Stay secure and informed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" > <channel> <title>Microsoft Secure</title> <atom:link href="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure</link> <description>In-depth discussion of security, cybersecurity and technology trends affecting trust in computing, as well as timely security news, trends, and practical security guidance</description> <lastBuildDate>Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:22:42 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency> <generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2</generator> <item> <title>Stepping up protection with intelligent security</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/25/stepping-up-protection-with-intelligent-security/</link> <pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2017 13:00:54 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Julia White]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69940</guid> <description><![CDATA[With digital transformation, technology becomes increasingly central to every business and organization. This makes ensuring cybersecurity increasingly important. And, as employees increase their use of mobile devices and cloud-based apps, protecting their work requires a new approach for IT. With 80% of employees admitting to the use of non-approved cloud apps for work, ensuring data protection cannot be left to employees to manage.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone wp-image-69994" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/MS-Ignite-Venue.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="317" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/MS-Ignite-Venue.jpg 630w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/MS-Ignite-Venue-300x190.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></p>&#10;<p>With digital transformation, technology becomes increasingly central to every business and organization. This makes ensuring cybersecurity increasingly important. And, as employees increase their use of mobile devices and cloud-based apps, protecting their work requires a new approach for IT. With 80% of employees admitting to the use of non-approved cloud apps for work, ensuring data protection cannot be left to employees to manage.</p>&#10;<p>To address these needs, Microsoft continues to take a multi-faceted approach to providing built-in security capabilities. These span areas across:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Protecting at the front door</li>&#10;<li>Protecting data anywhere</li>&#10;<li>Achieving data security compliance objectives</li>&#10;<li>Detecting and recovering from attacks</li>&#10;<li>Managing the security tool set</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>The Microsoft security tools continuously improve with insight from the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which serves as the connective tissue across Microsoft security solutions. Today at <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/ignite">Ignite</a>, we are announcing new integrations, expanded capabilities, and partnerships toward addressing the complex areas of cybersecurity for all organizations.</p>&#10;<h2>Protect at the front door</h2>&#10;<p>The vast majority of security breaches continue to trace back to weak or stolen passwords. Because its proving to work, attackers are increasing their focus on stealing passwords to access corporate systems. The latest <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/sir">Microsoft Security Intelligence Report</a> shows a 300 percent increase in user account attacks. To address this growing issue, it is essential to focus on securing identities and access. Our cloud-based approach is through broadly implemented conditional access.</p>&#10;<p>Conditional access enables you to control who has access to your organizations resources based on a combination of risk factors, such as user account activity, physical location, and the trustworthiness of the device. <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/identity">Azure Active Directory</a> analyzes these factors and applies continuous cybersecurity threat intelligence, powered by Microsofts Intelligent Security Graph. This insight provides real-time risk assessment, and triggers the appropriate authentication requirements needed for accessing apps and data. Today, we are expanding conditional access capabilities by integrating with Microsoft Cloud App Security, Azure Information Protection, and our partners in the ecosystem:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Microsoft <a href="http://www.cloudappsecurity.com/">Cloud App Security</a> performs real-time monitoring and helps IT gain control over cloud apps and how employees use these apps. Now with Cloud App Security, users actions taken in cloud applications can be managed and controlled based on conditional access policies and proxy-enforced session restrictions. For example, you can allow users to access cloud apps from an unfamiliar location or unmanaged device, but prevent them from downloading documents.</li>&#10;<li>To further enhance security at the file level, we&#8217;re introducing conditional access for sensitive files. With the integration of <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/azure-information-protection">Azure Information Protection</a> and Azure Active Directory, conditional access can be set up to allow or block access to documents protected with Azure Information Protection. You can also enforce additional security requirements such as multi-factor authentication or device enrollment.</li>&#10;<li>Not only are we providing better integration within our own solutions to deliver holistic and identity-driven security, we also are working with our partners to extend conditional access in the ecosystem. In addition to Azure multi-factor authentication (MFA), you can now use RSA, Duo or Trusona for two-step authentication as part of your conditional access policy.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<h2>Protect your data anywhere</h2>&#10;<p>Employees are using more SaaS apps, creating more data, and working across multiple devices. While this has enabled people to do more, it has also increased the risk of data loss it is estimated that 58% of workers have accidentally shared sensitive data with the wrong person.</p>&#10;<p>Microsofts Information Protection solutions help you detect, classify, protect and monitor your data regardless of where it is stored or shared. Today, were announcing several new investments in the integration across our information protection solutions helping provide more comprehensive protection across the data lifecycle.</p>&#10;<p>A key part of this vision is to provide a more consistent and integrated classification, labeling and protection approach across our information protection technologies, enabling persistent protection of your data everywhere. Microsoft Cloud App Security natively integrates with Azure Information Protection to classify and label files that reside in cloud applications.</p>&#10;<p>Finally, we are announcing the general availability of improvements to <a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/office-365-message-encryption">Office 365 message encryption</a>, which makes it easier to share protected emails with anybody inside or outside of your organization. Recipients can view protected Office 365 emails on a variety of devices, using common email clients or even consumer email services such as Gmail and Outlook.com.</p>&#10;<h2>Achieve your data security compliance objectives</h2>&#10;<p>Regulated organizations have additional needs to demonstrate compliance, and were investing in tools to help achieve those goals.</p>&#10;<p>Customer Key can help regulated customers meet their security compliance obligations by providing added control and management of encryption keys. To learn more, check out this <a href="https://youtu.be/y-BSmEhdk7c?t=8m18s">video example</a> of how Customer Key works in SharePoint Online.</p>&#10;<p>Beyond just security compliance, achieving organizational compliance is a complex challenge. Its hard to stay up-to-date with all the regulations that matter to your organization, and to define and implement controls with limited in-house capability. Were pleased to introduce the upcoming preview of Compliance Manager, which enables you to manage your compliance posture from one place and stay up-to-date on evolving data protection regulations. Compliance Manager enables real-time risk assessment with one intelligent score reflecting your compliance posture against data protection regulations when using Microsoft cloud services. It also provides recommended actions and step-by-step guidance to help you improve your compliance posture.</p>&#10;<h2>Detect and recover from attacks</h2>&#10;<p>On average breaches exist for over 90 days in a customers environment before they are detected. In response, many organizations are moving to an assume breach posture. We continue to invest in tools that help detect attacks sooner and then remediate. But, we know its also important to continue investing in pre-breach attack prevention tools.</p>&#10;<p>Today, we are announcing several new capabilities to further improve our anti-phishing capabilities in <a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/online-email-threat-protection">Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection</a>, with a focus on mitigating content phishing, domain spoofing, and impersonation campaigns. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is also expanded to help secure SharePoint Online, OneDrive for business, and Teams. In Office 365 Threat Intelligence, we have introduced threat insights and tracking to help with detection and remediation. In Windows, we are adding Windows Defender Application Control, which is powered by the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to make it less likely that malicious code can run on the endpoint.</p>&#10;<p>On the post-breach detection side, we are announcing the limited preview of a brand-new service Azure Advanced Threat Protection for users that brings our on-premises identity threat detection capabilities to the cloud and integrates them with the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. Powered by the graph, our Advanced Threat Protection products have a unified view of security event data so your security operations analysts can investigate an incident from endpoint to end-user to e-mail. Finally, as previously announced earlier in the month, <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/windows-atp">Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection</a> is integrating Hexadite&#8217;s AI technology to automatically investigate new alerts, determine the complexity of a threat, and take the necessary actions to remediate it.</p>&#10;<h2>Security management</h2>&#10;<p>Protecting resources across distributed infrastructure against evolving cyberthreats demands a new approach to security management a solution that provides comprehensive visibility, consistent controls and actionable intelligence and guidance.</p>&#10;<p>We are <a href="https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=856797">announcing</a> today that <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/security-center/">Azure Security Center</a>, which helps customers protect workloads running in Azure against cybersecurity threats, can now also be used to secure workloads running on-premises and in other private and public clouds. Azure Security Center reduces management complexity by delivering visibility and control over workloads across clouds, enables adaptive threat prevention to reduce your exposure to threats, and provides intelligent detection to help you keep pace with rapidly evolving cyberattacks.</p>&#10;<p>Azure Security Center also has new capabilities to enable central management of security policies, better detect and defend against advanced threats, and streamline investigation of threats for your hybrid workloads. Read the Azure <a href="https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=856797">blog</a> to learn more about these and other new features.</p>&#10;<h2>Getting started</h2>&#10;<p>We have made it easier than ever to get end-to-end security solutions up and running. FastTrack for Microsoft 365 now provides deployment services for key security scenarios, giving you the resources, tools, and support you need from Microsoft engineers.</p>&#10;<p>FastTrack for Microsoft 365 can work with you directly, work with your existing partner, or help you get matched with a trusted Microsoft partner to deploy comprehensive security solutions. And the best part is this isnt a one-time benefit. It is a repeatable resource that you can use to ensure you have the help and resources you need.</p>&#10;<p>You can go to <a href="https://fasttrack.microsoft.com/">fasttrack.microsoft.com</a> and get help to deploy Microsoft products to address some of the most common security scenarios including:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Working securely from anywhere, anytime on almost any device enabling a flexible workstyle</li>&#10;<li>Protect your data on files, apps and devices within and across orgs</li>&#10;<li>Detect and protect against external threats</li>&#10;<li>Protect your users and their accounts</li>&#10;<li>Securely collaborate on documents in real time</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>New Microsoft 365 features to accelerate GDPR compliance</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/25/new-microsoft-365-features-to-accelerate-gdpr-compliance/</link> <pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2017 12:59:56 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[announce]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=70066</guid> <description><![CDATA[Today we made several Microsoft 365 security and compliance announcements and updates as part of the news from the Microsoft Ignite conference. I wanted to share how these new capabilities provide customers with a more complete and protected solution to simplify their journey to compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>This post is authored by Alym Rayani, Director Office 365 Security.