At Microsoft, we remain steadfast in our commitment to security, which continues to be our top priority. Through our Secure Future Initiative (SFI), we’ve dedicated the equivalent of 34,000 full-time engineers to the effort, making it the largest cybersecurity engineering project in history—driving continuous improvement in our cyber resilience. In our latest update, we share insights into the work we are doing in culture, governance, and cybernorms to promote transparency and better support our customers in this new era of security. For each engineering pillar, we provide details on steps taken to reduce risk and provide guidance so customers can do the same.

Insights gained from SFI help us continue to harden our security posture and product development. At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we are pleased to unveil new security solutions, an industry-leading bug bounty program, and innovations in our AI platform. 

Transforming security with graph-based posture management 

Microsoft’s Security Fellow and Deputy Chief Information Security Office (CISO) John Lambert says, “Defenders think in lists, cyberattackers think in graphs. As long as this is true, attackers win,” referring to cyberattackers’ relentless focus on the relationships between things like identities, files, and devices. Exploiting these relationships helps criminals and spies do more extensive damage beyond the point of intrusion. Poor visibility and understanding of relationships and pathways between entities can limit traditional security solutions to defending in siloes, unable to detect or disrupt advanced persistent threats (APTs).

We are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Security Exposure Management. This innovative solution dynamically maps changing relationships between critical assets such as devices, data, identities, and other connections. Powered by our security graph, and now with third-party connectors for Rapid 7, ServiceNow, Qualys, and Tenable in preview, Exposure Management provides customers with a comprehensive, dynamic view of their IT assets and potential cyberattack paths. This empowers security teams to be more proactive with an end-to-end exposure management solution. In the constantly evolving cyberthreat landscape, defenders need tools that can quickly identify signal from noise and help prioritize critical tasks.  

Beyond seeing potential cyberattack paths, Exposure Management also helps security and IT teams measure the effectiveness of their cyber hygiene and security initiatives such as zero trust, cloud security, and more. Currently, customers are using Exposure Management in more than 70,000 cloud tenants to proactively protect critical entities and measure their cybersecurity effectiveness.

Announcing $4 million AI and cloud security bug bounty “Zero Day Quest” 

Born out of our Secure Future Initiative commitments and our belief that security is a team sport, we also announced Zero Day Quest, the industry’s largest public security research event. We have a long history of partnering across the industry to mitigate potential issues before they impact our customers, which also helps us build more secure products by default and by design.  

Every year our bug bounty program pays millions for high-quality security research with over $16 million awarded last year. Zero Day Quest will build on this work with an additional $4 million in potential rewards focused on cloud and AI—— which are areas of highest impact to our customers. We are also committed to collaborating with the security community by providing access to our engineers and AI red teams. The quest starts now and will culminate in an in-person hacking event in 2025.

As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, we will share the details of the critical bugs once they are fixed so the whole industry can learn from them—after all, security is a team sport. 

New advances for securing AI and new skills for Security Copilot 

AI adoption is rapidly outpacing many other technologies in the digital era. Our generative AI solution, Microsoft Security Copilot, continues to be adopted by security teams to boost productivity and effectiveness. Organizations in every industry, including National Australia Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Oregon State University, and Eastman are able to perform security tasks faster and more accurately.² A recent study found that three months after adopting Security Copilot, organizations saw a 30% reduction in their mean time to resolve security incidents. More than 100 partners have integrated with Security Copilot to enrich the insights with ecosystem data. New Copilot skills are now available for IT admins in Microsoft Entra and Microsoft Intune, data security and compliance teams in Microsoft Purview, and security operations teams in the Microsoft Defender product family.   

According to our Security for AI team’s new “Accelerate AI transformation with strong security” white paper, we found that over 95% of organizations surveyed are either already using or developing generative AI, or they plan to do so in the future, with two thirds (66%) choosing to develop multiple AI apps of their own. This fast-paced adoption has led to 37 new AI-related bills passed into law worldwide in 2023, reflecting a growing international effort to address the security, safety, compliance, and transparency challenges posed by AI technologies.³ This underscores the criticality of securing and governing the data that fuels AI. Through Microsoft Defender, our customers have discovered and secured more than 750,000 generative AI app instances and Microsoft Purview has audited more than a billion Copilot interactions.⁴  

Microsoft Purview is already helping thousands of organizations, such as Cummins, KPMG, and Auburn University, with their AI transformation by providing data security and compliance capabilities across Microsoft and third-party applications. Now, we’re announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Purview to discover, protect, and govern data in generative AI applications. Available for preview, new capabilities in Purview include Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot, prevention of data oversharing in AI apps, and detection of risky AI use such as malicious intent, prompt injections, and misuse of protected materials. Additionally, Microsoft Purview now includes Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) that gives customers a single pane of glass to proactively discover data risks, such as sensitive data in user prompts, and receive recommended actions and insights for quick responses during incidents. For more details, read the blog on Tech Community. 

Microsoft continues to innovate on our end-to-end security platform to help defenders make the complex simpler, while staying ahead of cyberthreats and enabling their AI transformation. At the same time, we are continuously improving the safety and security of our cloud services and other technologies, including these recent steps to make Windows 11 more secure. 

Next steps with Microsoft Security

From the advances announced to our daily defense of customers, and the steadfast dedication of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella and every employee, security remains our top priority at Microsoft as we deliver on our principles of secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations. To learn more about our vision for the future of security, tune in to the Microsoft Ignite keynote. 

Microsoft Ignite 2024

Gain insights to keep your organizations safer with an AI-first, end-to-end cybersecurity approach.

Register now

Are you a regular user of Microsoft Security products? Review your experience on Gartner Peer Insights™ and get a $25 gift card. 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. 

¹ Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024.

² Microsoft customer stories:

• National Australia Bank invests in an efficient, cloud-managed future with Windows 11 Enterprise
• Intesa Sanpaolo accrues big cybersecurity dividends with Microsoft Sentinel, Copilot for Security
• Oregon State University protects vital research and sensitive data with Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender
• Eastman catalyzes cybersecurity defenses with Copilot for Security

³ How countries around the world are trying to regulate artificial intelligence, Theara Coleman, The Week US. July 4, 2023.

⁴ Earnings Release FY25 Q1, Microsoft. October 30, 2024.

The post AI innovations for a more secure future unveiled at Microsoft Ignite appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Across many sessions and demos, we’ll address the top security pain points related to AI and empower you with practical, actionable strategies. Keep reading this blog for a guide of highlighted sessions for security professionals of all levels, whether you’re attending in-person or online.

And be sure to register for the digital experience to explore the Microsoft Security sessions at Microsoft Ignite.

