts for Hunting, our first-party managed threat hunting service for customers who want Microsoft to help them proactively hunt threats across endpoints, Microsoft Office 365, cloud...

​​Expanding cloud logging to give customers deeper security visibility

In response to the increasing frequency and evolution of nation-state cyberthreats, Microsoft is taking additional steps to protect our customers and increase the secure-by-default baseline of our cloud platforms. These steps are the result of close coordination with commercial and government...

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...

Analysis of Storm-0558 techniques for unauthorized email access

Executive summary On July 11, 2023, Microsoft published two blogs detailing a malicious campaign by a threat actor tracked as Storm-0558 that targeted customer email that weve detected and mitigated: Microsoft Security Response Center and Microsoft on the Issues. As we continue our investigation...