Securing multicloud environments is a deeply nuanced task, and many organizations struggle to fully safeguard the many different ways cyberthreat actors can compromise their environment. In our latest report, “2024 State of Multicloud Security Risk,” we analyzed usage patterns across Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Security Exposure Management, Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Purview to identify the top multicloud security risks across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and beyond. This is the first time Microsoft has released a report sharing key insights across aspects of cloud security, including identity and data. 

This multidimensional analysis is key because it provides deeper visibility into all of the angles cyberattackers can use to breach cloud environments. For example, we found that more than 50% of cloud identities had access to all permissions and resources in 2023. Can you imagine what would happen if even one of these “super identities” were compromised? Looking beyond identity and access, we also discovered significant vulnerabilities in development and runtime environments and within organizations’ data security postures. These threats and more are the driving forces behind Microsoft’s work to advance cybersecurity protections by sharing the latest security intelligence and through programs like the recently expanded Secure Future Initiative, which works to guide Microsoft advancements according to secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations principles.

Read on for our topline insights from the report.

2024 State of Multicloud Security

The new report shares trends and insights to drive an integrated multicloud security strategy.

Read the report

1. Multicloud security demands a proactive, prioritized approach  

Any practitioner who has worked in cloud security can tell you just how challenging it is to analyze, prioritize, and address the hundreds of security alerts they receive every day. Security teams are also responsible for managing all exposed assets and other potential risk vectors. The average multicloud estate has 351 exploitable attack paths that lead to high-value assets, and we discovered more than 6.3 million exposed critical assets among all organizations.  

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is one solution, but rather than taking a siloed approach, we recommend driving deeper, more contextualized CSPM as part of a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP).  

CNAPPs are unified platforms that simplify securing cloud-native applications and infrastructure throughout their lifecycle. Because CNAPPs can unify CSPM with things like multipipeline DevOps security, cloud workload protections, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), and cloud service network security (CSNS), they can correlate alerts and eliminate visibility gaps between otherwise disparate tools. This allows security teams to proactively identify, prioritize, and mitigate potential cyberattack paths before they can be exploited. 

2. CNAPP embeds secure best practices throughout the entire application lifecycle

Properly securing cloud-native applications and infrastructure from initial code development to provisioning and runtime is a significant challenge area for many organizations. We found that 65% of code repositories contained source code vulnerabilities in 2023, which remained in the code for 58 days on average. Given that one quarter of high-risk vulnerabilities are exploited within 24 hours of being published, this creates a significant window for threat actors to take advantage and compromise your environment.²

In addition to delivering proactive protection during runtime, CNAPP can act as a shared platform for security teams to work with developers to unify, strengthen, and manage multipipeline DevOps security. And because CNAPP unites multiple cloud security capabilities under a single umbrella, security teams can also enforce full-lifecycle protections from a centralized dashboard. This shifts security left and heads off development risks before they become a problem in runtime.  

3. Organizations need a unified security approach to secure cross-cloud workloads

Multicloud security goes deeper than attack path analysis and strong DevSecOps. Organizations also need to examine how the growing use and variety of cloud workloads impact their exposure to cyberthreats. When cloud workloads span across multiple cloud environments, that creates a more complex threat landscape with additional complexities and dependencies that require proper configuration and monitoring to secure.  

Microsoft’s CNAPP solution, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, has an extended detection and response (XDR) integration that provides richer context to investigations and allows security teams to get the complete picture of an attack across cloud-native resources, devices, and identities. Roughly 6.5% of Defender for Cloud alerts were connected to other domains—such as endpoints, identities, networks, and apps and services—indicating cyberattacks that stretched across multiple cloud products and platforms.  

Rather than using individual point solutions to manage cross-cloud workload threats, organizations need an easy way to centralize and contextualize findings across their various security approaches. A CNAPP delivers that unified visibility. 

4. Securing growing workload identities requires a more nuanced approach

Also central to multicloud security is the idea of identity and access management. In the cloud, security teams must monitor and secure workload identities in addition to user identities. These workload identities are assigned to software workloads, such as apps, microservices, and containers. The growing usage of workload identities creates several challenges. 