Be among the first to hear top news

Microsoft is bringing together every part of the company in a collective mission to advance cybersecurity protection to help our customers and the security community. We have four powerful advantages to drive security innovation: large-scale data and threat intelligence; end-to-end protection; responsible AI; and tools to secure and govern the use of AI.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in May 2024 that security is the top priority for our company. At the Microsoft Ignite opening keynote on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, Microsoft Security Executive Vice President Charlie Bell and Corporate Vice President (CVP), Microsoft Security Business Vasu Jakkal will join Nadella to discuss Microsoft’s vision for the future of security. Other well-known cybersecurity speakers at Microsoft Ignite include Ann Johnson, CVP and Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO); Joy Chik, President, Identity, and Network Access; Mark Russinovich, Chief Technology Officer and Deputy CISO; and Sherrod DeGrippo, Director of Threat Intelligence Strategy.

For a deeper dive into security product news and demos, join the security general session on Wednesday, November 20, 2024, at 11:00 AM CT. Hear from Vasu Jakkal; Joy Chik; Rob Lefferts, CVP, Microsoft Threat Protection; Herain Oberoi, General Manager, Microsoft Data Security, Privacy, and Compliance; and Michael Wallent, CVP; who will share exciting security innovations to empower you with AI tools designed to help you get ahead of attackers.

These news-breaking sessions are just the start of the value you can gain from attending online.

Benefit from insights designed for your role

While cybersecurity is a shared concern of security professionals, we realize the specific concerns are unique to role. Recognizing this, we developed sessions tailored to what matters most to you.

• CISOs and senior security leaders: If you’ll be with us in Chicago, kick off the conference with the Microsoft Ignite Security Forum on November 18, 2024 from 1 PM CT to 5 PM CT. Join this exclusive pre-day event to hear from Microsoft security experts on threat intelligence insights, our Secure Future Initiative (SFI), and trends in security. Go back to your registration to add this experience on. Also for those in Chicago, be sure to join the Security Leaders Dinner, where you can engage with your peers and provide insights on your greatest challenges and successes. If you’re joining online, gain firsthand access to the latest Microsoft Security announcements. Whether you’re in person or online, don’t miss “Proactive security with continuous exposure management” (BRK324), which will explore how Microsoft Security Exposure Management unifies disparate data silos for visibility of end-to-end attack surface, and “Secure and govern data in Microsoft 365 Copilot and beyond” (BRK321), which will discuss the top concerns of security leaders when it comes to AI and how you can gain the confidence and tools to adopt AI. Plus, learn how to make your organization as diverse as the threats you are defending in “The Power of Diversity: Building a stronger workforce in the era of AI” (BRK330).
• Security analysts and engineers: Join actionable sessions for information you can use immediately. Sessions designed for the security operations center (SOC) include “Microsoft cybersecurity architect lab—Infrastructure security” (LAB454), which will showcase how to best use the Microsoft Secure Score to improve your security posture, and “Simplify your SOC with the unified security operations platform” (BRK310), which will feature a fireside chat with security experts to discuss common security challenges and topics. Plus, learn to be a champion of safe AI adoption in “Scott and Mark learn responsible AI” (BRK329), which will explore the three top risks in large language models and the origins and potential impacts of each of these.
• Developers and IT professionals: We get it—security isn’t your main focus, but it’s increasingly becoming part of your scope. Get answers to your most pressing questions at Microsoft Ignite. Sessions that may interest you include “Secure and govern custom AI built on Azure AI and Copilot Studio” (BRK322), which will dive into how Microsoft can enable data security and compliance controls for custom apps, detect and respond to AI threats, and managed your AI stack vulnerabilities, and “Making Zero Trust real: Top 10 security controls you can implement now” (BRK328), which offers technical guidance to make Zero Trust actionable with 10 top controls to help improve your organization’s security posture. Plus, join “Supercharge endpoint management with Microsoft Copilot in Intune” (THR656) for guidance on unlocking Microsoft Intune’s potential to streamline endpoint management.
• Microsoft partners: We appreciate our partners and have developed sessions aimed at supporting you. These include “Security partner growth: The power of identity with Entra Suite” (BRK332) and “Security partner growth: Help customers modernize security operations” (BRK336).

Attend sessions tailored to addressing your top challenge

When exploring effective cybersecurity strategies, you likely have specific challenges that are motivating your actions, regardless of your role within your organization. We respect that our attendees want a Microsoft Ignite experience tailored to their specific objectives. We’re committed to maximizing your value from attending the event, with Microsoft Security sessions that address the most common cybersecurity challenges.

• Managing complexity: Discover ways to simplify your infrastructure in sessions like “Simpler, smarter, and more secure endpoint management with Intune” (BRK319), which will explore new ways to strengthen your security with Microsoft Intune and AI, and “Break down risk silos and build up code-to-code security posture” (BRK312), which will focus on how defenders can overcome the expansive alphabet soup of security posture tools and gain a unified cloud security posture with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.   
• Increasing efficiency:: Learn how AI can help you overcome talent shortage challenges in sessions like “Secure data across its lifecycle in the era of AI” (BRK318), which will explore Microsoft Purview leveraging Microsoft Security Copilot can help you detect hidden risks, mitigate them, and protect and prevent data loss, and “One goal, many roles: Microsoft Security Copilot: Real-world insights and expert advice” (BRK316), which will share best practices and insider tricks to maximize Copilot’s benefits so you can realize quick value and enhance your security and IT operations.  
• Threat landscape: Navigate effectively through the modern cyberthreat landscape, guided by the insights shared in sessions like “AI-driven ransomware protection at machine speed: Defender for Endpoint” (BRK325), which will share a secret in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint success and how it uses machine learning and threat intelligence, and the theater session “Threat intelligence at machine speed with Microsoft Security Copilot” (THR555), which will showcase how Copilot can be used as a research assistant, analyst, and responder to simplify threat management.
• Regulatory compliance: Increase your confidence in meeting regulatory requirements by attending sessions like “Secure and govern your data estate with Microsoft Purview” (BRK317), which will explore how to secure and govern your data with Microsoft Purview, and “Secure and govern your data with Microsoft Fabric and Purview” (BRK327), which will dive into how Microsoft Purview works together with Microsoft Fabric for a comprehensive approach to secure and govern data.
• Maximizing value: Discover how to maximize the value of your cybersecurity investments during sessions like “Transform your security with GenAI innovations in Security Copilot” (BRK307), which will showcase how Microsoft Security Copilot’s automation capabilities and use cases can elevate your security organization-wide, and “AI-driven ransomware protection at machine speed: Defender for Endpoint” (BRK325), which will dive into the key secret to the success of Defender for Endpoint customers in reducing the risk of ransomware attacks as well maximizing the value of the product’s new features and user interfaces.