</em></p>&#10;<h2>New capabilities in Microsoft 365 help simplify your GDPR compliance journey</h2>&#10;<p>Today we made several Microsoft 365 security and compliance announcements and updates as part of the news from the Microsoft Ignite conference. I wanted to share how these new capabilities provide customers with a more complete and protected solution to simplify their journey to compliance with the <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/TrustCenter/Privacy/gdpr/default.aspx">General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)</a>.</p>&#10;<p>Earlier this year, we brought together Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows into a single, always-up-to-date solution called Microsoft 365 relieving organizations from much of the cost of multiple, fragmented systems that were not necessarily designed to be compliant with modern standards. These announcements at Ignite add to our extensive capabilities that organizations are already using to secure and manage their data, users, and devices.</p>&#10;<h3>A platform you can trust, and verify</h3>&#10;<p>We understand that organizations with GDPR responsibilities will have additional needs to demonstrate compliance, and were investing in tools to help them achieve those goals.</p>&#10;<p>Microsoft 365 users enjoy built-in security and compliance for the apps, services, and devices that they use every day. Microsoft has a long history of transparency, defense-in-depth, and privacy-by-design that enabled us to be the first enterprise cloud services provider to implement the rigorous controls needed to earn approval for the EU Model Clauses, the first to achieve ISOs 27018 cloud privacy standard, and the first to offer contractual commitments to the GDPR.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Introducing Compliance Manager</strong> We understand that achieving your organizational compliance goals can be very challenging. Its hard to stay up-to-date with all the regulations that matter to your organization, and to define and implement the controls.</p>&#10;<p>Were pleased to introduce Compliance Manager, a new compliance solution that helps you to manage your compliance posture from one place. Compliance Manager enables you to conduct real-time risk assessment, providing one intelligent score that reflects your compliance performance against data protection regulatory requirements when using Microsoft cloud services.</p>&#10;<p>You will also be able to use the built-in control management and audit-ready reporting tools to improve and monitor your compliance posture. Read our <a href="https://aka.ms/compliance-manager-blog">Tech Community Blog</a>to learn more about Compliance Manager, and <a href="https://aka.ms/compliance-manager-preview">sign up for the preview program</a>, which will be available starting in November.</p>&#10;<p><img class="size-large wp-image-70075 aligncenter" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/Example-of-Compliance-Manager-dashboard-1024x818.png" alt="" width="640" height="511" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Compliance-Manager-dashboard-1024x818.png 1024w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Compliance-Manager-dashboard-300x240.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Compliance-Manager-dashboard-768x613.png 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Compliance-Manager-dashboard.png 1300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></p>&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Example of Compliance Manager dashboard</em></p>&#10;<p><strong>General availability of service encryption with Customer Key</strong> Were announcing the availability of service encryption with Customer Key, which can help regulated customers demonstrate additional compliance controls by managing the encryption keys for their Office 365 data. Here is an example of how Customer Key works in SharePoint Online:</p>&#10;<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y-BSmEhdk7c" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>&#10;<h2>Simplify how you govern data</h2>&#10;<p>Organizations face ever increasing quantities of complex electronic data. Gaining control over this data overload so that you know what to keep and find whats relevant when you need it is critical for both security and compliance purposes. Today we are introducing several new features which further enhance the already rich set of capabilities available with Microsoft Information Protection and Advanced Data Governance.</p>&#10;<p>Companies of all sizes and industries need to protect their sensitive data and ensure that it doesnt get into the wrong hands. Employees are using more SaaS apps, creating more data, and working across multiple devices. While this has enabled people to do more, it has also increased the risk of data loss it is estimated that 58% of workers have accidentally shared sensitive data with the wrong person.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Microsofts Information Protection</strong> solutions help you identify, classify, protect and monitor your sensitive data as it is created, stored, or shared. We made several investments across our information protection solutions helping provide more comprehensive protection across the data lifecycle. A key part of our vision is to provide a more consistent and integrated classification, labeling, and protection approach across our information protection technologies, enabling persistent protection of your data everywhere. <strong>Microsoft Cloud App Security</strong> now deeply integrates with <strong>Azure Information Protection</strong> to classify and label files that reside in cloud applications.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Advanced Data Governance enhancements</strong>, including event based retention in Office 365 Advanced Data Governance, allows customers to create events which will trigger the retention period of data in Office 365 to consistently comply with internal business requirements. Disposing of data in a defensible manner allows organizations to effectively reduce their security and compliance risks. This feature is currently in the standard Office 365 Universal Preview Program and available for you to try.</p>&#10;<p><strong>New Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365</strong> enable a single tenant to span multiple Office 365 datacenter geographies (geos) to store data at-rest and on a per-user basis in customer specified geos. Multi-Geo helps customers address organizational, regional, and local data residency requirements and enables modern collaboration experiences for their globally dispersed employees. <a href="https://aka.ms/Multi-Geo">Learn more about Multi-Geo</a>.</p>&#10;<p>Also, we are announcing the general availability of improvements to <strong>Office 365 message encryption</strong>, which makes it easier to share protected emails with anybody inside or outside of your organization. Recipients can view protected Office 365 emails on a variety of devices, using common email clients or even consumer email services such as Gmail, Outlook.com, and Live.com.</p>&#10;<h3>Use intelligent tools to better discover and control your data</h3>&#10;<p>Many organizations are evaluating how to find and protect the personal data they collect. With the explosion of data and its increasing value many organizations cannot adequately manage their assets with traditional manual processes.</p>&#10;<p>Unfortunately, even once you know where all the data is and how it should be managed, you must constantly ensure it is protected from threats. The GDPR requires organizations take appropriate measures to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure and to notify stakeholders in the case of breach. Today, on average attacks exist for over 90 days in an environment prior to detection. Microsoft continues to invest in tools that help detect attacks sooner and then remediate, as well as in pre-breach attack prevention tools.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Analysis of non-Office 365 data with Advanced eDiscovery</strong>: While the amount of data being generated and stored in Office 365 is growing at an exponential rate, many organizations still have data in legacy file shares and archives. Data is also being generated in other cloud services which may be relevant for an eDiscovery case surrounding a Data Subject Request. Analysis of non-Office 365 data allows organizations to import the case-specific copy of such data into a specifically assigned Azure container and analyze it using Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery. Having one eDiscovery workflow for both Office 365 and non-Office 365 data provides organizations with the consistency they need to make defensible decisions across the entire data set of a case.</p>&#10;<p>This feature is currently in preview and requires an Advanced eDiscovery license for each user whose data is being analyzed. Later this year, in addition to Advanced eDiscovery licenses this feature will require the purchase of the eDiscovery Storage plan for all non-Office 365 data imported into the specifically assigned Azure container for analysis by Advanced eDiscovery. The eDiscovery Storage plan comes in increments of 500GB of storage and is priced at $100 per month.</p>&#10;<p><img class="size-large wp-image-70081 aligncenter" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/Example-of-Advanced-eDiscovery-1024x557.png" alt="" width="640" height="348" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Advanced-eDiscovery-1024x557.png 1024w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Advanced-eDiscovery-300x163.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/Example-of-Advanced-eDiscovery-768x418.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></p>&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Example of Advanced eDiscovery</em></p>&#10;<p>To better protect your users against threats, we also improved our anti-phishing capabilities in <strong>Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection</strong>, with a focus on mitigating content phishing, domain spoofing, and impersonation campaigns. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is also expanded to help secure SharePoint Online, OneDrive for business, and Teams. In Windows, we added <strong>Windows Defender Application Contro</strong>l, which is powered by the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to make it less likely that malicious code can run on that endpoint.</p>&#10;<p>On the post-breach detection side, we announced the limited preview of a brand-new service <strong>Azure Advanced Threat Protection</strong> for users that brings our on-premises identity threat detection capabilities to the cloud and integrates them with the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. Finally, as previously announced earlier in the month, <strong>Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection</strong> is integrating Hexadite&#8217;s AI technology to automatically investigate new alerts, determine the complexity of a threat, and take the necessary actions to remediate it.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Office 365 security management updates</strong> We have also made a few updates to Advanced Security Management to give you even better visibility and control over Office 365. To help organizations in the EU meet their compliance obligations, starting in October, we will begin hosting Advanced Security Management in our EU datacenter region. We are also giving you additional visibility into the service by adding support for activities from Skype for Business, Yammer and Office 365 Threat Intelligence. The signals from these services will be used to generate activity alerts and be factored into anomaly detection alerts. Lastly, to better align our Microsoft 365 investments, we are renaming Advanced Security Management to Office 365 Cloud App Security.</p>&#10;<h2>Taking the next step on your GDPR compliance journey</h2>&#10;<p>The GDPR is compelling every organization to consider how they will respond to todays security and compliance challenges. It may require significant changes to how your business gathers, uses, and governs data.</p>&#10;<p>As a global company with hundreds of millions of customers around the globe, we are subject to many stringent regulations including the GDPR and we understand the challenges you face. As your trusted partner, we are committed to going beyond our minimum responsibilities and always working on behalf of your best interests. To that end, Microsoft is an active participant in a community of compliance experts that can support all aspects of your GDPR journey &#8211; such as audit and consulting, cloud migration assistance, as well as delivering specific point solutions.</p>&#10;<p>For more details on these announcements and the other capabilities of Microsoft 365, read the new whitepaper: <a href="https://aka.ms/M365-GDPR-paper">Accelerate your GDPR compliance journey with Microsoft 365</a>.</p>&#10;<p>&nbsp;</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Security at Microsoft Ignite</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/22/security-at-microsoft-ignite/</link> <pubDate>Fri, 22 Sep 2017 20:30:05 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=70021</guid> <description><![CDATA[Microsoft Ignite begins this Sunday, September 24, with pre-day training and registration! The Microsoft Ignite event delivers the largest and most comprehensive perspective on the future of Enterprise technology at one conference. Everyone who attends IT pros and Enterprise developersgets inspiration, training, and connections to drive their business forward with Microsoft technology. 26,000+ IT and <p><a class="read-more" title="Security at Microsoft Ignite" aria-label="Read more about Security at Microsoft Ignite" href="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/22/security-at-microsoft-ignite/">Read more</a></p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-70048" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/MSCOM_Ignite_About_Connecting_Social_740x417.