For starters, workload identities make up 83% of all cloud identities within Microsoft Entra Permissions Management. When examining the data, we found that 40% of these workload identities are inactive—meaning they have not logged in or used any permissions in at least 90 days. These inactive identities are not monitored the same way as active identities, making them an attractive target for cyberattackers to compromise and use to move laterally. Workload identities can also be manually embedded in code, making it harder to clean them without triggering unintended consequences.  

What’s concerning, though, is the fact that the average organization has three human super identities for every seven workload super identities. These workload super identities have access to all permissions and resources within the multicloud environment, making them an enormous risk vector that must be addressed. And because workload identities are growing significantly faster than human identities, we expect the gap between human and workload super identities to widen rapidly.  

Security teams can address this risk by establishing visibility into all existing super identities and enforcing least privilege access principles over any unused or unnecessary permissions—regardless of the cloud they access. 

5. CIEM drives visibility and control over unused permissions

Speaking of permissions, our report found that more than 51,000 permissions were granted to users and workloads (up from 40,000 in 2022). With more permissions come more access points for cyberattackers.  

A CIEM can be used to drive visibility across the multicloud estate, eliminating the need for standing access for super identities, inactive identities, and unused permissions. Just 2% of human and workload identity permissions were used in 2023, meaning the remaining 98% of unused permissions open organizations up to unnecessary risk.  

By using a CIEM to identify entitlements, organizations can revoke unnecessary permissions and only allow just-enough permissions, just in time. This approach will significantly mitigate potential risks and enhance the overall security posture.  

6. A multilayered data security approach eliminates complexity and limits blind spots

Finally, organizations need a comprehensive data security approach that can help them uncover risks to sensitive data and understand how their users interact with data. It’s also important to protect and prevent unauthorized data use throughout the lifecycle using protection controls like encryption and authentication. 

A siloed solution won’t work, as organizations with 16 or more point solutions experience 2.8 times as many data security incidents as those with fewer tools. Instead, organizations should deploy integrated solutions through a multilayered approach that allows them to combine user and data insights to drive more proactive data security. At Microsoft, we accomplish this through Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive data security, compliance, and governance solution that discovers hidden risks to data wherever it lives or travels, protects and prevents data loss, and investigates and responds to data security incidents. It can also be used to help improve risk and compliance postures and meet regulatory requirements. 

Uncover strategies for mitigating your biggest multicloud risks 

Ultimately, multicloud security has multiple considerations that security teams must account for. It is not a check-the-box endeavor. Rather, security teams must continuously enforce best practices from the earliest stages of development to runtime, identity and access management, and data security. Not only must these best practices be enforced throughout the full cloud lifecycle, but they must also be standardized across all cloud platforms.

In a recent episode of our podcast, Uncovering Hidden Risks, we sat down with Christian Koberg-Pineda, a Principal Security DevOps Engineer at S.A.C.I. Falabella, to dive into his journey toward uncovering the challenges and strategies for safeguarding cloud-native applications across various cloud platforms. In it, he talks about the complexity of securing multiple clouds, including navigating differing configurations, technical implementations, and identity federation.

“One of the most relevant characteristics of cloud computing is that you can scale things on demand. As cloud security expert, you must think in scale too. You need to implement a security tool that is also capable of scaling together with your infrastructure or your services.”

– Christian Koberg-Pineda, Principal Security DevOps Engineer at S.A.C.I. Falabella

For more information on creating a secure multicloud environment, download the full “2024 State of Multicloud Security Risk” report and check out the below resources.  

• Uncovering Hidden Risks Podcast Episode 18: Navigating Multicloud Security Risks, A Customer Story.
• 2024 State of Multicloud Security Risk Report Infographic.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹SANS 2023 Multicloud Survey: Navigating the Complexities of Multiple Cloud,  SANS Institute. 

²1 in 4 high-risk CVEs are exploited within 24 hours of going public, SC Media.