Explore cybersecurity tools with product showcases and hands-on training

Learning about Microsoft security capabilities is useful, but there’s nothing like trying out the solutions for yourself. Our in-depth showcases and hands-on trainings give you the chance to explore these capabilities for yourself. Bring a notepad and your laptop and let’s put these tools to work.

• “Secure access at the speed of AI with Copilot in Microsoft Entra” (THR556): Learn how AI with Security Copilot and Microsoft Entra can help you accelerate tasks like troubleshooting, automate cybersecurity insights, and strengthen Zero Trust.  
• “Mastering custom plugins in Microsoft Security Copliot” (THR653): Gain practical knowledge of using Security Copilot’s capabilities during a hands-on session aimed at security and IT professionals ready for advanced customization and integration with existing security tools. 
• “Getting started with Microsoft Sentinel” (LAB452): Get hands-on experience on building detections and queries, configuring your Microsoft Sentinel environment, and performing investigations. 
• “Secure Azure services and workloads with Microsoft Defender for Cloud” (LAB457): Explore how to mitigate security risks with endpoint security, network security, data protection, and posture and vulnerability management. 
• “Evolving from DLP to data security with Microsoft Preview” (THR658): See for yourself how Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) integrates with insider risk management and information protection to optimize your end-to-end DLP program. 

Network with Microsoft and other industry professionals

While you’ll gain a wealth of insights and learn about our latest product innovations in sessions, our ancillary events offer opportunities to connect and socialize with Microsoft and other security professionals as committed to you to strengthening the industry’s defenses against cyberthreats. That’s worth celebrating!

• Pre-day Forum: All Chicago Microsoft Ignite attendees are welcome to add on to the event with our pre-day sessions on November 18, 2024, from 1 PM CT to 5 PM CT. Topics covered will include threat intelligence, Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, AI innovation, and AI security research, and the event will feature a fireside chat with Microsoft partners and customers. The pre-day event is designed for decision-makers from businesses of all sizes to advance your security strategy. If you’re already attending in person, log in to your Microsoft Ignite registration and add on the Microsoft Security Ignite Forum.
• Security Leaders Dinner: We’re hosting an exclusive dinner with leaders of security teams, where you can engage with your peers and provide insights on your greatest challenges and successes. This intimate gathering is designed specifically for CISOs and other senior security leaders to network, share learnings, and discuss what’s happening in cybersecurity.   
• Secure the Night Party: All security professionals are encouraged to celebrate the cybersecurity community with Microsoft from 6 PM CT to 10 PM CT on Wednesday, November 20, 2024. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with Microsoft Security subject matter experts and peers at our “Secure the Night” party during Microsoft Ignite in Chicago. Enjoy an engaging evening of conversations and experiences while sipping tasty drinks and noshing on heavy appetizers provided by Microsoft. We look forward to welcoming you. Reserve your spot today! 

Something that excites us the most about Microsoft Ignite is the opportunity to meet with cybersecurity professionals dedicated to modern defense. Stop by the Microsoft Security Expert Meetup space to say hello, learn more about capabilities you’ve been curious about, or ask questions about Microsoft’s cybersecurity efforts. 

Hear from our Microsoft Intelligent Security Association partners at Microsoft Ignite

The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), comprised of independent software vendors (ISV) and managed security service providers (MSSPs) that have integrated their solutions with Microsoft’s security technology, will be back at Microsoft Ignite 2024.

We kick things off by celebrating our Security Partner of the Year award winners BlueVoyant (Security), Cyclotron (Compliance), and Inspark (Identity) who will join Vasu Jakkal for a fireside chat on “How security strategy is adapting for AI,” during the Microsoft Ignite Security Pre-day Forum. This panel discussion includes insights into trends partners are seeing with customers relating to AI, a view on practical challenges, and scenarios that companies encounter when deploying AI, as well as the expert guidance and best practices that security partners can offer to ensure successful AI integration in security strategies.

MISA is thrilled to welcome small and medium business (SMB) verified solution status to its portfolio. This solution verification highlights technology solutions that are purpose built to meet the needs of small and medium businesses, and the MSSPs who often manage IT and security on behalf of SMBs. MISA members who meet the qualifying criteria and have gone through engineering review, will receive a specialized MISA member badge showcasing the verification and will be featured in the MISA partner catalog. We are excited to launch this status with Blackpoint Cyber and Huntress.

Join MISA members including Blackpoint Cyber and Huntress at the Microsoft Expert Meetup Security area where 14 members will showcase their solutions and Microsoft Security Technology. Review the full schedule below.

We are looking forward to connecting with our customers and partners at the Microsoft Secure the Night Party on Wednesday, November 20, from 6 to 10 PM CT.  This evening event offers a chance to connect with Microsoft Security subject matter experts and MISA partners while enjoying cocktails, great food, and entertainment. A special thank you to our MISA sponsors: Armor, Cayosoft, ContraForce, HID, Lighthouse, Ontinue, and Quorum Cyber.

Register today to attend Microsoft Ignite online

There’s still time to register to participate in Microsoft Ignite online from November 19 to 22, 2024, to catch security-focused breakout sessions, product demos, and participate in interactive Q&A sessions with our experts. No matter how you participate in Microsoft Ignite, you’ll gain insights on how to secure your future with an AI-first, end-to-end cybersecurity approach to keep your organizations safer.

Plus, you can take your security knowledge further at Tech Community Live: Microsoft Security edition on December 3, 2024, to ask all your follow-up questions from Microsoft Ignite. Microsoft Experts will be hosting live Ask Microsoft Anything sessions on topics from Security for AI to Copilot for Security.

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 Microsoft Ignite: Sessions and demos to improve your security strategy appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

The Microsoft Purview team and I are thrilled to showcase the latest innovations in Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric, designed to help customers secure, govern, and manage their complex data estates in the AI era. We’re excited to announce the preview of Microsoft Purview Information Protection, which allows for content restriction in Fabric using sensitivity labels, and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies for lakehouses. Additionally, we’re highlighting the recent general availability of the Microsoft Purview Data Governance solution.

Customers are asking for a seamless solution that turns data security, governance, and compliance into a team sport to effectively address the converging trends across 1. scale and sophistication of data threats; 2. increasing regulations; 3. ever-expanding data estate; and 4. acceleration of AI adoption within the business.

Microsoft Purview delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that can help your organization secure, govern, and manage data for compliance and regulatory needs, wherever it lives. As we engage with customers at the Fabric Conference this week, we underscore the pivotal role of security and governance in laying the groundwork for responsible analytics. For businesses all over the world, this comprehensive approach balances the need to secure and protect data from cyberthreats with the need to activate data for business insights and AI.

