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Afternoon Cyber Tea: Microsoft’s cybersecurity response to COVID-19
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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On February 25, 2020, Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Bret Arsenault was attending the RSA Conference in San Francisco when the city declared a state of emergency because of COVID-19. Shortly after flying back to Seattle, Bret learned of the first death from the coronavirus in Washington state. He and other members of Microsoft’s Risk Management Council worked on the company’s crisis response. To kick off National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I spoke with Bret Arsenault on a recent episode of Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann Johnson. As CISO, Bret is responsible for disaster recovery at the enterprise level. He is the chair of Microsoft’s Risk Managem…
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Behind the scenes of business email compromise: Using cross-domain threat data to disrupt a large BEC campaign
by Guest Eric Avena- 0 replies
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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 get access to emails about financial transactions. In this blog, we’ll share our technical analysis and journey of unraveling this BEC operation, from the phishing campaign and compromised mailboxes to the attacker infrastructure. This threat highlights the importance of building a comprehensive defense strategy, which should include strong pre-breach solutions that can prev…
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How purple teams can embrace hacker culture to improve security
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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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 Matthew Hickey, co-founder, CEO, and writer for Hacker House. In this blog post, Matthew talks about the benefits of a purple team and offers best practices for building a successful one. Natalia: What is a purple team, and how does it bridge red and blue teams? Matthew: The traditional roles involve a blue team that acts as your defenders and a red team that acts as your attackers. The blue team wants to protect t…
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CRSP: The emergency team fighting cyber attacks beside customers
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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What is CRSP? Microsoft Global Compromise Recovery Security Practice. Who is CRSP? We are a worldwide team of cybersecurity experts operating in most countries, across all organizations (public and private), with deep expertise to secure an environment post-security breach and to help you prevent a breach in the first place. As a specialist team within the wider Microsoft cybersecurity functions, we predominantly focus on reactive security projects for our customers. The main types of projects we undertake are: Compromise recovery: Giving customers back control of their environment after a compromise. Rapid ransomware recovery: Restore business-critic…
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Optimize security with Azure Firewall solution for Azure Sentinel
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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Security is a constant balance between proactive and reactive defenses. They are both equally important, and neither can be neglected. Effectively protecting your organization means constantly optimizing both prevention and detection. That’s why we’re excited to announce a seamless integration between Azure Firewall and Azure Sentinel. Now, you can get both detection and prevention in the form of an easy-to-deploy Azure Firewall solution for Azure Sentinel. Combining prevention and detection allows you to ensure that you both prevent sophisticated threats when you can, while also maintaining an “assume breach mentality” to detect and quickly respond to cyberattacks.…
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Hart and Microsoft announce partnership to incorporate ElectionGuard
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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On Thursday, June 3, 2021, via a joint press release on Microsoft Stories, Hart InterCivic and Microsoft have announced a partnership to incorporate ElectionGuard software developed by Microsoft into Hart’s Verity voting systems. The partnership makes Hart the first major voting machine manufacturer in the United States to provide end-to-end verifiability to voters, giving individual voters the ability to confirm their ballots were counted in an election and not altered. End-to-end verifiability also enables independent election security experts to build verifier programs that can independently confirm the accuracy of the overall vote count for elections that incorporate …
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- FPCH Admin
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Organizations often know they need to identify and address their cybersecurity blind spots. They also know the technology exists to help them do that. However, they don’t often understand how to communicate this need within their organization to justify the expense, nor do they know how to share with employees how they may be impacted. When I spoke with Jules Okafor on an episode of Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann Johnson, she shared how she has seen many cybersecurity projects fail not because of the technology put in place, but rather, the organization’s inability to communicate responsibilities or the expected results. One of the biggest pitfalls is the result of a ver…
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- FPCH Admin
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This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) guest blog series. Learn more about MISA. The fight against malware has become the epic battle of our generation, placing businesses of all sizes against a never-ending stream of hackers and zero-day attacks bent on compromising security perimeters. The recent SolarWinds breach¹ illustrates how much is currently at stake. According to the Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report2, an estimated 94 percent of malware is delivered via email with 90 percent of malware hidden in common file types such as PDF, Word, Excel, and Zip. What is Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR)? …
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Privacy compliance for smart meter infrastructure with Microsoft Information Protection and Azure Purview