The post 6 insights from Microsoft’s 2024 state of multicloud risk report to evolve your security strategy appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Our own Microsoft Defender Experts team has been using and exploring Copilot, and finding new ways it can streamline, inform, and optimize their daily work—from improving communication clarity to data analysis and upskilling. Through their work on the Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR service, they serve as an extension of our customers’ security operations center (SOC) teams. They proactively hunt for serious cyberthreats using Microsoft Defender data. They triage, investigate, and expose advanced threats, identify the scope and impact of malicious activity, and then take action on a customer’s behalf to remediate the incident. And now with Copilot, Defender Experts have a powerful new security tool.

Microsoft Copilot for Security

Powerful new capabilities, new integrations, and industry-leading generative AI.

Learn more

A leadership view of Copilot for Security

In this new series of short videos, our Defender Experts share real-world scenarios where Copilot is helping them navigate threat detection, investigation, and managed response. To begin, Ryan Kivett, Partner Group Manager for Defender Experts, Microsoft, shares his leadership view on how Copilot helps support learning and career growth for his team. Then Brian Hooper, Principal Research Lead for Defender Experts, Microsoft, talks about how Copilot can help minimize the mundane tasks that take security analysts away from their most important work—serious threat investigations.

Watch the video “A leadership view on deploying Copilot.”

Save time and increase efficiency

From a leadership level, it’s easy to see the potential of Copilot. But when every second counts—like during an active security incident—that potential needs to be fully realized and actionable. Copilot for Security puts critical guidance and context into the hands of your security team so they can respond to incidents in minutes instead of hours or days. In our next video clip, Phoebe Rogers, a senior member of the Microsoft Defender Experts analyst team, shares how Copilot helps her shave minutes off every script analysis—which adds up to real saved time, increased efficiency and understanding, and greater incident insight. Watch as she shares how she uses Copilot to analyze a suspicious script, step by step.

Watch the video “Script Analysis.”

When security analysts communicate with customers, they need to provide a clear, concise, and comprehensive summary of an active incident in a timely manner, so customers have a deep understanding of the situation. In the following video, Brian Hooper shares a detailed walkthrough of how Copilot is helping analysts write up these incident narratives 90% faster than in the past.

Watch the video “Incident Summaries.”

Upskill junior analysts and develop critical expertise

Most complex and sophisticated attacks like ransomware evade detection through numerous ways, including the use of scripts and PowerShell. Moreover, these scripts are often obfuscated, which adds to the complexity of detection and analysis. In our next video, Brian Hooper shows how the detailed, line-by-line script examination in Copilot allows security analysts to quickly assess and identify a script as malicious or benign. It also helps junior security analysts upskill their expertise. With Copilot, any analyst can use natural language prompts to initiate and perform tasks that they may not have a lot of experience with or expertise in, and the outputs of Copilot will help them both accomplish the right results quickly, and, more importantly, help them develop those critical skills for long-term use.

“Copilot for Security really helps our junior analysts, as if they had a coach next to them, guiding them through the learning phase of their role. And for our senior analysts, it’s really helping them push past what would have otherwise been possible, in terms of reaching their potential.”

—Ryan Kivett, Partner Group Manager for Defender Experts, Microsoft

Watch the video “Script Analyzer in Defender.”

Get rich, contextual information with threat intelligence

Understanding an organization’s external threat surface can take a lot of time and tools. Often, analysts must go to multiple repositories to obtain the critical data sets they need to assess a suspicious domain, host, or IP address. DNS data, WHOIS information, malware, and SSL certificates provide important context to indicators of compromise (IOCs), but these repositories are widely distributed and don’t always share a common data structure, making it difficult to ensure analysts have all relevant data needed to make a proper and timely assessment of suspicious infrastructure. Getting threat intelligence data and rich, contextual information from Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence and Copilot helps security analysts make determinations, like whether an IP is malicious or not. In the next video clip, Phoebe Rogers uses Defender Threat Intelligence and Copilot to compare a user’s sign-in properties with their authentication history, surfacing the relevant information to streamline her analysis and determine whether or not it’s a threat.