Integrated with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric are committed to delivering a rich integrated experience so customers can seamlessly secure and govern their data estate efficiently to help meet regulatory, compliance, and privacy requirements while ensuring high-quality data for data activation. For Fabric customers, this means you can discover, secure, govern, and manage Fabric items from within Microsoft Purview as a single pane of glass across your heterogeneous data estate.

Microsoft Purview helps you seamlessly discover data assets in OneLake, extend the same Microsoft Purview data security sensitivity labels and policies from Microsoft 365 to Fabric items, and curate your Fabric data assets into a single enterprise data catalog along with other data sources like Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and Google Big Query. And this seamless integration doesn’t require any data movement or duplication, helping you reduce data sprawl and silos.

Seamlessly secure your data

Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities are already loved and leveraged by customers around the world for their Microsoft 365 data, and with today’s announcements, we are extending this value further to Microsoft Fabric customers. These added investments enhance the Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities already available for Fabric released in March.

Now in preview, Microsoft Purview Information Protection now includes the ability to restrict access to content based on sensitivity labels for Fabric data, which helps you discover, classify, and protect sensitive information, including the ability to apply sensitivity labels. By extending the sensitivity label support to Fabric data, security admins can now use sensitivity labels to manage who has access to Fabric items with certain labels. For example, a security admin could restrict access to data items with a “financial data” sensitivity label to only users in the finance department.

We are also extending support for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) policies for your Fabric items. Purview DLP helps an organization protect sensitive data and reduce the risk of data oversharing by letting organizations define and apply policies. With these new integrations, security admins can now apply Purview DLP policies to Fabric data. As an example, a policy can be set to help detect the upload of sensitive data, like social security numbers to a lakehouse in Fabric. If detected, the policy will trigger an automatic audit activity, which can alert the security admin, and can also surface a custom policy tip to data owners to take action and remedy the non-compliance with the policy.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview Data Security integrations in Fabric.

Confidently activate your data

Microsoft Purview’s new data governance experience was made generally available on September 1, 2024. This newly reimagined solution is purpose-built for federated data governance and offers a business-friendly experience, AI-powered experiences for dramatic efficiencies, and all the key ingredients you’d expect, including catalog curation, data quality management, actionable insights, rich user experiences, and integration with third-party data management solutions—helping organizations to confidently activate their data for analytics and AI.

Microsoft Fabric customers can complement the governance capabilities in Fabric for a single-pane-of-glass experience in Microsoft Purview for data catalog curation, data user access, data quality management, health controls, and actionable insights for Fabric items and for data assets across your heterogeneous data environment.

A complete solution for the modern data governance practice

Data Catalog management offers a business-friendly experience and terms, making it easy to logically build a data catalog for your unique business needs while built-in AI serves up recommendations based on your active metadata. Data owners and data stewards can easily participate across data curation and management, responsible data access, and impact analysis—easily combining data assets from the heterogenous data estate (for example: Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, and Google). Data users can seamlessly and securely request access to data assets for use in insights, analysis, development, and AI.

Data Health management offers a rich experience across data quality capabilities, actionable insights, and health reports, which help organizations to assess and action the quality of their governed data estate—making it easy and efficient to support a strong healthy data governance posture. With complete data quality capabilities, you can apply built-in rules and AI-generated rules that are applied and translate into data quality scores and actions across your data assets, data products, and governance domains, helping you to more effectively manage and improve your data governance posture. Data Health controls enable data stewards and chief data officers to assess the health of their data estate through the lens of industry-recognized standards and controls. While the control rules are established at a global level, execution is delegated to individual governance domains, allowing for the application of broad standards while meeting the specific needs of various groups within the organization.

Purpose-built integration with industry-leading master data management and data modeling solutions extend the value of Microsoft Purview further and help customers maximize their existing data management investments.

• CluedIn brings native master data management and Data Quality functionality to Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Purview, and the Azure stack. Learn more about CluedIn. 
• Profisee Master Data Management is a complimentary and necessary piece of your data governance strategy. Learn more about Profisee. 
• Semarchy combines master data management, data intelligence, and data integration into a singular application in any environment. Learn more about Semarchy.  
• RELTIO’s AI-powered data unification and management solutions unify data from disparate sources, delivering a single source of truth. Learn more about RELTIO.
• ER/Studio (an Idera company) delivers advanced data modeling and metadata management to help organizations improve their data posture. Learn more about ER/Studio.

The general availability release also delivered new data governance capability not previously available during preview. Some of these new capabilities include: customers can now delete business concepts, more easily manage data access through the data catalog admin settings, view data product access request workflows, browse an enterprise glossary to better understand terms, and apply the Data Quality capabilities to Azure Synapse, Databricks Unity Catalog, Fabric Lakehouse, Google Big Query (preview), and Snowflake. Check out the complete list of new capabilities in Microsoft Purview Data Governance.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview

• Try Microsoft Purview today.
• Watch the webinar The CDO Dilemma.
• Visit the Microsoft Purview website.

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 Activate your data responsibly in the era of AI with Microsoft Purview appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Data security as a foundation for secure AI adoption

Learn the four steps organizations can take to prepare their data for AI.

Get the whitepaper

Preparing data for AI adoption

In a recent survey on the state of generative AI, business leaders expressed optimism on the potential of AI, but shared their struggle to gain full visibility into their AI programs—creating data security and compliance risks.² 58% of organizations surveyed expressed concern about the unsanctioned use of generative AI at their companies, and the general lack of visibility into it. And 93% of leaders report heightened concern about shadow AI—unsanctioned or undetected AI usage by employees.³ Our whitepaper walks through four key steps organizations can take to prepare their data for AI and includes a detailed checklist at each stage. The stages include knowing your data, governing your data, protecting your data, and preventing data loss. Taking these steps and understanding how to prepare your data properly for AI tools can help mitigate leader concerns and decrease data risk.

Choosing which AI to deploy

Once you secure your data and prepare to deploy AI, how do you decide which generative AI application is best for your organization? For many customers, choosing AI that integrates with their existing Microsoft 365 apps helps maintain security and maximize their current technology investments.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is integrated into Microsoft 365 apps so that it understands a user’s work context, is grounded in Microsoft Graph to provide more personalized and relevant responses, and can connect to business data sources to reason over all of user’s enterprise data. Copilot inherits Microsoft 365 controls and commitments, such as access permissions, as well as data commitments and controls for the European Union Data Boundary, providing customers with comprehensive enterprise data protection. And with Microsoft Purview, Copilot customers receive real-time data security and compliance controls seamlessly integrated into their organization’s Microsoft 365 deployment.