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="417" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/MSCOM_Ignite_About_Connecting_Social_740x417.jpg 740w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/MSCOM_Ignite_About_Connecting_Social_740x417-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" /></p>&#10;<p><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite/default.aspx">Microsoft Ignite</a> begins this Sunday, September 24, with pre-day training and registration! The Microsoft Ignite event delivers the largest and most comprehensive perspective on the future of Enterprise technology at one conference. Everyone who attends IT pros and Enterprise developersgets inspiration, training, and connections to drive their business forward with Microsoft technology. 26,000+ IT and Enterprise developer customers and prospects come to collaborate and learn how Microsoft technology can help them achieve success.</p>&#10;<h2>Top three things to do before you go:</h2>&#10;<ol>&#10;<li>Download the mobile app&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>The mobile apps allow you to easily access My Conference, session details, evaluations, attendee networking, maps, event notifications, partners, and more. Download it now for your device: <a href="https://aka.ms/ignite.mobileapp">Window | IOS | Android</a></li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Set up your attendee profile&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Connect with attendees at the events. Setting up your profile helps attendees discover Microsoft experts and get their questions answered. After your edits are complete, your profile will be updated in the apps and in MyIgnite.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Get ready for a great show&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Confirm your hotel reservation</li>&#10;<li>Familiarize yourself with our event and resources</li>&#10;<li>Have fun!</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;</ol>&#10;<h2>Key security sessions to attend at Ignite</h2>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><a href="https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/56715?source=sessions">Create a modern workplace with Microsoft 365</a>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Kirk Koenigsbauer, Brad Anderson, Catherine Boeger</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li><a href="https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/56716?source=sessions">Empower IT and developer productivity with Microsoft Azure</a>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Scott Guthrie</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li><a href="https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/56551?source=sessions">Cloud infrastructure: Enabling new possibilities together</a>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Jason Zander</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li><a href="https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/56550?source=sessions">Microsoft 365: Step up your protection with intelligent security</a>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Julia White</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li><a href="https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/56549?source=sessions">Microsoft 365: Modern management and deployment</a>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Brad Anderson, Rob Lefferts</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>But thats not all, we have a huge selection of security related content, 345 sessions to be exact. Sessions have been designed to not only meet your product needs, but also your expertise needs. <a href="https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions?q=security">Find a complete list of security sessions here</a>.</p>&#10;<h2>Who is attending from Microsoft</h2>&#10;<p>This year we are rolling out a fantastic new tool simply known as Expert Finder. All Microsoft staff will be tagged with the areas of expertise and can easily be located on the expo floor. Work with staff onsite at the Expo to locate the expert(s) that you need to speak with.</p>&#10;<p><a href="https://microsoftignitecontent.hubb.me/expertfinder">The Expert Finder tool can be found here</a>. (note not all attendees will have access)</p>&#10;<h2>Where to find Security onsite: In the expo</h2>&#10;<p>We have full coverage of security topics in the expo. From getting help desk answers to seeing demos, you are sure to walk away with the information you need.</p>&#10;<p>Youll find us in the expo during the following times:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Monday: 12:30 7:30pm&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Social hour: 5:30pm 7:30pm</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Tuesday: 10:00am 6pm&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Social hour: 5:30pm 7:30pm</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Wednesday: 10:00am 6:00pm&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Social hour: 5:30pm 6:00pm</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Thursday: 10:00am 4:00pm</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>Below you can see where the Security area is located within the Expo, as noted by the red circle.</p>&#10;<p><img class="aligncenter wp-image-70036" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/Ignite-Map.jpg" alt="" width="750" height="375" /></p>&#10;<h2>Networking opportunities</h2>&#10;<p>Ignite it not only about talking with the Microsoft experts, its also a great time to network with your peers. Here is a list of great opportunities for you to network during the event:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Immersion zone&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Get &#8220;Hands-on&#8221;- youll find Labs, workshops, mixed reality experiences, learning experts and more!</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Visit the security and privacy <a href="https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-Compliance/ct-p/SecurityPrivacyCompliance">Microsoft Tech Community</a>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Learn and see what other attendees are talking about. Then take the opportunity to not only to collaborate virtually, but set up time to network face-to-face while at the event.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Social hours&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Wind down the day and enjoy a drink with security related professions, social hours are posted above.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li>Celebration event&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>More details to come, but on Thursday we have an amazing celebration event!</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>In the week following Ignite, we will summarize our lessons learned, product announcements, and customer feedback received from the event.</p>&#10;<p>To learn more about Microsoft security solutions and services, visit <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/secure">https://www.microsoft.com/secure</a>.</p>&#10;<p>We hope you have a lot of fun, make amazing connections, and walk away with inspiring insights at this years Ignite conference. Were looking forward to seeing you there!</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>3 key tenets to help with security management</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/13/3-key-tenets-to-help-with-security-management/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:00:28 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69828</guid> <description><![CDATA[&#160; This post is authored byBerk Veral, Director, Product Marketing, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. Across industries, as attack methods have become more sophisticated and complex, organizations have been responding by deploying more security solutions, which in turn has tremendously increased the complexity of security management. Today, organizations must manage distributed resources across many environments, and given <p><a class="read-more" title="3 key tenets to help with security management" aria-label="Read more about 3 key tenets to help with security management" href="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/13/3-key-tenets-to-help-with-security-management/">Read more</a></p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>&#10;<p><a href="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/WWS16_Library_124.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-69840" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/WWS16_Library_124.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1331" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/WWS16_Library_124.jpg 2000w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/WWS16_Library_124-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/WWS16_Library_124-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/WWS16_Library_124-1024x681.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /></a></p>&#10;<p><em>This post is authored byBerk Veral, Director, Product Marketing, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group.</em></p>&#10;<p>Across industries, as attack methods have become more sophisticated and complex, organizations have been responding by deploying more security solutions, which in turn has tremendously increased the complexity of security management.</p>&#10;<p>Today, organizations must manage distributed resources across many environments, and given the constantly evolving threats, this means there are more attack surfaces that need to be protected.</p>&#10;<p>In some cases, an organization may end up having multiple point solutions even within a single workload to address specific security concerns. However, managing a growing number of individual security controls becomes a true nightmare. You lose visibility into the security state of that workload, let alone the security of the entire organization.</p>&#10;<p>Managing a high number of point solutions and vendors, coupled with the increasing noise caused by diverse datasets with varying levels of fidelity, adds to the complexity of security management. It becomes harder to gain optimal insight into end points and results in even less visibility into the security posture of your entire network.</p>&#10;<p>Often, these point solutions dont share any information as they are not integrated, which leads to the most dangerous of your challenges: ineffective responses to threats that grow both in number and sophistication.</p>&#10;<p>More solutions to deploy and more vendors to manage, with less insight and ineffective threat response, ultimately manifestsin higher costs of security for CISOs as well.</p>&#10;<h2>How can CISOs efficiently manage security?</h2>&#10;<p>In todays connected, technology-driven world, where digital transformation is the only way to survive for any organization, an efficient security management practice becomes the cornerstone of any long-term strategy of CISOs, regardless of their industry.</p>&#10;<p>Whether your assets are deployed in the cloud, on-premises, oracross a hybrid environment, your organizations security has 4 core components for you to manage and secure:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Identity</li>&#10;<li>Devices or end points</li>&#10;<li>Apps and data</li>&#10;<li>Infrastructure</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>And across these 4 core components, an effective security management solution should provide <strong>3key tenets &#8211; visibility, control, and guidance</strong>:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Full <strong>visibility</strong> that helps you understand the security state and risks across resources</li>&#10;<li>Built-in security <strong>controls</strong> to help you define consistent security policies</li>&#10;<li>Effective <strong>guidance</strong> to help elevate your security through actionable intelligence and recommendations</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<h2>Vendor consolidation &amp; intelligence is key</h2>&#10;<p>An effective security management solution is not about a single console. It is about integration where it counts, but with the freedom of specialized tools for different functions.</p>&#10;<p>Microsoft helps you consolidate from a plethora of specialized functions and tools to just a few. Our offerings provide functionality to ensure specialized security teams have the flexibility and freedom to manage the unique needs of specific areas such as <a target="_blank" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/azure-active-directory?&amp;WT.srch=1&amp;wt.mc_id=AID622874_SEM_HszllOot" rel="noopener">identity</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/01/23/introducing-windows-defender-security-center/" rel="noopener">devices</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-welcome" rel="noopener">apps</a> or <a target="_blank" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/security-center/" rel="noopener">infrastructure</a>. However, the key that makes Microsoft security management consoles much more effective is the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/intelligence" rel="noopener">vast intelligence</a> that is built into our solutions, which helps your organization maintain a consistent and robust security posture.</p>&#10;<p>Microsoft has a unique perspective as we face the same adversaries our customers do, but because of the scale of technology we build and operate, we capture a massive amount of security related-signal:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Nearly 1 billion Windows devices updated worldwide each month, and we operate the largest anti-virus and anti-malware service in the world</li>&#10;<li>Over 450 billion authentications processed monthly into our cloud services</li>&#10;<li>Over 400 billion emails scanned monthly for spam and malware through Office 365 and Outlook.com</li>&#10;<li>More than 18 billion Bing web page scans per month</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>We build this intelligence into our products and services &#8211; harnessing the power of machine learning, processing trillions of pieces of data, from billions of devices, we enable our customers to detect relevant threats faster and prioritize response. Our security management solutions are built to work for you. This shared intelligence is leveraged by management consoles across identity, devices, apps, data, and infrastructure &#8211; helping security admins and operation center teams to get important insights optimized for their workloads.