Watch the video “Getting threat intel data.”

Once a determination is made, it can still take time and effort for an analyst to summarize and communicate a threat to affected parties. But Copilot can help. In our last video clip, Phoebe explains how Copilot can quickly explain the impact of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and summarize relevant content like impacted products, bad actors known to exploit the vulnerability, and mitigation recommendations.

Watch the video “CVEs and Vulnerabilities.”

Protect at the speed and scale of AI

When faced with incomplete and imperfect data and the need to investigate a potential threat, communicate that threat to a customer, or craft a timely response, security analysts are realizing tangible, measurable benefits from using Copilot in their daily work. It helps them protect and defend their organization at machine speed and scale. Of course, the ability to leverage generative AI is not exclusive to security teams. It may also be leveraged by potential threat actors. So, the sooner security teams can experience and evaluate generative AI to augment and improve their security, the better. That’s why Brian Hooper encourages department leadership who are building their plan to deploy Copilot within their team to encourage exploration. “Let the team try different prompts. Let the team summarize incidents. Let the team analyze scripts. Let the team find out about intelligence that Microsoft knows about attacks. Organically, they will find all different places that it’s going to help them.”

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot for Security, visit the product page, and for more helpful tips and information, view the Copilot for Security Playlist on the Microsoft Security Channel on YouTube.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft Copilot for Security provides immediate impact for the Microsoft Defender Experts team appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Generative AI: The game changer in cybersecurity

To tip the scales in favor of safety and security, we need to augment the work of our skilled security professionals. Human ingenuity and expertise will always be irreplaceable components of defense, but we need technology to expand the skill sets of our security teams with the lightning-fast processing speeds, rapid pattern recognition, and continual improvements of generative AI. By detecting hidden patterns and sharing informed responses back at machine speed—while always adhering to the latest, most advanced security practices—generative AI can help us regain an advantage against cybercriminals. AI provides near real-time visibility and context for potential threats, helping us investigate and mitigate threats faster. When we utilize solutions that incorporate generative AI, teams can become more effective and efficient, using natural language prompts rather than complex queries, and collaborate more easily with shared skills. Early preview customers of Microsoft Security Copilot agree.

Microsoft Security Copilot

Powerful new capabilities, new integrations, and industry-leading generative AI—now available in early access.

Learn more

Early customers report Microsoft Security Copilot saves time

Greg Peterson, Senior Director of Security, Technology, and Operations at Avanade, shares the challenges his organization faces today and how Microsoft Security Copilot can help by empowering senior analysts, junior analysts, and even interns to get ahead of potential security threats.

“For senior analysts, Security Copilot might give them a different and new way to look at a problem. But for our more junior analysts, it’s really going to help bridge the skills gap—especially as we build more curated prompt playbooks and learn how to use those tools,” Peterson explained.  

Beyond generative AI, our end-to-end security, identity, compliance, and privacy solutions allow us to cover more cyberthreat vectors and deliver more value with a coordinated, comprehensive customer experience across the entire digital estate. By embracing generative AI and simplifying otherwise complex toolsets, we help organizations gain an advantage against cyberattackers and allow them to refocus precious security resources on more important business tasks, like innovation. In our preview of Microsoft Security Copilot, customers reported saving up to 40 percent of their security analysts’ time on foundational tasks like investigation and response, threat hunting, and threat intelligence assessments.³ And on more mundane tasks like preparing reports or troubleshooting minor issues, Security Copilot delivered gains in efficiency up to and above 60 percent.³ But the most promising data coming out of our early research is not the numbers, but what customers can do with these gains in efficiency and time saved.