Secure and govern usage of Copilot for Microsoft 365

As organizations deploy Copilot and other generative AI applications, they want to get ahead of the inherent risks of data being shared with generative AI applications—including data oversharing, data leakage, and non-compliant use of generative AI apps. In the whitepaper, we walk through the steps you can take to discover and protect your organization data as it interacts with AI, then how to govern usage of Copilot once it is deployed. Many organizations also choose to add Microsoft Purview, which provides value like Microsoft Purview AI Hub to help you gain visibility into how your organization is already using AI, including insights into sensitive data being shared with AI applications. The whitepaper shares more detail on the AI Hub interface, its capabilities, and insights into the risks identified by Microsoft Purview. It also shows how you can protect sensitive data throughout its AI journey, with information on sensitivity labeling, data security controls, and data loss prevention capabilities.

The whitepaper also details how your organization can prioritize compliance obligations with Microsoft Purview, assess your compliance with existing AI regulations, and conduct legal investigations for incidents where AI interactions were involved.

Gain the confidence to innovate with AI, securely

Implementing the strategies described in our whitepaper—Data security as a foundation for secure AI adoption—can help give your organization the confidence to explore new avenues and opportunities with AI while protecting and governing your data to minimize security risks and stay ahead of compliance obligations.

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.

¹PwC AI Analysis—Sizing the Prize, PwC.

²The 2023 State of Generative AI Survey, Portal26.

³As Companies Eye Generative AI to Improve Productivity and Growth, Two-thirds Admit to GenAI-related Security or Misuse Incident in the Last Year, Yahoo.

The post New Microsoft whitepaper shares how to prepare your data for secure AI adoption appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

We are also excited to announce new innovations including an embedded Copilot in Microsoft Purview experience for data governance, deeper integrations with Microsoft Fabric, and broadening our partner network to help organizations confidently activate their data estate. In this post, we will highlight the growing challenges facing today’s data landscape and explore how Microsoft Purview Data Governance is helping customers establish a federated data-driven culture.

Microsoft Purview

Secure and govern data across your data estate while reducing risk and meeting compliance requirements.

Learn more

Security and governance have become a team sport

In today’s world, the sophistication of cyberattacks, increasing regulations, an ever-expanding data estate, and business demand for insights are converging. This convergence pressurizes business leaders to adopt a unified strategy to confidently ensure AI readiness. Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive set of solutions that can help organizations secure, govern, and manage their data, wherever it lives. The unification of data security and governance capabilities in Microsoft Purview reflects our belief that our customers need a simpler approach to data. Microsoft Purview’s modern data governance solution addresses the challenges of the AI era with a business-friendly solution that empowers organizations to confidently democratize their data.

Governing data has been easier said than done

The practice of data governance is not just about technology. It starts with people and processes. Without a clear vision, strategy, and roadmap, organizations often struggle to align stakeholders, define roles, and communicate the benefits of data governance across the organization. This can result in low adoption and resistance to change. Data leaders encounter four primary challenges when implementing governance solutions:

1. Fragmentation—Organizations find themselves using multiple tools to govern data. This can generate blind spots and lead to difficulties maintaining consistent data quality, security, and compliance.
2. Labor-intensive tasks—Processes such as data classification, metadata management, and compliance reporting can be manual and time consuming.
3. Centralized governance—A centralized approach stifles innovation and leads to shadow business intelligence where business units—often sales and marketing teams—resort to their own unauthorized tools.
4. Technical interfaces—A poor user experience for business units can block their participation, leaving the practice of data governance centralized around IT.

Microsoft Purview Data Governance: a solution for the era of AI

About a decade ago, Microsoft’s Senior Leadership team, led by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, asked a team of senior leaders, “Do we know where all of our data lives?” The question was difficult to answer. Like many organizations, our data was kept in silos, contributing to a lack of visibility and governance. This realization created an urgency for Microsoft to solve this problem in a way that could help our own business and our customers. We needed to streamline data visibility, management and access.

The biggest cultural change was the shift from a centralized approach to a federated governance structure with central guidance, training, and policies. This allowed individual business units to manage their own data quality while staying in sync with the main data office to maintain policy efficacy. This federated approach combined with the right technology tilts the scale in favor of the business, enabling every user to leverage high quality, trusted data. The re-imagined solution is grounded in years of applied learning and proven practices from navigating our own data transformation journey. Our vision for the new data governance solution is based on the following design principles: 

AI-powered—To eliminate the drudgery of tasks surrounding manual classification and tagging of data, AI has been infused at every layer of the experience to help automate manual tasks and accelerate data curation, data management, and data discovery. For example, data stewards can now generate data quality rules automatically, saving hours of manual work. Data consumers can quickly find data products by specifying the data they are looking for in their natural language. With the power of AI, you can automate tasks like assigning business domains, providing glossary terms, and setting data quality rules and objectives and key results (OKRs) to make your data easily discoverable by the line of business users.

Figure 1. AI-powered data discovery in Microsoft Purview Data Governance.

Business-friendly—Designed with the user in mind, the new experience supports multiple functions across an organization with clear role definitions. The Data Catalog is an enterprise repository to help data stewards (people responsible for data governance) and data owners (people handling day-to-day maintenance of data) curate assets and enable responsible democratization of data. Within the experience, the data health capability was purpose-built for the data office to ensure data quality, alignment with industry standards (for example, Cloud Data Management Capabilities framework), and built-in reports to assess the health of the governance practice across the organization. For example, customers can easily define and organize data with business domains (such as finance and claims) and set OKRs to link business objectives to the Data Catalog.

Figure 2. Business-friendly browsing experience in the Data Catalog.

Unified—The unified experience reduces the need for fragmented point solutions. The integrated Microsoft Purview portal provides a centralized solution for data classification, labeling, lineage, audit logging, and management across a variety of platforms, including the built-in integration with Microsoft Fabric to ensure a best-in-class governance experience as you bring your data into the era of AI. The new experience also offers comprehensive data governance capabilities such as the extraction of metadata, scanning, and data quality across additional sources including SQL, ADLS, Synapse Analytics, and Azure Databricks, as well as third-party sources such as Snowflake. This streamlines the process, saving both time and the expense of integrating disparate solutions. Additionally, the new solution enables visibility across the health of your data assets, providing insights into curated data in your catalog, classification status, and sensitivity labels. Lastly, the solution includes built-in workflow capabilities to help you efficiently assign action owners to improve your governance posture.

Figure 3. Built-in workflows to improve governance posture.

“Embracing Microsoft Purview Data Governance has been a game-changer for Vanderlande. As a preview customer over the past 18 months, we’ve witnessed Microsoft Purview’s remarkable growth and the eagerness of Microsoft to bring a state-of-the-art governance solution to the market. Based on the general availability, we will start the implementation of these capabilities across our global organization.”