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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Smart meters and smart grid infrastructure have been deployed in many of the world’s electric distribution grids. They promise energy conservation, better grid management for utilities, electricity theft reduction, and a host of value-added services for consumers. To deliver on this promise, they need to collect granular electric usage data and make this available to the stakeholders who need it. This has created consumer privacy concerns which are being addressed with security and governance programs, like Microsoft Information Protection and Azure Purview, and with regulation by the government. The ability to protect and govern smart meter data is critical to addressing…
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- FPCH Admin
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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 that contain multiple specialized sub-processors each with its own firmware layer and often a custom operating system. Many vulnerability analysis and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools find it challenging to monitor and protect devices at the firmware level, leading to an attractive security gap for attackers to exploit. At the same time, we have also seen growth in the…
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Understanding the threat landscape and risks of OT environments
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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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 Chris Sistrunk, Technical Manager in Mandiant’s ICS/OT Consulting practice and former engineer at Entergy, where he was a subject matter expert on transmission and distribution of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. In this blog, Chris introduces operational technology (OT) security and shares the unique challenges and security risks to OT. Natalia: What’s the difference between OT, industrial co…
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Breaking down NOBELIUM’s latest early-stage toolset
by Guest Eric Avena- 0 replies
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As we reported in earlier blog posts, the threat actor NOBELIUM recently intensified an email-based attack that it has been operating and evolving since early 2021. We continue to monitor this active attack and intend to post additional details as they become available. In this blog, we highlight four tools representing a unique infection chain utilized by NOBELIUM: EnvyScout, BoomBox, NativeZone, and VaporRage. These tools have been observed being used in the wild as early as February 2021 attempting to gain a foothold on a variety of sensitive diplomatic and government entities. As part of this blog, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is releasing an append…
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New sophisticated email-based attack from NOBELIUM
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has uncovered a wide-scale malicious email campaign operated by NOBELIUM, the threat actor behind the attacks against SolarWinds, the SUNBURST backdoor, TEARDROP malware, GoldMax malware, and other related components. The campaign, initially observed and tracked by Microsoft since January 2021, evolved over a series of waves demonstrating significant experimentation. On May 25, 2021, the campaign escalated as NOBELIUM leveraged the legitimate mass-mailing service, Constant Contact, to masquerade as a US-based development organization to distribute malicious URLs to a wide variety of organizations and industry verticals. Micr…
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How user experience is shaping verifiable credentials and identity
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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Since 2017, Microsoft has been working with the identity community on two groundbreaking technologies designed from the ground up to make digital privacy convenient and practical: . We believe verifiable credentials will revolutionize the way we exchange personal information, shifting ownership and control of identity and personal data back to individuals. To develop our implementation, Frank Chiachiere and other members of our team conducted pilots with industry leaders in healthcare, the public sector, financial services, retail, professional sports, and education. As Frank explains in the below interview with Alex Simons, the team started with optimistic ideas that…
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Becoming resilient by understanding cybersecurity risks: Part 4—navigating current threats
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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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 applications. As businesses begin reimagining their future in a post-pandemic world, most are pivoting to a digital-first approach to take full advantage of technological innovation (much of which was adopted in haste). The pandemic has accelerated three existing trends and the tension between them: how to remain relevant against a backdrop of consumer and market demands, how to re…
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Microsoft is a Leader in the 2021 Forrester Endpoint Security Software as a Service Wave
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Endpoint Security Software as a Service, Q2 20211, receiving one of the highest scores in the strategy category and among the top three scores in the current offering category. Forrester notes that “the focus on endpoint security has increased as cyber risks shift from the network to the endpoints, prompted by increasing amounts of homeworkers and the bulk movement of data from enterprise network-connected data centers to edge devices.” Microsoft Defender for Endpoint received the highest possible scores in the control, data security, and mobile security criteria, as well as in the Ze…
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Resources for accelerating your Zero Trust journey
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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For many organizations, 2020 was the year that finally saw remote work become a reality on a global scale. As many people begin transitioning back to the office, many organizations are thinking about how they can transition from a remote workforce to a more permanent hybrid workplace. We recently conducted a study with over 900 chief information security officers (CISOs) on the state of Zero Trust and found that 81 percent say their organization has started or currently has a hybrid work environment in place and that 91 percent plan for their organization to be fully transitioned to hybrid work within the next five years. The era of hybrid work is here to stay. Learn more…