Upskilling with Security Copilot: Empowering junior security analysts

Our preview research data suggests that Security Copilot can enable junior security analysts, including Tier 1 and 2 team members, to take on tasks that were previously reserved for Tier 3 and 4 security professionals. To test this hypothesis, we asked our own Microsoft security operations center (SOC) analysts to evaluate the output of Security Copilot on tasks like incident summarization, script analysis, incident reporting, query assistance, and guided response. The results were impressive: experienced practitioners equated Security Copilot outputs to those of mid- to expert-level human analysts, particularly for tasks such as incident summarization, script analysis, and query assistance. This means that any analyst can use natural language prompts to initiate and perform tasks that they may not have a lot of experience or expertise in, and the outputs of Security Copilot will help them both accomplish the right results immediately and, more importantly, help them develop those critical skills for long-term use. With Security Copilot, your team can accomplish a lot more with the resources you already have.

The impact of Security Copilot on your organization

Microsoft Security Copilot is more than just an AI-powered, large language model working with your security technology. It builds on the latest innovation in large language models and uniquely goes beyond that, harnessing the foundational power of Microsoft’s security expertise, global threat intelligence, and technologies to deliver massive efficiency gains for the most vital security use cases. When you submit a prompt, Security Copilot improves it with the security-specific system built on deep Microsoft Security knowledge and continuous learning. Your prompt is enriched with the end-to-end Microsoft Security product portfolio and fresh threat intelligence informed by Microsoft’s 65 trillion signals and human intelligence.¹ Finally, it translates the response according to your prompt instructions, taking the form of text or code that helps you see the full context of an incident, the impact, and the next steps you should take to deepen understanding or to take direct action for remediation and defense hardening.

Security Copilot is an AI assistant for daily operations in security and IT that can help organizations:

• Outpace adversaries—Security Copilot helps analysts respond to and remediate incidents faster. The increased speed and efficiency of generative AI lets analysts refocus on critical security tasks, including more time spent on proactive initiatives like implementing Zero Trust principles.
• Strengthen team expertise—Security Copilot helps junior security analysts complete more complex tasks with skills like natural language to Kusto Query Language (KQL) translation and malicious script analysis.
• Simplify the complex—Analysts no longer need to write complex scripts or KQL. They can simply ask questions in English and Security Copilot understands the context, sets the plan in motion, and writes the script. This saves time, exposes junior security analysts to more complex skills, and yields gains in productivity for organizations.
• Catch what others miss—Because Security Copilot uses generative AI to analyze data from many sources—including Microsoft Security products and Microsoft’s unrivaled threat intelligence—it can also help analysts catch what they might otherwise miss.
• Cut through the noise—Despite an extremely busy signal-to-noise ratio, Security Copilot synthesizes data and detects “important” signals better than ever before, allowing security and IT professionals to access, summarize, and act on insights from their tools faster.
• Broaden the hiring pool—Because of the upskilling potential, Security Copilot allows Tier 1 analysts to complete more complex tasks, which means organizations can recruit and develop talent from a broader, more diverse resource pool.

Lean into the AI era

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite, from November 14 to 17, 2023, learn how to lean into the AI era and protect your people, data, devices, and apps across clouds and platforms. We plan to share more big news about Security Copilot and more innovations—including new integrations to support a broader set of use cases. Join our free digital online experience to watch Scott Guthrie’s (Microsoft Executive Vice President, Cloud and AI) keynote titled AI transformation for your organization with the Microsoft Cloud. And catch Rob Lefferts’ (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Threat Protection) breakout session titled Unifying XDR + SIEM: A new era in SecOps to supercharge your threat detection, response, and defense. For news on what’s next with generative AI and Microsoft Security Copilot, sign up for email updates.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Security Copilot.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (formerly known as Twitter) (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2023, Microsoft.

²Cybersecurity Workforce Study, ISC². 2022.

³Microsoft Security Copilot Private Preview customer survey conducted by Microsoft, October 2023.

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The importance of cybersecurity in facilitating productive remote work was a significant catalyst for the two years-worth of digital transformation we observed in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this era of ubiquitous computing, security solutions don’t just sniff out threats, they serve as control planes for improving productivity and collaboration by giving end-users easier access to more corporate resources. Microsoft recently concluded a survey of nearly 800 business leaders of companies of more than 500 employees in India (IN), Germany (DE), the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) to better understand their views of the pandemic threat landscape, implications for budgets and staffing, and how they feel the pandemic could reshape the cyber-security long-term.