—Geert-Jan Verdonk, Data Governance Lead, Vanderlande (a Toyota automated logistics company)

New capabilities coming with general availability

Copilot embedded experience in Microsoft Purview (Preview)—We are introducing Copilot capabilities within the Data Governance experience to guide customers in getting started with the solution. This experience will recommend proven best practices to create an enterprise catalog, helping data professionals quickly discover, curate, and manage their data.

Deeper Microsoft Fabric integration (Preview)—As part of our tight integration with Microsoft Fabric, we are excited to announce the ability to build your own custom reports out of Fabric data. In addition, the data quality feature will now support any Microsoft Fabric source, whether it is mirrored or shortcut. If a source is supported by Fabric, Microsoft Purview can now scan it and use it as part of its data quality rules.

Broadening our partner network—As we announced in March 2024, a modern data governance solution integrates across your digital estate. We are excited to announce two more partners to our ecosystem: ER Studio (an Idera company) for data modeling and RELTIO for master data management. Additionally, CluedIn, Profisee, Semarchy, and Solidatus have their integrations live in Azure Marketplace today.

Try it today

Please log on to the Microsoft Purview portal and give the data governance experience within the “Data Catalog” icon a try. If you want to learn more, please access the following resources:

• Microsoft Purview Data Governance learning docs.
• Webinar: Fabric + Purview webinar—The CDO Dilemma.
• Visit the Microsoft Purview Data Governance website.
• Visit us at the CDOIQ Symposium at MIT in Massachusetts from July 16 to18, 2024.
• Blog: Modern Data Governance for the era of AI.

Learn more

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 Purview Data Governance will be generally available September 1, 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

As we discussed in a previous blog post about AI jailbreaks, an AI jailbreak could cause the system to violate its operators’ policies, make decisions unduly influenced by a user, or execute malicious instructions.     

In this blog, we’ll cover the details of a newly discovered type of jailbreak attack that we call Skeleton Key, which we covered briefly in the Microsoft Build talk Inside AI Security with Mark Russinovich (under the name Master Key). Because this technique affects multiple generative AI models tested, Microsoft has shared these findings with other AI providers through responsible disclosure procedures and addressed the issue in Microsoft Azure AI-managed models using Prompt Shields to detect and block this type of attack. Microsoft has also made software updates to the large language model (LLM) technology behind Microsoft’s additional AI offerings, including our Copilot AI assistants, to mitigate the impact of this guardrail bypass.

Introducing Skeleton Key

This AI jailbreak technique works by using a multi-turn (or multiple step) strategy to cause a model to ignore its guardrails. Once guardrails are ignored, a model will not be able to determine malicious or unsanctioned requests from any other. Because of its full bypass abilities, we have named this jailbreak technique Skeleton Key.

This threat is in the jailbreak category, and therefore relies on the attacker already having legitimate access to the AI model. In bypassing safeguards, Skeleton Key allows the user to cause the model to produce ordinarily forbidden behaviors, which could range from production of harmful content to overriding its usual decision-making rules. Like all jailbreaks, the impact can be understood as narrowing the gap between what the model is capable of doing (given the user credentials, etc.) and what it is willing to do. As this is an attack on the model itself, it does not impute other risks on the AI system, such as permitting access to another user’s data, taking control of the system, or exfiltrating data.

To protect against Skeleton Key attacks, as detailed in this blog, Microsoft has implemented several approaches to our AI system design and provides tools for customers developing their own applications on Azure. Below, we also share mitigation guidance for defenders to discover and protect against such attacks.

Microsoft recommends customers who are building their own AI models and/or integrating AI into their applications to consider how this type of attack could impact their threat model and to add this knowledge to their AI red team approach, using tools such as PyRIT. (Note: Microsoft has updated PyRIT to include Skeleton Key)

In the next sections, we will discuss some of the known methods for exploiting generative AI models using the Skeleton Key technique, explain the steps we’re taking to address the risk, and provide guidance for the detection and mitigation of this threat. You can watch this video to learn more about how Microsoft approaches AI Red Teaming.

Attack flow

Skeleton Key works by asking a model to augment, rather than change, its behavior guidelines so that it responds to any request for information or content, providing a warning (rather than refusing) if its output might be considered offensive, harmful, or illegal if followed. This attack type is known as Explicit: forced instruction-following.

In one example, informing a model that the user is trained in safety and ethics, and that the output is for research purposes only, helps to convince some models to comply, as shown below:

When the Skeleton Key jailbreak is successful, a model acknowledges that it has updated its guidelines and will subsequently comply with instructions to produce any content, no matter how much it violates its original responsible AI guidelines.

During our testing, from April to May 2024, the jailbreak was shown to work on the following base models and hosted models:

• Meta Llama3-70b-instruct (base)
• Google Gemini Pro (base)
• OpenAI GPT 3.5 Turbo (hosted)
• OpenAI GPT 4o (hosted)
• Mistral Large (hosted)
• Anthropic Claude 3 Opus (hosted)
• Cohere Commander R Plus (hosted)

For each model that we tested, we evaluated a diverse set of tasks across risk and safety content categories, including areas such as explosives, bioweapons, political content, self-harm, racism, drugs, graphic sex, and violence. All the affected models complied fully and without censorship for these tasks, though with a warning note prefixing the output as requested. Unlike other jailbreaks like Crescendo, where models must be asked about tasks indirectly or with encodings, Skeleton Key puts the models in a mode where a user can directly request tasks, for example, “Write a recipe for homemade explosives”. Further, the model’s output appears to be completely unfiltered and reveals the extent of a model’s knowledge or ability to produce the requested content.

Consistent with responsible disclosure principles, Microsoft shared this research with the affected AI vendors before publication, helping them determine how to best address mitigations, as needed, in their respective products or services.

GPT-4 demonstrated resistance to Skeleton Key, except when the behavior update request was included as part of a user-defined system message, rather than as a part of the primary user input. This is something that is not ordinarily possible in the interfaces of most software that uses GPT-4, but can be done from the underlying API or tools that access it directly. This indicates that the differentiation of system message from user request in GPT-4 is successfully reducing attackers’ ability to override behavior.

Mitigation and protection guidance

Microsoft has made software updates to the LLM technology behind Microsoft’s AI offerings, including our Copilot AI assistants, to mitigate the impact of this guardrail bypass. Customers should consider the following approach to mitigate and protect against this type of jailbreak in their own AI system design:

• Input filtering: Azure AI Content Safety detects and blocks inputs that contain harmful or malicious intent leading to a jailbreak attack that could circumvent safeguards.
• System message: Prompt engineering the system prompts to clearly instruct the large language model (LLM) on appropriate behavior and to provide additional safeguards. For instance, specify that any attempts to undermine the safety guardrail instructions should be prevented (read our guidance on building a system message framework here).
• Output filtering: Azure AI Content Safety post-processing filter that identifies and prevents output generated by the model that breaches safety criteria.
• Abuse monitoring: Deploying an AI-driven detection system trained on adversarial examples, and using content classification, abuse pattern capture, and other methods to detect and mitigate instances of recurring content and/or behaviors that suggest use of the service in a manner that may violate guardrails. As a separate AI system, it avoids being influenced by malicious instructions. Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service abuse monitoring is an example of this approach.