</p>&#10;<p><strong>The key for a CISOs success in managing security is not about a single console across everything, but consolidation wherever it makes sense. This gives CISOs the best of all capabilities and allows them the flexibility when they need it.</strong></p>&#10;<p>With single vendor management, built-in controls that come with Microsoft solutions, and unmatched intelligence, Microsoft becomes your trusted partner in achieving intelligent security management.</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>New IIS functionality to help identify weak TLS usage</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/07/new-iis-functionality-to-help-identify-weak-tls-usage/</link> <pubDate>Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:00:17 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69789</guid> <description><![CDATA[This post is authored byAndrew Marshall, Principal Security Program Manager, TwC Security, Yanbing Shi, Software Engineer, Internet Information Services Team, and Sourabh Shirhatti, Program Manager, Internet Information Services Team. As a follow-up to our announcement regarding TLS 1.2 support at Microsoft, we are announcing new functionality in Windows Server 2012R2 and Windows Server 2016 to <p><a class="read-more" title="New IIS functionality to help identify weak TLS usage" aria-label="Read more about New IIS functionality to help identify weak TLS usage" href="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/09/07/new-iis-functionality-to-help-identify-weak-tls-usage/">Read more</a></p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>This post is authored byAndrew Marshall, Principal Security Program Manager, TwC Security, Yanbing Shi, Software Engineer, Internet Information Services Team, and Sourabh Shirhatti, Program Manager, Internet Information Services Team.</em></p>&#10;<p>As a follow-up to our announcement regarding <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/06/20/tls-1-2-support-at-microsoft/">TLS 1.2 support at Microsoft</a>, we are announcing new functionality in <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4025335/windows-8-1-windows-server-2012-r2-update-kb4025335">Windows Server 2012R2</a> and <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4025334/windows-10-update-kb4025334">Windows Server 2016</a> to increase your awareness of clients connecting to your services with weak security protocols or cipher suites.</p>&#10;<p>IIS logs can already be used to correlate client IP address, user agent string, and service URI. With the addition of the new custom logging fields detailed below, you will be able to quantify the usage of outdated security protocols and ciphers by clients connecting to your services.</p>&#10;<p>To enable this new functionality, these four server variables need to be configured as the sources of the custom fields in IIS applicationHost.config. The custom logging can be configured on either server level or site level. Here is a sample site-level configuration:</p>&#10;<pre> &lt;site name="Default Web Site" id="1" serverAutoStart="true"&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;application path="/"&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\inetpub\wwwroot" /&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;/application&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;bindings&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;binding protocol="https" bindingInformation="*:443:" /&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;/bindings&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;logFile&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;customFields&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;clear /&gt;&#13;&#10;&lt;add logFieldName="crypt-protocol" sourceName="CRYPT_PROTOCOL" sourceType="ServerVariable" /&gt;&#13;&#10;&lt;add logFieldName="crypt-cipher" sourceName="CRYPT_CIPHER_ALG_ID" sourceType="ServerVariable" /&gt;&#13;&#10;&lt;add logFieldName="crypt-hash" sourceName="CRYPT_HASH_ALG_ID" sourceType="ServerVariable" /&gt;&#13;&#10;&lt;add logFieldName="crypt-keyexchange" sourceName="CRYPT_KEYEXCHANGE_ALG_ID" sourceType="ServerVariable" /&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;/customFields&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;/logFile&gt;&#13;&#10; &lt;/site&gt;</pre>&#10;<p>Each SSL info field is a hexadecimal number that maps to either a <a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa379819(v=vs.85).aspx">secure protocol version</a> or <a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa375549(v=vs.85).aspx">cipher suite algorithm</a>.<br />&#10;For an HTTP plain-text request, all four fields will be logged as -.</p>&#10;<p>A sample log and explanation of the new fields follows:</p>&#10;<p><img class="aligncenter wp-image-69798 size-full" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/09/A-sample-log-and-explanation-of-the-new-fields-follows.png" alt="" width="1116" height="396" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/A-sample-log-and-explanation-of-the-new-fields-follows.png 1116w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/A-sample-log-and-explanation-of-the-new-fields-follows-300x106.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/A-sample-log-and-explanation-of-the-new-fields-follows-768x273.png 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/09/A-sample-log-and-explanation-of-the-new-fields-follows-1024x363.png 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1116px) 100vw, 1116px" /></p>&#10;<h5>For more information visit<a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/configuration/system.applicationhost/sites/site/logfile/customfields/">Official Microsoft Documentation for Custom Logging Fields in IIS</a>.</h5>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Microsoft&#8217;s perspective on cyber resilience</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/23/microsoft-perspective-on-cyber-resilience/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 23 Aug 2017 15:00:04 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69645</guid> <description><![CDATA[In the wake of recent ransomware outbreaks, I wanted to understand how impacted firms have evolved their thinking on cyber resilience planning and implementation. I asked the Detection and Response Team at Microsoft, who help our customers proactively and in real time to respond and recover from cyberattacks, to share their experiences.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>This post is authored by Ann Johnson, Vice President, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group.</em></p>&#10;<p>In the wake of recent ransomware outbreaks, I wanted to understand how impacted firms have evolved their thinking on cyber resilience planning and implementation. I asked the Detection and Response Team at Microsoft, who help our customers proactively and in real time to respond and recover from cyberattacks, to share their experiences. Ive included below a few anonymized customer scenarios the team shared with me, which point to the acute need for a cyber resilience plan.</p>&#10;<p>What follows is a reference framework of Microsoft capabilities which can help our customers become more agile in the face of modern attacks. In other words, this post is about mapping the road to cyber resilience.</p>&#10;<h2>Why cyber resilience matters</h2>&#10;<p>Organizations globally are highly dependent on technology to conduct personal and business-related tasks. As of the end of Q1CY2017, there were over <a href="http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm">3.7B Internet users world</a>wide and this population is growing. As Internet adoption is growing, the attack surface is growing. The current cybersecurity threat landscape creates a real risk to people and assets. Therefore, organizations should maintain a balance between allowing access and managing risk. Commonly, enterprise organizations approach cybersecurity by implementing tools and technologies and personnel for protection and incident response. While this is important, the root purpose of implementing cybersecurity tools and technologies is business continuity. Enterprise organizations should also be thinking at a strategic level about the big picture of how to fortify their critical systems, IT infrastructure, and data centers to stay resilient in the face of human errors and cyberthreats that cause downtime. This is where a cyber resilience strategy comes into play. Organizations need to build a cyber resilience strategy and execute a cyber resilience program specifically tailored to their business needs to ensure business continuity in the event of a security incident.</p>&#10;<p>According to Accentures <a href="https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-cybersecurity-digital-trust-2016">State of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust</a>, while 75% of all survey takers say they have high cybersecurity confidence levels, only 37% claim they have confidence in their organizations ability to monitor for breaches and 36% claim confidence in their ability to minimize disruptions. According to Gartner, the <a href="http://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-downtime/">average cost of downtime is USD $5,600 per minute</a>over USD $300,000 per hour. Human error is the most common contributor to downtime. Some studies conclude that <a href="http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240179651/Human-error-most-likely-cause-of-datacentre-downtime-finds-study">human error accounts for 75% of downtime</a>.</p>&#10;<p>With organizations more reliant on IT than ever before, it is important to acknowledge business continuity and disaster response (BCDR) as a vital component to the entire organization, instead of as an issue that has implications for IT teams only. Every enterprise organization needs to be prepared to handle outages caused by unforeseen events. Downtime of critical applications and services could lead to a stop in productivity and operations, lost revenues, and lower customer confidence in the organization. A strong cyber resilience plan effectively executed can help organizations computer systems, IT infrastructure and data centers withstand impact from cyberthreats and human error.</p>&#10;<h2>Cyber resilience scenarios</h2>&#10;<p>There are many news stories about organizations who have suffered from cyberattacks and/or data breaches. Developing a strategy and taking actions in support of cyber resilience may help reduce the extent and cost of recovery from damage due to such incidents.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Example #1 Ransomware infecting multiple organizations globally:</strong></p>&#10;<p>Recent ransomware attacks in the first half of 2017 have highlighted the need to be able to access critical IP, systems, and infrastructure even when its locked down by ransomware. WannaCry ransomware impacted multiple industries and companies worldwide, including automobile manufacturing plants that had to halt production for some time. Regardless of the motivation of the attack, clearly it resulted in unplanned downtime and recovery costs to impacted companies.</p>&#10;<p>A key takeaway is ransomware can impact any type of organization. Keeping computer systems patched and up-to-date, backing up data regularly, having fully tested disaster recovery plans in place, and providing education on cyberthreats (e.g. phishing and ransomware) to direct employees and contractors can help to at least reduce the extent of damage from such an incident.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Example #2 Data breaches continue to impact US healthcare industry:</strong></p>&#10;<p>Cyberattacks continue to measurably impact the healthcare industry since cybercriminals who successfully gain access to medical data could use it for conducting fraud or identity theft for lucrative purposes. Also, the personal data often includes information on a patients medical history, which may be used in targeted spear-phishing attacks. As of August 9, 2017, the US Department of Health and Human Services&#8217; HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website &#8211; often called the &#8220;<a href="https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf">wall of shame</a>&#8221; &#8211; showed a total of 2,018 breaches since 2009. The number of individuals affected by health data breaches also has surged in recent years, <a href="http://www.healthcareinfosecurity.com/health-breach-tally-tops-1000-incidents-a-6891">from 31.5 million as of May 30, 2014, to about 175 million as of August 9, 2017</a>.</p>&#10;<p>There are three key takeaways from these trends and statistics. The first is that healthcare personnel and patients need to be alert to and inform their IT organization of suspicious communications (fraud/phishing emails) and identity theft incidents as much as possible. Another takeaway is that personal health and identification information should not be exposed without an express requirement to share (e.g. for a patient to offer proof of identity for a medical examination or procedure). Further, the use of data classification and information protection solutions can help reduce the impact of exposure by protecting sensitive information across its lifecycle.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Example #3 Human error led to client information exposure for financial services firm:</strong></p>&#10;<p>Financial services and banking industries, despite putting in place relatively tighter monitoring and controls over their infrastructure and data than other industries, continue to be impacted by data breaches. In early 2017, a financial services firm inadvertently left exposed to the public a database containing sensitive information on thousands of its clients. The company claimed that the incident was due to human error by a 3rd party vendor.