Among the key insights are data showing that an alarming number of businesses are still impacted by phishing scams, security budgets, and hiring increased in response to COVID-19, and cloud-based technologies and architectures like Zero Trust are significant areas of investment moving forward.

Improving Productivity & Mitigating Threats

Security and IT teams have been working overtime to meet business goals while simultaneously staying ahead of new threats and scams. “Providing secure remote access to resources, apps, and data” is the #1 challenge reported by security leaders. For many businesses, the limits of the trust model they had been using, which leaned heavily on company-managed devices, physical access to buildings, and limited remote access to select line-of-business apps, got exposed early on in the pandemic. This paradigm shift has been most acute in the limitations of basic username/password authentication. As a result, when asked to identify the top security investment made during the pandemic the top response was Multi-factor authentication (MFA).

In other ways, pandemic security risks feel all too familiar. Asked to identify their best pre-pandemic security investment, most identified anti-phishing technology.  Microsoft Threat Intelligence teams reported a spike in COVID-19 attacks in early March as cybercriminals applied pandemic themed lures to known scams and malware. Business leaders reported phishing threats as the biggest risk to security in that same timeframe, with 90% of indicating that phishing attacks have impacted their organization. More than half said clicking on phishing emails was the highest risk behavior they observed and a full 28% admitted that attackers had successfully phished their users.  Notably, successful phishing attacks were reported in significantly higher numbers from organizations that described their resources as mostly on-premises (36%) as opposed to being more cloud-based.

Security Impacting Budgets and Staffing

The role of security in remote work is having a direct impact on security budgets and staffing in 2020 as businesses scale existing solutions, enabling critical new capabilities like MFA, and implement a Zero Trust strategy. In order to adapt to the many business implications of the pandemic, a majority of business leaders reported budget increases for security (58%) and compliance (65%). At the same time, 81% also report feeling pressure to lower overall security costs.  Business leaders from organizations with resources mostly on-premises are especially likely to feel budget pressure, with roughly 1/3rd feeling ‘very pressured.’

To rein in expenses in the short-term, leaders say they are working to improve integrated threat protection to reduce the risk of costly breaches and acquire security solutions with self-help options for users to drive efficiency. In the longer-term, nearly 40% of businesses say they are prioritizing investments in Cloud Security (Cloud Access Security Broker, Cloud Workload Protection Platform, Cloud Security Posture Management), followed by Data & Information Security (28%) and anti-phishing tools (26%).

Technology alone cannot keep pace with the threats and demands facing businesses and their largely remote workforces. Human security expertise is at a premium with more than 80% of companies adding security professionals in response to COVID-19.

5 Ways the Pandemic is Changing Cybersecurity long-term

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation is several ways that are likely to change the security paradigm for the foreseeable future.

1. Security has proven to be the foundation for digital empathy in a remote workforce during the pandemic. When billions of people formed the largest remote workforce in history, overnight, teams learned much more than how to scale Virtual Private Networks. Companies were reminded that security technology is fundamentally about improving productivity and collaboration through inclusive end-user experiences. Improving end-user experience and productivity while working remotely is the top priority of security business leaders (41%), with “extend security to more apps for remote work” identified as the most positively received action by users. Not surprisingly, then, “providing secure remote access to resources, apps, and data” is the biggest challenge. For many businesses, the journey begins with MFA adoption.

2. Everyone is on a Zero Trust journey. Zero Trust shifted from an option to a business priority in the early days of the pandemic. In light of the growth in remote work, 51% of business leaders are speeding up the deployment of Zero Trust capabilities. The Zero Trust architecture will eventually become the industry standard, which means everyone is on a Zero Trust journey. That reality is reflected in the numbers like 94% of companies report that they are in the process of deploying new Zero Trust capabilities to some extent.

