Microsoft Support & Discussions

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 experiences that demonstrate you understand them and can adapt quickly to their evolving interests. Companies need to be able to move with agility, adapting quickly to changing market conditions and take advantage of new opportunities. Companies embracing this change are thriving, leaving those who don’t in their wake. As organizations drive their digital transformation efforts, …

Sharing the latest updates to the Microsoft Identity Bounty Program The post Microsoft Identity Bounty Improvements appeared first on Microsoft Security Response Center. Continue reading...

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 National Vulnerability Database has shown nearly a five-fold increase in the number of firmware vulnerabilities discovered. To combat threats specifically targeted at the firmware and operating system levels, we’re announcing a new initiative we’ve been working on with partners to design what we call Secured-core PCs. These devices, created in partnership with our PC manufacturi…

Announcing the new ElectionGuard Bounty program The post Introducing the ElectionGuard Bounty program appeared first on Microsoft Security Response Center. Continue reading...

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 the cloud include flexibility, converting large upfront infrastructure investments to smaller monthly bills (for example, the CAPEX to OPEX shift), agility, scalability, the capability to run applications and workloads at high speed, as well as high levels of reliability and availability. However, cloud security is often an afterthought in this process. Some worry that it may …

Right before Black Hat USA 2019, we announced our new researcher recognition program, and at Black Hat we announced the top researchers from the previous twelve months. Since it’s easier to track your progress with regular updates than with just an annual report, we are excited to announce the MSRC Q3 2019 Security Researcher Leaderboard, … Announcing the Security Researcher Quarterly Leaderboard Read More » The post Announcing the Security Researcher Quarterly Leaderboard appeared first on Microsoft Security Response Center. Continue reading...

Ready, set, go! The Windows Server team is ready to make sure you are set up for success at Microsoft Ignite 2019. Our experts are busy preparing technical content for breakout sessions, theater sessions and hands-on-workshops. Youll find the schedule to plan your attendance below. We might even challenge you to a game of bowling or cornhole, if youre up for it! Thats right, youve guessed it, aside from all the great product and feature updates at the conference, were also going to have an awesome customer appreciation party on Tuesday evening, November 5, 2019. Visit the Windows Server booths to find out how to register. So, what else is going on with Windows Serve…

Over the course of my internship at the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), I worked on the safe systems programming languages (SSPL) team to promote safer languages for systems programming where runtime overhead is important, as outlined in this blog. My job was to port a security critical network processing agent into Rust to eliminate … An intern’s experience with Rust Read More » The post An intern’s experience with Rust appeared first on Microsoft Security Response Center. Continue reading...

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. And they use a variety of techniques to do this—spoofing trusted domains or brands, impersonating known users, using previously compromised contacts to launch campaigns and/or using compelling but malicious content in the email. In the context of an organization or business, every user is a target and, if compromised, a conduit for a potential breach that could prove very costly…

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 increase in just four years. The seeds that bloom into these business disasters are often planted in both hardware and software systems created in various steps of your supply chain, propagated by bad actors and out-of-date business practices. These compromises in the safety and integrity of your supply chain can threaten the success of your business, no matter the size of you…

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 is not enough. Our people, culture, and process are just as critical. You may not have trillions of signals to manage, but I bet you will still get a lot of value from a behind-the-scenes look at the CDOC. Even the small companies that I’ve worked with have improved the effectiveness of their security operations centers (SOCs) based on learnings from Microsoft. Watch the …

In the wake of the devastating (Not)Petya 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 available for months and had already been used in the WannaCrypt worm—which clearly established a ”real and present danger.” We learned a lot from this journey, including how important it is to build clearer industry guidance and standards on enterprise patch management. To help make it easier for organizations to plan, implement, and improve an enterprise patch management st…

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 his own rescue” by becoming a better person. Sometimes it can feel like we’re caught in our own repetitious loops in cybersecurity—I even did a on this very topic a few years ago. The good news is that we can get out of the loop. By learning lessons from the past and bringing them forward and applying them to today’s technologies, outcomes can be changed—with “change” being…

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 strengthening existing defenses by introducing new and innovative layers of protection. While our industry-leading endpoint protection platform stops most threats before they can even run, we continue improving protections for instances where sophisticated adversarial attacks manage to slip through. Multiple layers of protection mean multiple hurdles that attackers need to ov…

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 Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center (CDOC). Over the course of the series, we’ve discussed how we operate our SOC at Microsoft. In the last two posts, Part 2a, Organizing people, and Part 2b: Career paths and readiness, we discussed how to support our most valuable resources—people—based on successful job performance. We’ve also included lessons learned from the Microsoft D…

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 general population. All authenticators are vulnerable There is a broad range of mechanisms to break authenticators. That doesn’t make all authenticators equally vulnerable. Costs vary massively by attack type, and attacks that preserve anonymity and don’t require proximity to the target are much easier to achieve. Channel-Jacking and Real-Time Phishing are the most dominant w…

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 market. Today, we are proud to announce that Microsoft is positioned as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Endpoint Security Suites, Q3 2019, receiving among the second highest scores in both the strategy and market presence categories. According to Forrester, “Microsoft has a compelling vision for the future where endpoint threat prevention and detection are completely integrated a…

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 to get into cybersecurity and how we can better prepare cyber pros to succeed? In my own experience, I’ve read white papers and manuals, taken bootcamps and practice tests, and slogged through hours of recorded content. It’s a lot to process, and mostly dependent on the quality of the instructor or delivery format. In this evolving threat environment, content is also outdated a…

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 1.0, they run into the complex challenge of balancing their own security needs with the migration readiness of their customers. Microsoft faced this as well. To date, we’ve helped customers address these issues by adding TLS 1.2 support to older operating systems, by shipping new logging formats in IIS for detecting weak TLS usage by clients, as well as providing the latest te…

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 techniques, which refer to the abuse of legitimate tools, also called living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins), that already exist on machines through which malware can persist, move laterally, or serve other purposes. But what happens when attackers require functionality beyond what’s provided by standard LOLBins? A new malware campaign we dubbed Nodersok decided to bring its own LO…

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 customers, crater your email deliverability rates, and crush your email-based revenue streams. For all the utility of email, which remains the ultimate app for business collaboration and communication, it does have a serious flaw: the ability for a bad actor to pretend to be someone else in an email message. This can be done through one of two attack techniques, spoofing and…