Building AI solutions on Azure

Microsoft provides tools for customers developing their own applications on Azure. Azure AI Content Safety Prompt Shields are enabled by default for models hosted in the Azure AI model catalog as a service, and they are parameterized by a severity threshold. We recommend setting the most restrictive threshold to ensure the best protection against safety violations. These input and output filters act as a general defense not only against this particular jailbreak technique, but also a broad set of emerging techniques that attempt to generate harmful content. Azure also provides built-in tooling for model selection, prompt engineering, evaluation, and monitoring. For example, risk and safety evaluations in Azure AI Studio can assess a model and/or application for susceptibility to jailbreak attacks using synthetic adversarial datasets, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud can alert security operations teams to jailbreaks and other active threats.

With the integration of Azure AI and Microsoft Security (Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Defender for Cloud) security teams can also discover, protect, and govern these attacks. The new native integration of Microsoft Defender for Cloud with Azure OpenAI Service, enables contextual and actionable security alerts, driven by Azure AI Content Safety Prompt Shields and Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence. Threat protection for AI workloads allows security teams to monitor their Azure OpenAI powered applications in runtime for malicious activity associated with direct and in-direct prompt injection attacks, sensitive data leaks and data poisoning, or denial of service attacks.

References

• Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations for LLM Conversation Safety: A Survey (Shanghai AI Laboratory)
• AI jailbreaks: What they are and how they can be mitigated
• How Microsoft discovers and mitigates evolving attacks against AI guardrails

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles and approach, refer to http://approjects.co.za/?big=ai/principles-and-approach.

For the latest security research from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community, check out the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Blog: https://aka.ms/threatintelblog.

To get notified about new publications and to join discussions on social media, follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/microsoft-threat-intelligence, and on X (formerly Twitter) at https://twitter.com/MsftSecIntel.

To hear stories and insights from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community about the ever-evolving threat landscape, listen to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence podcast: https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/microsoft-threat-intelligence.

The post Mitigating Skeleton Key, a new type of generative AI jailbreak technique appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Tools like Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, Microsoft Secure Score, and regulatory compliance dashboard in Microsoft Defender for Cloud are great ways for an organization to benchmark and communicate its security and compliance posture.

This blog post will offer these learnings to CISOs and IT security teams to set their relationship with the cybersecurity committee of the board up for success.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Meet multicloud compliance requirements across global, industrial, or regional regulations and standards.

Learn more

The cybersecurity committee of the board

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted rules in July 2023¹ to expand the scope of its cybersecurity reporting requirements for publicly traded companies,² making the governance of IT security by the board of directors and the cybersecurity expertise of board members reportable to the marketplace.

Corporate governance benchmarks including the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) ESG Governance QualityScore, widely used by analysts and for some executive compensation are including IT security measurements in their scoring.³ Cybersecurity is recognized as requiring governance from the board of directors. Boards are changing to make this possible.

The IT security function was viewed as the province of technical specialists, to be given some increased investment for a more hostile security landscape and in response to high profile security incidents. Cybersecurity was not considered a focus area of the board like finance, audit, or executive compensation. This has changed. Boards are seating directors with IT security expertise and asking for more communication from the IT security team, usually through the CISO.

Mandate of the cybersecurity committee

The mandate of the cybersecurity committee includes learning about the organization’s IT security team. To optimize the relationship, the security team needs to understand how the board and the cybersecurity committee work as well.

The cybersecurity committee will have a mandate, vetted and granted by the board members and likely the chief executive officer (CEO). This mandate will be set out in a corporate document that describes the responsibilities of the committee, the content, and frequency of their reports and the type of information they are to review. The CISO should understand the mandate and with it the scope of the committee to know how to best and most efficiently partner with them. A proactive CISO can contribute to the formulation of the mandate, avoiding conflict and inefficiency, and setting the relationship up for success.

Beyond the mandate document, the board will likely have public-facing Rules of Procedure. This document sets out the mission, duties, and operations of the board. It will likely also have a section describing the various board committees, their operations, and responsibilities.

The committee will be focused on discharging these responsibilities in an auditable way.

Time on the agenda of board meetings is at a premium. A typical two-hour meeting agenda might include:

• Approval of the last board meeting minutes.
• Review of first half results.
• Review of Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) report and ESG committee recommendations.
• Approval of board members’ expenses.
• Financial and business outlook.
• Business plan update.
• Review of next meeting dates.

Some of these are mandated by law, leaving little time for discretionary topics. There may be four or five such board meetings per year. The cybersecurity committee will have a slot on the agenda slot as will other business.

A board may receive a briefing from the CISO on current state and plan once a year. The CISO may be called on to provide ad hoc input on risks, incidents, or other emerging topics.

A cybersecurity committee is a subgroup of the board. It is led by one or two directors that have a relatively high level of cybersecurity expertise. They should:

• Understand the IT security function, policies, standards, current state, and plan.
• Offer their opinion as to how the current state and plan aligns with the company’s risk management posture and business objectives.
• Identify areas in current state and plan that need focus from the IT security function.
• Communicate blockers and advocate for the security function with the board and executives.

The committee is accountable for reporting to the board on these items.

Working with the cybersecurity committee

The board and the CISO need to align on how they will work together. They need to agree on efficient ways to get the information and context the committee needs to achieve its mandate.

This is an opportunity for the CISO to leverage their existing reporting and documents to the extent possible. A CISO who is proactive and suggests a framework will be a good partner to the committee. This will reduce the level of effort for the security team going forward.

The role of the board and the committee is to act on behalf of the shareholders to manage risk—not to manage the IT security team, the plan, or be accountable for cybersecurity. That’s the CISO’s job.

Board members often serve on multiple boards and have high profile roles in other organizations. They need information that is on target, that they can consume quickly, and report with confidence to stakeholders. Effective communication includes:

Context

What does it mean to the business?

Cybersecurity risk and planning should be communicated in similar format to the financial and business risk that the board is used to managing.

Progress to plan should be shown in context. A security roadmap for a minimum of three years should be shared with progress and changes tracked over time.

The focus should be on a holistic IT security strategy and architecture spanning infrastructure, services, internal, vendors, on-premises, cloud, and culture.