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Microsoft recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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In this new world of hybrid work, organizations face an increasing volume of data, ever-evolving regulations around how that data is protected, and an evolving complexity and frequency of data security breaches. To help our customers navigate this complex data landscape, we are focused on delivering secure, intelligent, and user-centric solutions that provide visibility, reduce complexity, and mitigate risk. Over the past few years, we significantly increased our investment in building risk management and compliance solutions, inclusive of information protection and data loss prevention (DLP). We delivered new solutions, such as Microsoft Information Protection, Endpoi…
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- FPCH Admin
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The future of Internet Explorer (“IE”) on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge. What does this mean for commercial organizations, IT admins, developers, and end users? Microsoft Edge brings you a faster, more secure, and more modern web experience than Internet Explorer. Also, Microsoft Edge with Internet Explorer mode (“IE mode”), is the only browser with built-in compatibility for legacy IE-based sites and apps. As announced today, Microsoft Edge with IE mode is officially replacing the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application on Windows 10. As a result, the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will go out of support and be retired on June 15, 2022 for certain versio…
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Phorpiex morphs: How a longstanding botnet persists and thrives in the current threat environment
by Guest Eric Avena- 0 replies
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Phorpiex, an enduring botnet known for extortion campaigns and for using old-fashioned worms that spread via removable USB drives and instant messaging apps, began diversifying its infrastructure in recent years to become more resilient and to deliver more dangerous payloads. Today, the Phorphiex botnet continues to maintain a large network of bots and generates wide-ranging malicious activities. These activities, which traditionally included extortion and spamming activities, have expanded to include cryptocurrency mining. From 2018, we also observed an increase in data exfiltration activities and ransomware delivery, with the bot installer observed to be distributing…
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SimuLand: Understand adversary tradecraft and improve detection strategies
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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At Microsoft, we continuously collaborate with customers and the InfoSec community to learn more about the latest adversary tradecraft so that we can improve our detection strategies across all our security services. Even though those detections are already built into our products, and protecting customers today, we believe it is important for security researchers to go beyond alerts and detections to understand the underlying attack behaviors and technical implementation of adversary techniques. This also empowers others in the InfoSec community to better respond to investigations of related attacks. To help the broader security community with these efforts, we are relea…
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End of synchronization for WSUS 3.0 SP2
by Guest Paul_Reed- 0 replies
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On October 31, 2021, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2) will no longer synchronize and download updates. WSUS is key to the Windows servicing process for many organizations. Whether being used standalone or as a component of other products, it provides a variety of useful features including automating the download and installation of Windows updates. Extended support for WSUS 3.0 SP2 ended on January 14, 2020, in alignment with the end of support dates for Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It is, however, still possible to synchronize and download updates from Microsoft using WSUS 3.0 SP2. WSUS relies on several diff…
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Protecting SAP applications with the new Azure Sentinel SAP threat monitoring solution
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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As one of the leading solution providers for applications that manage business processes, SAP is the custodian for massive amounts of sensitive data in many of the biggest organizations in the world. Since these applications are business-critical, an SAP security breach can be catastrophic. Yet, protecting SAP applications is uniquely challenging. These systems are growing in complexity as organizations expand them beyond base capabilities. They are vulnerable not only to outside attacks, but also insider threats. What’s more, their complex nature means that threats can emerge across multiple modules, making cross-correlation especially important. It has been tradit…
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Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021
by Guest Emma Jones- 0 replies
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I am thrilled to share that Forrester Research has named Microsoft Cloud App Security as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021. Additionally, Microsoft received the highest score in the strategy category. People have increasingly used cloud apps to stay productive and connected during this challenging period. Organizations have accelerated the migration to the cloud to address their evolving needs. While the adoption of cloud apps offers a simple and cost-effective solution, it can also lead to a rise in shadow IT and creates an urgency to address new security and compliance requirements. Our continued innovation in Microsoft Cloud App Sec…
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IT tools to support Windows 10, version 21H1
by Guest Joe Lurie- 0 replies
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Windows 10, version 21H1 is now available through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and Windows Update for Business, and can be downloaded today from Visual Studio Subscriptions, the Software Download Center (via Update Assistant or the Media Creation Tool), and the Volume Licensing Service Center[1]. Today also marks the start of the 18-month servicing timeline for this H1 (first half of the calendar year) Semi-Annual Channel release. Windows 10, version 21H1 (also referred to as the Windows 10 May 2021 Update) offers a scoped set of improvements in the areas of security, remote access, and quality to ensure that your organization and your end users stay protected…