3. Diverse data sets mean better Threat Intelligence. The pandemic illustrated the power and scale of the cloud as Microsoft tracked more than 8 trillion daily threat signals from a diverse set of products, services, and feeds around the globe. A blend of automated tools and human insights helped to identify new COVID-19 themed threats before they reached customers – sometimes in a fraction of a second. In other cases, cloud-based filters and detections alert security teams to suspicious behavior. Not surprisingly, 54% of security leaders reported an increase in phishing attacks since the beginning of the pandemic.

4. Cyber resilience is fundamental to business operations. Cybersecurity provides the underpinning to operationally resiliency as more organizations enable secure remote work options. To maintain cyber resilience, businesses need to regularly evaluate their risk threshold and ability to execute cyber resilience processes through a combination of human efforts and technology products and services. The cloud makes developing a comprehensive Cyber Resilience strategy and preparing for a wide range of contingencies simpler.

More than half of cloud forward and hybrid companies report having cyber-resilience strategy for most risk scenarios compared to 40% of primarily on-premises organization. 19% of companies relying primarily upon on-premises technology do not expect to maintain a documented cyber-resilience plan.

5. The cloud is a security imperative. Where people often thought about security as a solution to deploy on top of existing infrastructure, events like Covid-19 showcase the need for truly integrated security for companies of all sizes. As a result, integrated security solutions are now seen as imperative.

These insights from security leaders echo many of the best practices that Microsoft has been sharing with customers and working around the clock to help them implement. The bottom line is that the pandemic is clearly accelerating the digital transformation of cyber-security. Microsoft is here to help.  If any of the insights we’ve shared today resonate with you and your teams, here are a few things you should consider

• Listen to employees and take steps to build digital empathy. Enabling self-help options is a win-win for end-users and IT.
• Hire diverse security talent and empower them with great threat intelligence and tools.
• Embrace the reality that remote work is having a lasting impact on the security paradigm. Lean into the power of the cloud for built-in security spanning endpoints to the cloud.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post New data from Microsoft shows how the pandemic is accelerating the digital transformation of cyber-security appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Today, we’re also announcing:

• An expanded public preview of FIDO2 security key support in Azure Active Directory (AD) to encompass hybrid environments. Workers can now sign in to work-owned Windows 10 devices with their Azure AD accounts using a FIDO2 security key instead of a password and automatically get single sign-on (SSO) to both on-premises and cloud resources.
• New integration between Microsoft Cloud App Security and Microsoft Defender ATP that enables endpoint-based control of unsanctioned cloud applications. Administrators can now control the unauthorized use of cloud apps with protection built right into the endpoint.
• Azure Security Center for IoT now supports a broader range of devices including Azure RTOS OS, Linux specifically Ubuntu and Debian, and Windows 10 IoT core. SecOps professionals can now reason over signals in an experience that combines IT and OT into a single view.
• Two new features of Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), campaign views and compromise detection and response, are now generally available. Campaign views gives security teams a complete view of email attack campaigns and makes it easier to address vulnerable users and configuration issues. Compromise detection and response speeds the detection of compromised users and is critical to ensuring that attacks are blocked early, and the impact of a breach is minimized.
• In partnership with Terranova, we will offer customized user learning paths in Office 365 ATP later this year. User education needs to be part of every organization’s security strategy and we are investing to raise security awareness training efficacy.

These innovations are just a part of our commitment to built-in and cross-platform security that embraces AI and is deeply integrated together.

This integration also spans a broad ecosystem of security vendors to help solve for our customers’ security and compliance needs. We now have more than 100 members in the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association, including new members such as ServiceNow, Thales, and Trend Micro, and new IoT security solution providers like Attivo Networks, CyberMDX, CyberX, SecuriThings, and Firedome to alleviate the integration challenges enterprises face.

To recognize outstanding efforts across the security ecosystem, on February 23, 2020—the night before the RSA Conference begins—we’ll host our inaugural security partner awards event, Microsoft Security 20/20, to celebrate our partners.

Good people, supported by AI and automation, have the advantage in the ongoing cybersecurity battle. That’s why we continue to innovate with new security and compliance solutions to help our customers in this challenge.

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