</p>&#10;<p>A key takeaway is that it is important for organizations to hold accountable all contractors with access to the organizations network and data. For instance, this was a major issue that came to light even with the outbreak of the Petya ransomware, in that 3rd party contractors failed to follow organizational cybersecurity policies, which was a root cause of the crisis.</p>&#10;<h2>Considerations for a cyber resilience program</h2>&#10;<p>To enhance the ability for computer systems, IT infrastructure, and data centers to withstand damages from human error, cyberthreats, and cyberattacks, we suggest enterprise organizations consider a cyber resilience program that leverages the combination of people, processes, and cloud services.</p>&#10;<p><strong>People:</strong></p>&#10;<p>Every person with corporate network access, including full-time employees, consultants, and contractors, should be regularly trained to develop a cyber resilient mindset. This includes not only adhering to IT security policies around identity-based access control, but also alerting IT to suspicious events and infections as soon as possible to help minimize time to remediation.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Processes:</strong></p>&#10;<p>Organizations should consider implementing several processes for an effective cyber resilient posture. Some of these can be implemented as IT security policies. Suggested processes include the ones listed in the table below.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Cloud services:</strong></p>&#10;<p>To maintain cyber resilience, the suggested processes should be performed on a regular basis based upon the threshold of the business to handle risk and its ability to operationally execute the processes through a combination of human efforts and technology products and services.</p>&#10;<p>Fortunately, cloud service based architectures can be used to rapidly reconstitute on-premises infrastructure or fail over to a mirrored infrastructure. A key consideration when adopting cloud services is to look at how the provider conducts their assessments and look for 3rd party audits and certifications as examples of how they are performing.</p>&#10;<p>Cloud services such as Microsoft Azure and Office 365 can serve at least as a first step towards helping customers with their cyber resilience needs.</p>&#10;<table style="height: 5995px;" width="1006">&#10;<tbody>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Process</strong></p>&#10;</td>&#10;<td style="text-align: center;" width="233"><strong>Description</strong></td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Microsoft Services</strong></p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Early warning and alerting system</td>&#10;<td width="233">Organizations should receive early warning and alerts on suspicious or investigation-worthy electronic information.</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security-center/security-center-intro">Azure Security Center</a> automatically collects, analyzes, and integrates log data from your Azure resources, which can be used for eDiscovery.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://support.office.com/en-us/article/eDiscovery-in-Office-365-143b3ab8-8cb0-4036-a5fc-6536d837bfce?ui=en-US&amp;rs=en-US&amp;ad=US">eDiscovery in Office 365</a> can be used to search for content in Exchange Online mailboxes, Office 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and sites, and Skype for Business conversations.</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Incorporate cyber incidents into disaster recovery and business continuity planning</td>&#10;<td width="233">Incorporate cyber incidents into your existing disaster recovery and business continuity planning, and characterize or assign a higher likelihood to these incidents than to traditional acts of nature.</p>&#10;<p>&nbsp;</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">If you are looking to implement disaster recovery for all your major IT systemswithout the expense of secondary infrastructure, Microsoft offers a <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/">variety of architectures</a> available to help organizations design and implement secure, highly-available, performant, and resilient solutions on Azure.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Office 365 offerings are delivered by highly resilient systems that help to ensure high levels of service. <a href="https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-service-continuity.aspx">Service continuity</a> provisions are part of the Office 365 system design. These provisions enable Office 365 to recover quickly from unexpected events such as hardware or application failure, data corruption, or other incidents that affect users. These service continuity solutions also apply during catastrophic outages (for example, natural disasters or an incident within a Microsoft data center that renders the entire data center inoperable).</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Platform hardening</td>&#10;<td width="233">Lock down platform against hacking attempts.</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">From a platform hardening perspective, Microsoft performs our own internal assessments through penetration testing and <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/red-teaming-using-cutting-edge-threat-simulation-to-harden-the-microsoft-enterprise-cloud/">red teams</a>. Microsoft uses Red Teaming to simulate real-world breaches, conduct continuous security monitoring, and practice security incident response to validate and improve the security of Microsoft Azure and Office 365. We strive to provide a robust cloud platform that customers can depend on for accessing critical applications and data in a secure manner.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/cloudservices/office365">Office 365</a> is a security-hardened service, designed following the <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/sdl">Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle</a>. We bring together best practices from two decades of building enterprise software and managing online services to give you an integrated software-as-a-service solution.</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Protect against email cyberthreats</td>&#10;<td width="233">Implement security policies for detecting and protecting users from opening email based web links and attachments that are suspicious or malicious (e.g. phishing).</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/online-email-threat-protection">Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection</a> helps protect mailboxes against new, sophisticated attacks in real time. By protecting against unsafe attachments and expanding protection against malicious links, it complements the security features of Exchange Online Protection to provide better zero-day protection.</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Control access</td>&#10;<td width="233">Limit access to data and applications, to reduce risk.</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/multi-factor-authentication/">Azure Multi-Factor Authentication</a> helps safeguard access to data and applications, and helps to meet customer demand for a simple sign-in process. Get strong authentication with a range of easy verification optionsphone call, text message, or mobile app notificationand allow customers to choose the method they prefer.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2014/02/10/multi-factor-authentication-for-office-365/">Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365</a> helps secure access to Office 365. It increases the security of user logins for cloud services above and beyond just a password. Users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message, or an app notification on their smartphone after correctly entering their password. Only after this second authentication factor has been satisfied can a user sign in.</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Detect and defend against rogue systems</td>&#10;<td width="233">Apply conditional access-based security defenses to systems that have gone rogue</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Conditional access in Azure Active Directory enables you to enforce controls on the access to apps in your environment based on specific conditions. With controls, you can either tie additional requirements to the access or you can block it. The implementation of conditional access is based on policies. A policy-based approach simplifies your configuration experience because it follows the way you think about your access requirements.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt750346.aspx">Device Health Attestation</a> (DHA) for Office 365 enables enterprises to raise the security bar of their organization to hardware monitored and attested security, with minimal or no impact on operation cost. You can use DHA to assess device health for:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile devices that support TPM 1.2 or 2.0.</li>&#10;<li>On-premises devices that are managed by using Active Directory with Internet access, devices that are managed by using Active Directory without Internet access, devices managed by Azure Active Directory, or a hybrid deployment using both Active Directory and Azure Active Directory.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Vulnerability assessment</td>&#10;<td width="233">Learn about vulnerabilities in order of severity to be able to focus mitigation efforts on those presenting the most risk to the organization</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The vulnerability assessment in <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security-center/security-center-vulnerability-assessment-recommendations">Azure Security Center</a> is part of the Security Center virtual machine (VM) recommendations. If Security Center doesn&#8217;t find a vulnerability assessment solution installed on your VM, it recommends that you install one.</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Software updates and patching</td>&#10;<td width="233">Continuously patch vendor software as new updates become available to help reduce probability of attack or at least mitigate damage incurred.</p>&#10;<p>&nbsp;</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Hosting applications in Microsoft Azure not only alleviates management of systems for companies. It also helps with system updates and keeping servers up to date. As new security vulnerabilities are identified, Microsoft will automatically apply updates to Microsoft Azure roles (if configured to do so). Admins can choose to have Microsoft keep their roles (instances) up to date and apply these updates when they are available, thereby eliminating a tremendous administrative effort for the company.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus software can receive <a href="https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Choose-how-to-manage-updates-to-Office-365-ProPlus-e486afce-ad31-4889-87a4-28796751bb86">updates</a> automatically from the Internet or from an on-premises location (based on organizations preference).</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Identification-based access control</td>&#10;<td width="233">Protect access to applications and resources end-to-end: across the corporate datacenter and into the cloud.</p>&#10;<p>&nbsp;</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/identity-management">Microsoft identity and management solutions</a> enable you to centrally manage identities across your datacenter and the cloud:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/azure-active-directory">Azure Active Directory cloud identity and access management solutions</a> &#8211; get single sign-on to thousands of cloud apps and access to web apps that you run on-premises with Azure Active Directory Premium. Built for ease of use, Azure Active Directory management tools enable collaboration and deliver holistic identity protection and adaptive access control.</li>&#10;<li><a href="http://azure.microsoft.com/services/active-directory-b2c/">Azure Active Directory B2C</a> &#8211; cloud identity service allows you to connect to any customer. Governments and enterprises worldwide are using this service to serve their applications to their citizens and customers with fully customizable experiences, while protecting their identities at the same time.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Office 365 uses <a href="https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Understanding-Office-365-identity-and-Azure-Active-Directory-06a189e7-5ec6-4af2-94bf-a22ea225a7a9">Azure Active Directory</a> cloud based user authentication service to manage users. You can choose from three main identity models in Office 365 when you set up and manage user accounts:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Cloud identity. Manage your user accounts in Office 365 only. No on-premises servers are required to manage users; it&#8217;s all done in the cloud.</li>&#10;<li>Synchronized identity. Synchronize on-premises directory objects with Office 365 and manage your users on-premises. You can also synchronize passwords so that the users have the same password on-premises and in the cloud, but they will have to sign in again to use Office 365.</li>&#10;<li>Federated identity. Synchronize on-premises directory objects with Office 365 and manage your users on-premises. The users have the same password on-premises and in the cloud, and they do not have to sign in again to use Office 365. This is often referred to as single sign-on.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Regular data backups</td>&#10;<td width="233">Back up data in case your organization is impacted by ransomware or other cyberthreats.</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Azure:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-security-feature">Azure Backup</a> enables protection for hybrid backups via prevention, alerting, and recovery features.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Office 365:</strong></p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-is-OneDrive-for-Business-187f90af-056f-47c0-9656-cc0ddca7fdc2?ui=en-US&amp;rs=en-US&amp;ad=US">OneDrive for Business</a> is an integral part of Office 365, and provides place in the cloud where you can store, share, and sync work files. It also allows for incremental restoration of files.</p>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;<tr>&#10;<td width="111">Protection of administrative credentials</td>&#10;<td width="233">Secure administrative credentials from compromise and misuse.</td>&#10;<td width="280">&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Microsoft Cloud Services, including <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/cloudservices/azure">Azure</a> and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/cloudservices/office365">Office 365</a>, are built on a foundation of <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter">trust</a> and security. The following and many other principles apply to our cloud services:</li>&#10;<li>Microsoft provides you security controls and capabilities to help you protect your data and applications.</li>&#10;<li>You own your data and identities and the responsibility for protecting them, the security of your on-premises resources, and the security of cloud components you control.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</td>&#10;</tr>&#10;</tbody>&#10;</table>&#10;<h2>How Microsoft partners with the ecosystem</h2>&#10;<p>Cyber resiliency is not a problem we can address alone. Our commitment is to make sure our products work with technology our customers already use. Microsoft is fostering a vibrant ecosystem of partners who help us raise the bar across the industry. Through our technology partner network, we can offer proactive vulnerability tools as well as more feature rich solutions like application firewall and threat detection to customers. We also collaborate extensively with customers and industry standards bodies to help us meet specific customer cyber resiliency needs and industry regulations. Microsoft has been working with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to demonstrate that our operating systems and most recently, our cloud platform, Azure, have been hardened against cyberthreats. We are working towards getting Azure to pass the CIS Benchmark requirements. CIS Benchmarks are the only consensus-based, best-practice security configuration guides both developed and accepted by government, business, industry, and academia. Also, Microsoft is actively working to align our offerings with the SANS Critical Security Controls set of recommendations, which organizations use to prepare for the most important actual threats that exist in todays Internet world.</p>&#10;<h2>Summary</h2>&#10;<p>Developing and executing a cyber resilience program is not trivial it is a journey, not a destination. It requires organizational focus, commitment, and effort. For additional, detailed guidance on this topic, stay tuned for a white paper to be published later this year.</p>&#10;<hr />&#10;<p>&nbsp;</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 22 is now available</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/17/microsoft-security-intelligence-report-volume-22-is-now-available/</link> <pubDate>Thu, 17 Aug 2017 12:30:40 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69579</guid> <description><![CDATA[The latest volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is now available for free download at www.microsoft.com/sir.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The latest volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is now available for free download at <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sir">www.microsoft.com/sir</a>.</p>&#10;<p>This new volume of the report includes threat data from the first quarter of 2017. The report also provides specific threat data for over 100 countries/regions. As mentioned in a recent <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/02/5-reasons-why-microsoft-should-be-your-cybersecurity-ally/">blog</a>, using the tremendous breadth and depth of signal and intelligence from our various cloud and on-premises solutions deployed globally, we investigate threats and vulnerabilities and regularly publish this report to educate enterprise organizations on the current state of threats and recommended best practices and solutions.</p>&#10;<p>In this 22nd volume, weve made two significant changes:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>We have organized the data sets into two categories, cloud and endpoint. Today, most enterprises now have hybrid environments and its important to provide more holistic visibility.</li>&#10;<li>We are sharing data from a shorter time period, one quarter (January 2017 March 2017), instead of the typical six months, as we shift our focus to delivering improved and more frequent updates in the future.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>The threat landscape is constantly changing. Going forward, we plan to improve how we share the insights, and plan to share data on a more frequent basis &#8211; so that you can have more timely visibility into the latest threat insights. We are committed to continuing our investment in researching and sharing the latest security intelligence with you, as we have for over a decade. This shift in our approach is rooted in a principle that guides Microsoft technology investments: to leverage vast data and unique intelligence to help our customers respond to threats faster.</p>&#10;<p><strong>Here are 3 key findings from the report:</strong></p>&#10;<p><strong>As organizations migrate more and more to the cloud, the frequency and sophistication of attacks on consumer and enterprise accounts in the cloud is growing.</strong></p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>There was a 300 percent increase in Microsoft cloud-based user accounts attacked year-over-year (Q1-2016 to Q1-2017).</li>&#10;<li>The number of account sign-ins attempted from malicious IP addresses has increased by 44 percent year over year in Q1-2017.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p><strong>Cloud services such as Microsoft Azure are perennial targets for attackers seeking to compromise and weaponize virtual machines and other services, and these attacks are taking place across the globe.</strong></p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Over two-thirds of incoming attacks on Azure services in Q1-2017 came from IP addresses in China and the United States, at 35.1 percent and 32.5 percent, respectively. Korea was third at 3.1 percent, followed by 116 other countries and regions.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p><strong>Ransomware is affecting different parts of the world to varying degrees.</strong></p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Ransomware encounter rates are the lowest in Japan (0.012 percent in March 2017), China (0.014 percent), and the United States (0.02 percent).</li>&#10;<li>Ransomware encounter rates are the highest in Europe vs. the rest of the world in Q1-2017.&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Multiple European countries, including the Czech Republic (0.17 percent), Italy (0.14 percent), Hungary (0.14 percent), Spain (0.14 percent), Romania (0.13 percent), Croatia (0.13 percent), and Greece (0.12 percent) had much higher ransomware encounter rates than the worldwide average in March 2017.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>Download Volume 22 of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report today to access additional insights: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sir">www.microsoft.com/sir</a>.</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The world of eroding privacy: tips on how to stay secure</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/08/the-world-of-eroding-privacy-tips-on-how-to-stay-secure/</link> <pubDate>Tue, 08 Aug 2017 16:00:15 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69354</guid> <description><![CDATA[At the intersection of limes, teenagers, and privacy &#160; We will come to limes later in this blog, and they are relevant. But let me begin with one defining statement: I am the parent of a teenager, and the year is 2017. As the parent of an age group that is best described as unpredictable <p><a class="read-more" title="The world of eroding privacy: tips on how to stay secure" aria-label="Read more about The world of eroding privacy: tips on how to stay secure" href="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/08/the-world-of-eroding-privacy-tips-on-how-to-stay-secure/">Read more</a></p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<h2>At the intersection of limes, teenagers, and privacy</h2>&#10;<p>&nbsp;</p>&#10;<p><a href="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/07/limes.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-69363 alignright" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/07/limes.jpg" alt="" width="353" height="270" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/07/limes.jpg 557w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/07/limes-300x229.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 353px) 100vw, 353px" /></a>We will come to limes later in this blog, and they are relevant. But let me begin with one defining statement: I am the parent of a teenager, and the year is 2017.</p>&#10;<p>As the parent of an age group that is best described as unpredictable on good days, one thing is consistent. Research has shown us that this generation does not have the same expectation of privacy as my generation. I remember vigorously debating in a college class my inherent right to privacy as protected by the 4th Amendment. Regardless of whether my argument was flawed or simply not factual, my fundamental belief was I had a legal privacy right, and no institution or government could impede upon it.</p>&#10;<p>My teenager and his friends appear to have a different belief, illustrated by their vigorous use of social media to publish their photos, food, routine life events, even to share their entire belief systems. Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvards<a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/"> Berkman Klein Center for Internet &amp; Society</a>, has covered the topic of <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/new_report_on_t_1.html">teens, social media, and privacy</a> in the past. His conclusion is that teens desire privacy, but they also have a need to safely share with each other using their own language and coding. In 2014, Fast Company compiled and commented on varied research regarding <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3037962/then-and-now/the-truth-about-teenagers-the-internet-and-privacy">teenagers, young adults and expectations of privacy</a>. Whilst one study concluded online privacy is dead, other studies determined it truly depends on how you define privacy. Teenagers may not care if their Facebook friends or Twitter followers know their religion or gender identity, but they certainly care if their parents monitor their social feeds. Teenagers and young adults have grown up in the digital age, so they are much more likely to understand how to set and control privacy settings on their devices and accounts and they do so to segment their audiences. When I conducted my own informal study and asked my teen if a government agency, that suspected him of wrong doing or associated him with an unlawful activity, could search his phone or computer, the reply was get a warrant. So is this generation really any different from prior generations on expectations of privacy? Or, do the differences lie in the complexity of the information sharing platforms to which they feel dependent and entitled? And, how do these beliefs and values shape privacy regulation and laws, and intersect with security in the modern digital era? Are there learnings we can adopt from the next generations implementation of technology and privacy controls?</p>&#10;<p>Now about those limesI have a Twitter account (<a href="https://twitter.com/ajohnsocyber">@ajohnsocyber</a>). I opine about cybersecurity, post about my beloved Chicago Blackhawks and Dallas Cowboys, engage in animated communication with coworkers and friends and advocate for animal fostering and LGBTQ rights. I also have a Facebook account mainly to catch up with far away family and share pictures. I have a LinkedIn profile too, but its for work and I am a purist about my posts there. So, I have an online footprint. That online footprint will tell you the names of my dogs, things about my belief system, expose my awful attempts at humor, and my preference for seedless Persian Limes on the occasions when I need something to accompany a cocktail. The Persian limes were a recent addition based on a Twitter conversation with two people I havent actually met IRL, so you can say my social interactions are fruitful. The point of all of this is that I share enough for someone to assemble a fairly detailed profile of me from my social media footprint and with it, attempt to social engineer or password hack me. Yet I willingly give up some of my privacy to interact with other humans in cyber space. As a security professional, I should know better, right? Well, not necessarily. All social media use does not lead to a path of hacker victim, and I am fully aware of which information to share and which to protect and how.</p>&#10;<p>My social sharing is guided by some core principles:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>The Internet is in perpetuity. My digital footprint is unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future.</li>&#10;<li>Hackers will keep hacking, and even the best defenses cant always prevent persistent and sophisticated attempts. Think back to the relentless attempts on Brian Krebs in 2016.</li>&#10;<li>Multi-factor authentication (MFA) on my personal and professional accounts is a must.</li>&#10;<li>Most of the information I choose to disclose is already available in some way either via public record or through friends with no special instruction for secrecy.</li>&#10;<li>I can concurrently assert my right to privacy, and my privilege to waive that right.</li>&#10;<li>I encrypt sensitive personal data.</li>&#10;<li>I have provisioned defense in depth controls and alerts for critical information.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>Because in reality, our hyper-connected world of powerful search engines, and abundant compute and storage, make it possible for reams of data about your entire life to be mined by anyone with a strong desire and a credit card. Oddly though, the majority of breaches still start with a phish rather than a targeted social engineering attack. In fact, phishing is the number one delivery method of malicious software. Compromises of sensitive data are most often tracked back to: weak authentication, poor data classification/encryption policies, lax privilege management, absent or weak admin controls and lack of user education on phishing. We can opine all day about privacy and the need to hold sensitive information close to increase security, but in todays society, from our youth to the millions of adults using social media, including many of the top cyber professionals in the world, very little is truly private.</p>&#10;<p>Add to this a climate of perpetual information sharing and consumption and you can pretty much throw privacy expectations out the window. What you can and should do personally and professionally is make certain you distinguish the personal and private from that which is critically important and know your options to protect each. For technology, consumers deploy basic security hygiene, strong passwords and regular updating. Organizations have additional responsibilities to educate users, patch, use all available access controls and invest in proven detection solutions as well as human hunters so that the now. This way, all but inevitable breaches can be detected quickly.</p>&#10;<p>Because, guess what, notwithstanding the controls required by regulations, the right to be forgotten or have data forgotten in our ever-connected world maybe a right, but it needs your active participation if there is to be anything left to debat</p>&#10;<hr />&#10;<p>&nbsp;</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Top 5 best practices to automate security operations</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/03/top-5-best-practices-to-automate-security-operations/</link> <pubDate>Thu, 03 Aug 2017 21:16:28 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69444</guid> <description><![CDATA[This post is authored by Jonathan Trull, Worldwide Executive Cybersecurity Advisor, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. And by Vidhi Agarwal, Senior Security Program Manager,Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). Within the information security community, one of the emerging areas of focus and investment is the concept of security automation and orchestration. Although the topic is not necessarily new, <p><a class="read-more" title="Top 5 best practices to automate security operations" aria-label="Read more about Top 5 best practices to automate security operations" href="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/03/top-5-best-practices-to-automate-security-operations/">Read more</a></p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>This post is authored by Jonathan Trull, Worldwide Executive Cybersecurity Advisor, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. And by Vidhi Agarwal, Senior Security Program Manager,Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).</em></p>&#10;<p>Within the information security community, one of the emerging areas of focus and investment is the concept of security automation and orchestration. Although the topic is not necessarily new, it has taken on increased importance due to several industry trends. Before diving into the industry trends, we should first define exactly what security automation and security orchestration mean.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Security automation</strong> the use of information technology in place of manual processes for cyber incident response and security event management.</p>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Security orchestration</strong> the integration of security and information technology tools designed to streamline processes and drive security automation.</p>&#10;<h3>Industry trends driving the need for increased automation and orchestration</h3>&#10;<p>There are two primary trends driving the focus on the automation and orchestration of security event management and incident response. First, there are simply not enough skilled security professionals to support the need. A <a href="http://cybersecurityventures.com/jobs/">recent cybersecurity jobs report</a> found that there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity positions by 2021.</p>&#10;<p>The second industry trend driving further investments in security automation and orchestration is based on the volume, velocity, and complexity of attacks. As shown in Figure 1 below, our information environments are extremely complex and vast. They are also often beyond the capabilities of a human to perceive, visualize, calculate, and understand the interconnections. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately project risk in different scenarios. The velocity at which attacks transpire is also driving the need for automation. Based on recent examples from the Microsoft Global Incident Response and Recovery Team, we have seen situations where attackers move from an initial endpoint infection via a phishing email, to full domain control within 24 hours. Lastly, the sheer volume of cyberattacks and security events triaged daily by security operations centers continues to grow, making it nearly impossible for humans to keep pace.</p>&#10;<p><img class="size-large wp-image-69456 aligncenter" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/08/Verizon-Data-Breach-Report-Microsoft-Incident-Response-Data-1024x453.png" alt="" width="640" height="283" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Verizon-Data-Breach-Report-Microsoft-Incident-Response-Data-1024x453.png 1024w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Verizon-Data-Breach-Report-Microsoft-Incident-Response-Data-300x133.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Verizon-Data-Breach-Report-Microsoft-Incident-Response-Data-768x339.png 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Verizon-Data-Breach-Report-Microsoft-Incident-Response-Data.png 1432w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></p>&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Figure 1 Sources include <a href="https://nvd.nist.gov">https://nvd.nist.gov</a>, Verizon Data Breach Report &amp; Microsoft Incident Response Data</em></p>&#10;<h3>Security automation and orchestration at the Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center</h3>&#10;<p>Daily, the Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center (CDOC) receives alerts from a multitude of data collection systems and detection platforms across the 200+ cloud and online services. The key challenge they face is taking the huge volume of data on potential security events and reducing them down from thousands of high fidelity alerts, to hundreds of qualified cases that can be managed daily by the cyber defenders in the Microsoft CDOC. Automation solutions include the use of machine learning and custom software tools to handle an increasing number of events, without relying on a commensurate growth in headcount. It also accelerates Microsoft&#8217;s ability to identify those cases which need human intervention to remediate and evict adversaries fast.</p>&#10;<p><img class="size-large wp-image-69468 aligncenter" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/08/CDOC-1024x511.png" alt="" width="640" height="319" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/CDOC-1024x511.png 1024w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/CDOC-300x150.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/CDOC-768x383.png 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/CDOC.png 1430w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></p>&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Figure 2The Cyber Defense Operations Centers data scientists and analysts work 24&#215;7 protecting, detecting, and responding to attacks</em></p>&#10;<p>Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center workflow automation framework and engineering addresses all aspects of the job of a security responder and includes the following components:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><strong>Automated Ingestion:</strong> With an increasing number of specialized detection platforms across host, network, identity, and service detections, CDOC has an automated ingestion process leading to a single case management system for triage and investigations.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Stacking:</strong> Compression of alerts from thousands to hundreds of cases includes automated stacking based on time window or objects such as IP address, host name, user or subscription ID. In certain cases, alerts are aggregated or de-duplicated to reduce the noise coming to the SOC.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Enrichment:</strong> Often defenders need to go to multiple tools and databases to get contextual information. Adding contextual metadata to alerts from systems such as asset management, configuration management, vulnerability management and logs such as application logs, DNS and network traffic logs save defenders triage time and reduces overall Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). Furthermore, this data helps the automation system make decisions and enable appropriate actions.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Decisions:</strong> Based on conditional logic, the automation engine determines what workflow would be invoked to initiate the desired action.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Actions</strong>: Actions such as such as send e-mail, create a ticket, reset password, disable a VM, block an IP address, run a script to initiate processes in other tools and systems are automated.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>Based on the degree of automation implemented, there is a corresponding reduction in MTTR and an ability for a defender to close more cases. The automation maturity model below highlights the automation journey for the Microsoft CDOC. Not all scenarios will need to be at Level 5. Each level accrues, achieving automation goals your organization may have.</p>&#10;<p><img class="size-large wp-image-69474 aligncenter" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/08/Figure-3-automation-maturity-model-1024x407.png" alt="" width="640" height="254" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Figure-3-automation-maturity-model-1024x407.png 1024w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Figure-3-automation-maturity-model-300x119.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Figure-3-automation-maturity-model-768x306.png 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Figure-3-automation-maturity-model.png 1292w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></p>&#10;<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Figure 3: The automation maturity model and automation journey, Copyright Microsoft Corporation</em></p>&#10;<h3>Measuring automation success</h3>&#10;<p>The goal for any security operations center automation efforts is to reduce Mean Time to Detect and Mean Time to Remediate while not having a linear growth in headcount with the growth in business. The key is to not only measure automation results and SOC efficiency, but to also gain insights to determine where automation efforts need to be spent to improve the security posture of your organization. Some fundamentals to measure include:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><strong>Noise Reduction:</strong> Most Security Operations Centers struggle with the signal-to-noise ratio. A key measure for this is the stacking ratio that measures the compression from alerts to cases and is an indicator of reduction in triage activity needed.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Automate High Fidelity Signals:</strong> It is critical to ensure that automation efforts are spent on high fidelity alerts and the right response processes. Measuring detection efficacy by determining true positive and false positive alerts enables a continuous feedback loop and improvement in detection signals. Understanding false negatives identifies monitoring and security response gaps.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Address Top Offenders:</strong> It is common for security response teams to be drowned in repetitive signals and the same tasks repeatedly. Identifying and tracking top offenders over time provides insights on what needs to be further automated or prevented through better monitoring, controls and engineering solutions.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Automation Outcomes:</strong> Validating the outcomes for automation efforts is essential to right size efforts. With increased automation teams seeing that their TTx (Time to Detect, Triage, Remediate and others) goes down and the SOC investigator efficiency increases, as the number of cases each defender can successfully resolve goes up.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<h3>Security automation and orchestration best practices</h3>&#10;<p>Recently, we had the opportunity to share the lessons we have learned working with our customers and from the Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center at <a href="https://www.rsaconference.com/events/ap17/agenda/sessions/4649-10x-increase-your-teams-effectiveness-by-automating">RSA Asia Pacific and Japan 2017</a>. These best practices include:</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><strong>Move as much of the work as possible to your detectors</strong>. Select and deploy sensors that automate, correlate, and interlink their findings prior to sending them to an analyst.