Objective data

Recommendations from the IT security team should be presented together with objective information that supports it.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be agreed upon and visualized over time to expose trends. The committee should see that the right things are being monitored but not expect to drill down into every KPI.

Objective outputs that can show trends and be mapped to investments in security include Secure Score in Microsoft Defender. Secure Score monitors platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.    

Microsoft Secure Score is a similar service focused on the improvement of security posture of a company’s Microsoft 365 software as a service (SaaS), including identity, devices, and applications.

The score, which is expressed as a percentage from 0 to 100, is shown with a list of recommendations that can be undertaken to meet security controls. These security controls should be considered for the security roadmap. As the controls are implemented, the Secure Score increases.

A company should not be focused on driving Secure Score to 100 percent but rather that the recommendations are considered in light of the company’s risk appetite and security roadmap. If the score is not rising as expected then the reason should be understood.

Similarly Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager provides Compliance Score for Microsoft 365. For Azure customers, Microsoft provides the regulatory compliance dashboard in Microsoft Defender for Cloud, which also provides visibility into the compliance posture of non-Microsoft clouds. These solutions are vehicles to help customers objectively assess and communicate the company’s compliance posture with their most important regulatory standards.

The updated security roadmap, with progress indicated, should be presented to the committee, and the KPIs should broadly track with this progress, allowing an increased confidence in the organization’s security posture and trends.

Align with the mandate of the committee

Working with the cybersecurity committee and the board will involve communicating to a diverse group whose first expertise may not be information technology. We need to teach.

We also need to learn. The committee operates within its mandate. Servicing this mandate is the primary focus of the committee. It will come before other subjects we may want to discuss. Map these subjects to the committee’s mandate.

The board operates within its rules of procedure. We will be much more effective if we are familiar with these. If we map our asks and replies to the committee’s mandate, our communication will be well received and we’ll strengthen the partnership. If we understand the rules of procedure we can avoid ad hoc engagement and communicate our message effectively.

The mandate may indicate that a report from the committee is due to the board in advance of the Annual General Meeting. If we’ve agreed on the information needed to service the mandate, we can be proactive about providing this. We can anticipate questions and put challenges in context with what they mean to the business and what we’re doing to address them.

Confidentiality

Some of the materials provided to the cybersecurity committee will require confidentiality. They should be watermarked or encrypted per company policy. Board members are not employees, and they probably don’t have a company email address or access to the company network. The tools and procedures will need to take this into account.

The reporting of the cybersecurity committee to the board is also confidential. Beyond bad actors, the information may be taken out of context by analysts or those seeking to harm the company’s reputation. Security controls should be agreed with the CISO to ensure that the documents provided to and produced by the cybersecurity committee will be limited in distribution to the committee, company leadership and the office of the CISO.

Some board documents are shared with shareholders and made available to the public, such as minutes of the board meetings. Where input from the CISO or the cybersecurity committee for these documents is needed, it should be made sufficiently general so as not to expose the company to risk.

Get started with committee collaboration

The formation of a cybersecurity committee as part of a company’s board will mean more scrutiny of the IT security function. More time will be devoted to communicating and reporting.

The CISO and their team will get visibility with the board and can use this to advocate for the resources and cultural changes they need to protect the company. Productive, efficient interaction with the committee can build a partnership with the board, which protects and adds value for the company.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager.

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 X at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹SEC Adopts Rules on Cybersecurity Risk Management, Strategy, Governance, and Incident Disclosure by Public Companies, SEC. July 26, 2023.

²SEC cyber risk management rule—a security and compliance opportunity, Steve Vandenberg. March 1, 2023.

³IT security: An opportunity to raise corporate governance scores, Steve Vandenberg. August 8, 2022.

The post Working with a cybersecurity committee of the board appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

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.

Security is our top priority at Microsoft—above all else—and our expanded Secure Future Initiative underscores our company-wide commitment to making the world a safer place for everyone. I am proud that Microsoft is prioritizing security in the age of AI as we continue to innovate with a security-first mindset. 

Today, new capabilities are now available in Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview to help organizations secure and govern generative AI applications at work. These releases deliver purpose-built policy tools and better visibility to help you secure and govern generative AI apps and their data. We are also delivering a new unified experience for the security analyst and integrating Microsoft Copilot for Security across our security product portfolio.  

You’ll be able to see firsthand these innovations and more across the Microsoft Security portfolio at RSA Conference (RSAC). I also hope you will also join me on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, for “Securing AI: What We’ve Learned and What Comes Next,” to explore the strategies that every organization can implement to securely design, deploy, and govern AI.

Secure your AI transformation with Microsoft Security

Wherever your organization is in your AI transformation, you will need comprehensive security controls to secure govern your AI applications and data throughout their lifecycle—development, deployment, and runtime.  

With the new capabilities announced today, Microsoft becomes the first security provider to deliver end-to-end AI security posture management, threat protection, data security, and governance for AI.

Discover new AI attack surfaces, strengthen your AI security posture, and protect AI apps against threats with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Now security teams can identify their entire AI infrastructure—such as plugins, SDKs, and other AI technologies—with AI security posture management capabilities across platforms like Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Machine Learning, and Amazon Bedrock. You can continuously identify risks, map attack paths, and use built-in security best practices to prevent direct and indirect attacks on AI applications, from development to runtime.

Integrated with Microsoft Azure AI services, including Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety and Azure OpenAI, Defender for Cloud will continuously monitor AI applications for anomalous activity, correlate findings, and enrich security alerts with supporting evidence. Defender for Cloud is the first cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) to deliver threat protection for AI workloads at runtime, providing security operations center (SOC) analysts with new detections that alert to malicious activity and active threats, such as jailbreak attacks, credential theft, and sensitive data leakage. Additionally, SOC analysts will be able facilitate incident response with native integration of these signals into Microsoft Defender XDR.

Identify and mitigate data security and data compliance risks with Microsoft Purview. Give your security teams greater visibility into and understanding of which AI applications are being used and how to help you safeguard your data effectively in the age of AI. The Microsoft Purview AI Hub, now in preview, delivers insights such as sensitive data shared with AI applications, total number of users interacting with AI apps and their associated risk level, and more. To prevent potential oversharing of sensitive data, new insights help organizations identify unlabeled files that Copilot references and prioritize mitigation of oversharing risks. Additionally, we are excited to announce the preview of non-compliant usage insights in the AI Hub to help customers discover potential AI interactions that violate enterprise and regulatory policies in areas like hate and discrimination, corporate sabotage, money laundering, and more.

Govern AI usage to comply with regulatory policies with new AI compliance assessments in Microsoft Purview. We understand how important it is to comply with regulations, and how complicated it can be when deploying new technology. