Microsoft Cloud Security solutions provide comprehensive cross-cloud protection

The infrastructure, data, and apps built and run in the cloud are the foundational building blocks for a modern business. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, you likely utilize every layer of the cloud—from infrastructure as a service IaaS to platform as a service PaaS to software as a...

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...

Azure Sentinel updates: Improve your security operations with innovations from a cloud-native SIEM

Just a month ago, I communicated the details about Azure Sentinel reaching general availability. Since then, many customers have shared how Azure Sentinel has empowered their teams to be nimble and more efficient. ASOS, one of the largest online fashion retailers, is an excellent example of this...

Microsoft Intelligent Security Association grows to more than 80 members

Sometimes an idea sparks, and it feels so natural, so organic, that it takes on a life of its own and surprises you by how fast it grows. The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA was one of these ideas. It was born out of a desire to be easy to do business with and be a better partner ...

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...

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...

Improve security with a Zero Trust access model

Zero Trust is a security model that I believe can begin to turn the tide in the cybersecurity battles. Traditional perimeter-based network security has proved insufficient because it assumes that if a user is inside the corporate perimeter, they can be trusted. We’ve learned that this isn't true...

Gartner names Microsoft a Leader in the 2019 Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) Magic Quadrant

In Gartner’s third annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers CASB, Microsoft was named a Leader based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the CASB market. Microsoft was also identified as strongest in execution. Gartner led the industry when they defined the term...

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...

IoT security will set innovation free: Azure Sphere general availability scheduled for February 2020

Today, at the IoT Solutions World Congress, we announced that Azure Sphere will be generally available in February of 2020. General availability will mark our readiness to fulfill our security promise at scale, and to put the power of Microsoft’s expertise to work for our customers every day—by...

Traditional perimeter-based network defense is obsolete—transform to a Zero Trust model

Digital transformation has made the traditional perimeter-based network defense obsolete. Your employees and partners expect to be able to collaborate and access organizational resources from anywhere, on virtually any device, without impacting their productivity. Customers expect personalized...

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...

Best practices for adding layered security to Azure security with Check Point’s CloudGuard IaaS

The cloud is changing the way we build and deploy applications. Most enterprises will benefit from the cloud’s many advantages through hybrid, multi, or standalone cloud architectures. A recent report showed that 42 percent of companies have a multi-cloud deployment strategy. The advantages of th...

Top 6 email security best practices to protect against phishing attacks and business email compromise

Most cyberattacks start over email—a user is tricked into opening a malicious attachment, or into clicking a malicious link and divulging credentials, or into responding with confidential data. Attackers dupe victims by using carefully crafted emails to build a false sense of trust and/or urgency...

Guarding against supply chain attacks—Part 1: The big picture

Every day, somewhere in the world, governments, businesses, educational organizations, and individuals are hacked. Precious data is stolen or held for ransom, and the wheels of “business-as-usual” grind to a halt. These criminal acts are expected to cost more than $2 trillion in 2019, a four-fold...

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...

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...

How to avoid getting caught in a “Groundhog Day” loop of security issues

It’s Cyber Security Awareness Month and it made me think about one of my favorite movies, called Groundhog Day. Have you ever seen it? Bill Murray is the cynical weatherman, Phil Connors, who gets stuck in an endless loop where he repeats the same day over and over again until he “participates in...

In hot pursuit of elusive threats: AI-driven behavior-based blocking stops attacks in their tracks

Our experience in detecting and blocking threats on millions of endpoints tells us that attackers will stop at nothing to circumvent protections. Even one gap in security can be disastrous to an organization. At Microsoft, we don’t stop finding new ways to fill in gaps in security. We go beyond...

CISO series: Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC—Part 3a: Choosing SOC tools

The Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC blog series is designed to share our approach and experience with security operations center SOC operations. Our learnings in the series come primarily from Microsoft’s corporate IT security operation team, one of several specialized teams in the Microso...

Your password doesn’t matter—but MFA does!

Your pa$$word doesn’t matter—Multi-Factor Authentication MFA is the best step you can take to protect your accounts. Using anything beyond passwords significantly increases the costs for attackers, which is why the rate of compromise of accounts using any MFA is less than 0.1 percent of the gener...

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2019 Endpoint Security Suites Wave

As we continue as a company to empower every person on the planet to achieve more, we keep delivering on our mission through products that achieve the highest recognition in the industry. For the last several years we’ve been working hard to provide the leading endpoint security product in the...

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 ...

TLS version enforcement capabilities now available per certificate binding on Windows Server 2019

At Microsoft, we often develop new security features to meet the specific needs of our own products and online services. This is a story about how we solved a very important problem and are sharing the solution with customers. As engineers worldwide work to eliminate their own dependencies on TLS...

Bring your own LOLBin: Multi-stage, fileless Nodersok campaign delivers rare Node.js-based malware

We’ve discussed the challenges that fileless threats pose in security, and how Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection Microsoft Defender ATP employs advanced strategies to defeat these sophisticated threats. Part of the slyness of fileless malware is their use of living-off-the-land...

How to prevent phishing attacks that target your customers with DMARC and Office 365

You already know that email is the number one attack vector for cybercriminals. But what you might not know is that without a standard email security protocol called Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance DMARC, your organization is open to the phishing attacks that target your...

Top 5 use cases to help you make the most of your Cloud Access Security Broker

The number of apps and the flexibility for users to access them from anywhere continues to increase. This presents a challenge for IT departments in ensuring secure access and protecting the flow of critical data with a consistent set of controls. Cloud Access Security Brokers CASBs are a new...

Azure Sentinel—the cloud-native SIEM that empowers defenders is now generally available

Machine learning enhanced with artificial intelligence AI holds great promise in addressing many of the global cyber challenges we see today. They give our cyber defenders the ability to identify, detect, and block malware, almost instantaneously. And together they give security admins the abilit...

Microsoft is awarded Zscaler’s Technology Partner of the Year for 2019

Last week at Zscaler’s user conference, Zenith Live, Microsoft received Zscaler’s Technology Partner of the Year Award in the Impact category. The award was given to Microsoft for the depth and breadth of integrations we’ve collaborated with Zscaler on and the positive feedback received from...

Overview of the Marsh-Microsoft 2019 Global Cyber Risk Perception survey results

Technology is dramatically transforming the global business environment, with continual advances in areas ranging from artificial intelligence AI and the Internet of Things IoT to data availability and blockchain. The speed at which digital technologies evolve and disrupt traditional business...

Operational resilience begins with your commitment to and investment in cyber resilience

Operational resilience cannot be achieved without a true commitment to and investment in cyber resilience. Global organizations need to reach the state where their core operations and services won’t be disrupted by geopolitical or socioeconomic events, natural disasters, and cyber events if they...

Are students prepared for real-world cyber curveballs?

With a projected “skills gap” numbering in the millions for open cyber headcount, educating a diverse workforce is critical to corporate and national cyber defense moving forward. However, are today’s students getting the preparation they need to do the cybersecurity work of tomorrow? To help...

Foundations of Flow—secure and compliant automation, part 2

In part 1 of this series, we introduced you to Microsoft Flow, a powerful automation service already being used by many organizations across the world. Flow is designed to empower citizen developers while featuring capabilities sought for by professional developers. Flow is also a foundational...

Automated incident response in Office 365 ATP now generally available

Security teams responsible for investigating and responding to incidents often deal with a massive number of signals from widely disparate sources. As a result, rapid and efficient incident response continues to be the biggest challenge facing security teams today. The sheer volume of these...

Foundations of Microsoft Flow—secure and compliant automation, part 1

Automation services are steadily becoming significant drivers of modern IT, helping improve efficiency and cost effectiveness for organizations. A recent McKinsey survey discovered that “the majority of all respondents 57 percent say their organizations are at least piloting the automation of...

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...

Beyond the buzzwords

When I was a kid, Gilligan’s Island reruns aired endlessly on TV. The character of the Professor was supposed to sound smart, so he’d use complex words to describe simple concepts. Instead of saying, “I’m nearsighted” he’d say, “My eyes are ametropic and completely refractable.” Sure, it was funn...

Improve security and simplify operations with Windows Defender Antivirus + Morphisec

My team at Morphisec a Microsoft Intelligent Security Association MISA partner often talks with security professionals who are well-informed about the latest cyberthreats and have a longterm security strategy. The problem many of them face is how to create a stronger endpoint stack with limited...

Gartner names Microsoft a Leader in 2019 Endpoint Protection Platforms Magic Quadrant

Our mission as a company is to empower every person on the planet to achieve more. We deliver on that mission through products that achieve the highest marks in the industry, which we believe is inclusive of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. We have been on a journey for the last several years working ha...

One simple action you can take to prevent 99.9 percent of attacks on your accounts

There are over 300 million fraudulent sign-in attempts to our cloud services every day. Cyberattacks aren’t slowing down, and it’s worth noting that many attacks have been successful without the use of advanced technology. All it takes is one compromised credential or one legacy application to...

How Axonius integrates with Microsoft to help customers solve the cybersecurity asset management challenge

Despite the amazing and futuristic progression of technologies in cybersecurity, it's still incredibly hard to answer the most basic of questions like: how many assets do I have, and do they adhere to my security policy? Somewhere along the line, asset management became very mundane compared to t...

From unstructured data to actionable intelligence: Using machine learning for threat intelligence

The security community has become proficient in using indicators of compromise IoC feeds for threat intelligence. Automated feeds have simplified the task of extracting and sharing IoCs. However, IoCs like IP addresses, domain names, and file hashes are in the lowest levels of the threat...

Protect against BlueKeep

Worms are the cause of many cyber headaches. They can easily replicate themselves to spread malicious malware to other computers in your network. As the field responders providing Microsoft enterprise customers with onsite assistance to serious cybersecurity threats, our Detection and Response Te...

A case study in industry collaboration: Poisoned RDP vulnerability disclosure and response

Earlier this year, I reached out to Check Point researcher Eyal Itkin, who had published multiple flaws in several Remote Desktop Protocol RDP clients, including a vulnerability in mstsc.exe, the built-in RDP client application in Windows. While there were no active exploits detected in the wild,...

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...

CISO series: Better cybersecurity requires a diverse and inclusive approach to AI and machine learning

Artificial Intelligence AI and machine learning have created lots of buzz with vendors. Being cast as the superheroes of technology is great for getting attention. But even Superman and Supergirl had their kryptonite. Could the lack of diversity and inclusiveness in the design teams and data type...

Council of EU Law Enforcement Protocol improves cross-border cooperation

Last March, the Council of the European Union announced the new EU Law Enforcement Emergency Response Protocol to address the growing problem of planning and coordinating between governments, agencies, and companies when cyberattacks occur across international boundaries. Remember well-known...

The evolution of Microsoft Threat Protection—July update

Modern security teams need to proactively, efficiently, and effectively hunt for threats across multiple attack vectors. To address this need, today we’re excited to give you a glimpse of a new threat hunting capability coming soon to Microsoft Threat Protection. Building off the threat hunting...

New machine learning model sifts through the good to unearth the bad in evasive malware

We continuously harden machine learning protections against evasion and adversarial attacks. One of the latest innovations in our protection technology is the addition of a class of hardened malware detection machine learning models called monotonic models to Microsoft Defender ATP's Antivirus...

How to cost-effectively manage and secure a mobile ecosystem

Today’s post was written by Roxane Suau, Vice President of Marketing for Pradeo. In the corporate environment, mobile devices and applications are at the center of communications, enhancing collaborators’ productivity with 24/7 access to information. But at the same time, they represent thousands...