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Automate alert collection</strong>. The SOC analyst should have everything they need to triage and respond to an alert without performing any additional information collection, such as querying systems that may or may not be offline or collecting information from additional sources such as asset management systems or network devices.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Automate alert prioritization</strong>. Real time analytics should be leveraged to prioritize events based on threat intelligence feeds, asset information, and attack indicators. Analysts and incident responders should be focused on the highest severity alerts.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Automate tasks and processes</strong>. Target common, repetitive, and time-consuming administrative processes first and standardize response procedures. Once the response is standardized, automate the SOC analyst workflow to remove any human intervention where possible.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Continuous Improvement</strong>. Monitor the key metrics we discussed earlier in this article and tune your sensors and workflows to drive incremental changes.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p>Microsoft is committed to our customers success and has applied these best practices not only internally within the CDOC but also into our Advanced Threat Protection offerings to help enterprises stay ahead of cyberattacks. In addition, our recent <a href="https://news.microsoft.com/2017/06/08/microsoft-signs-agreement-to-acquire-hexadite/#VwJGVJM5sI2dWyFd.97">acquisition of Hexadite</a> will build on the successful work already done to help commercial Windows 10 customers detect, investigate and respond to advanced attacks on their networks with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP).</p>&#10;<p>Microsofts Advanced Threat Protection offering will now include artificial intelligence-based automatic investigation and remediation capabilities, making response and remediation faster and more effective.</p>&#10;<p>In addition, Azure Security Center offers advanced threat detection capabilities that utilize artificial intelligence to automate and orchestrate detection and response for a customers Azure workloads. This makes it easier for Azure customers to not only identify and respond to attacks against their cloud assets, but it also provides intelligent recommendations to help prevent future attacks.</p>&#10;<p>Read more about the work Microsoft is doing to automate and orchestrate security workloads by learning about the capabilities within <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/windows-atp">WDATP</a>, <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/security-center/">Azure Security Center </a>and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/default.aspx">Microsoft Security</a>.</p>&#10;<p>&nbsp;</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>5 Reasons why Microsoft should be your cybersecurity ally</title> <link>https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/08/02/5-reasons-why-microsoft-should-be-your-cybersecurity-ally/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 02 Aug 2017 16:00:45 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Microsoft Secure Blog Staff]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/?p=69405</guid> <description><![CDATA[When you think about cybersecurity, does Microsoft come to mind? Probably not. Here are 5 reasons why enterprises should consider partnering with Microsoft on cybersecurity.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>When you think about cybersecurity, does Microsoft come to mind? Probably not.</p>&#10;<p>Here are 5 reasons why enterprises should consider partnering with Microsoft on cybersecurity:</p>&#10;<h3>1. Strong Commitment to Cybersecurity</h3>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><strong>Significant security investments</strong>. <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-cyber-microsoft-idUSKBN15A1GA">Microsoft invests over $1 billion annually on security</a>. Microsoft has invested significantly towards building security into our core technologies like Windows, Office, and Azure, and in making strategic acquisitions of security technologies that enhance the investments customers have already made in Microsoft. We operate the <a href="http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/6/8/4680DFC2-7D56-460F-AD41-612F1A131A26/Microsoft_Cyber_Defense_Operations_Center_strategy_brief_EN_US.pdf">Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center</a> (CDOC), a 24&#215;7 cybersecurity and defense facility with leading security experts and data scientists that protect, detect, and respond to threats to Microsofts cloud infrastructure, products and devices, and internal resources.</li>&#10;<li><strong>Microsoft powered by Microsoft</strong>. We use our own hosted cloud and security solutions. Microsoft runs its business on the same multi-tenant cloud services as our customers, including those from highly regulated industries and governments.</li>&#10;<li><strong>World class security talent and expertise</strong>. Our dedicated engineers, researchers, forensics experts, threat hunters, and data scientists work together to make our products and services better for you. The global incident response team works around the clock to help our customers respond and recover from breaches, and our team of Executive Security Advisors, including former CISOs, leverage extensive real-world experience to partner with customers on planning and implementing sound security programs.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<h3>2. Holistic Security Approach</h3>&#10;<p>Microsoft takes a three-fold security approach for customers to enable their business digital transformation.</p>&#10;<p><a href="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/08/Holistic-Security-Approach.png"><img class="size-large wp-image-69414 aligncenter" src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/08/Holistic-Security-Approach-1024x319.png" alt="" width="640" height="199" srcset="https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Holistic-Security-Approach-1024x319.png 1024w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Holistic-Security-Approach-300x93.png 300w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Holistic-Security-Approach-768x239.png 768w, https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/08/Holistic-Security-Approach.png 1134w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></a></p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><strong>A Comprehensive Platform</strong> Microsofts platform looks holistically across all the critical end-points of todays cloud &amp; mobile world. By building security into Microsoft products and services from the start, we can deliver a comprehensive, agile platform to better protect your organization, move faster to detect threats, and respond to security breaches across even the largest of organizations. The platform serves as the framework for protecting enterprise organizations in four ways:&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Identity and Access Management: protect users identities and control access to valuable resources based on user risk level</li>&#10;<li>Threat Protection: protect against advanced threats and help you recover quickly when attacked</li>&#10;<li>Information Protection: help ensure documents and emails are seen only by the people you authorize</li>&#10;<li>Security Management: gain visibility and control over your security resources, workflows, and policies, as well as recommendations on improving your security posture</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;<li><strong>Vast Intelligence</strong> Our intelligence, which is built upon a massive amount of security related-signals from the consumer and commercial services that we operate on a global scale, powers Microsoft solutions to enable you to protect, detect, and respond to threats more effectively. Each month we:&#10;<ul>&#10;<li>Scan 400 billion emails across outlook.com and Office 365 for phishing and malware</li>&#10;<li>Process 450 billion authentications across all cloud services</li>&#10;<li>Execute 18+ billion Bing webpage scans</li>&#10;<li>Update 1+ billion Windows devices</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Using the tremendous breadth and depth of signal and intelligence from our various on-premises and cloud solutions deployed globally, we investigate threats and vulnerabilities and regularly publish the <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/Intelligence-report">Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR)</a> to educate enterprise organizations on the current state of threats and recommended best practices and solutions.</p>&#10;<ul>&#10;<li><strong>Broad Partnerships</strong> Were committed to being a leader in this space, but security is not a problem we can address alone. Our commitment is to make sure our products work with technology you already use. Microsoft is fostering a vibrant ecosystem of partners who help us raise the bar across the industry. We also collaborate extensively with customers and industry standards bodies to help us meet specific customer needs and industry regulations.</li>&#10;</ul>&#10;<h3>3. Trust-aligned Corporate Mission</h3>&#10;<p>Microsofts mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As our CEO, Satya Nadella, stated, Businesses and users are going to embrace technology only if they can trust it, and therefore we want to make sure our customers can trust the digital technology that they use, backed with the assurances they need. Weve made investments in privacy and control, compliance, and transparency, and especially those features that matter the most to our customers.</p>&#10;<p>For example, for our cloud services, we are committed to: helping you have control over your data, enabling you to comply with applicable laws, regulations and key international standards, and being transparent with you about the collection and use of your data. Last, but not least, we are committed to safeguarding your data from hackers and unauthorized access using state-of-the-art technology, process and certifications.</p>&#10;<p>To learn more about Microsofts commitment to security, privacy, compliance, and transparency of our products and services, visit the Microsoft Trust Center at <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/trustcenter">www.microsoft.com/trustcenter</a>.</p>&#10;<h3>4. Leadership in Cybersecurity Best Practice Sharing</h3>&#10;<p>Microsoft collaborates extensively with governments and organizations around the world in sharing industry standards, providing guidance on cybersecurity best practices, and engaging in protecting critical infrastructure sectors.</p>&#10;<p>For example, even before the launch of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cyber Security Framework (CSF), Microsoft provided a response to the <a href="http://csrc.nist.gov/cyberframework/rfi_comments/040713_microsoft.pdf">RFI</a> and subsequently, NIST used our recommendations of focusing on protect, detect, respond, and recover functions in the NIST CSF. Microsofts deep engagement with the Framework has allowed <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/security/designopsecurity">us</a> to be agile in adopting it for our enterprise risk-management program, to inform and influence our security risk practices. It is also a key component in how we track security assurance and communicate about security maturity.</p>&#10;<p>Additionally, the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), established as a mandatory policy in 2004, has been designed as an integral part of the software development process at Microsoft. Combining a holistic and practical approach, the SDL introduces security and privacy early and throughout all phases of the development process. The industry has accepted practices aligned with the SDL, and we continue to adapt it to new technologies and changes in the threat landscape. Microsoft has developed guidance papers, tools, training and resources to help organizations <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/sdl">understand and adopt</a> the SDL.</p>&#10;<p>We are committed to disseminating such best practices (NIST CSF, SDL, etc.) internationally also.</p>&#10;<h3>5. Deep Customer Interaction</h3>&#10;<p>The Enterprise Cybersecurity Group (ECG) inside of Microsoft has been deeply engaging with customers across the globe to educate them on Microsofts cybersecurity approach and services. To further help customers with their cybersecurity strategies, ECG partnered with a variety teams (Digital Crimes Unit, Cyber Defense Operations Center, Digital Risk and Security Engineering team, Cloud &amp; Enterprise Security, Windows Security, and others) to launch a cybersecurity executive briefing center (EBC) experience. This invitation only program is designed to provide an executive level security experience for our customers CISOs and their teams.</p>&#10;<p>Key benefits of the EBC experience for customers:</p>&#10;<ol>&#10;<li>Attendees receive a comprehensive overview of Microsofts cybersecurity products and services aligned thematically to the Protect, Detect, and Respond framework, a common approach followed by enterprise organizations.</li>&#10;<li>They meet face-to-face with Microsoft security experts and leaders from engineering, product management, threat intelligence, cyber security services, information security and risk management, and more to learn about approaches, ask questions, and provide feedback in real time.</li>&#10;<li>Attendees learn how to improve their cyber security posture and come away with a stronger relationship with Microsoft as a trusted advisor and partner.</li>&#10;</ol>&#10;<p>To learn about Microsofts security strategy and solutions, visit: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/security">www.microsoft.com/security</a>.</p>&#10;]]></content:encoded> </item> </channel> </rss>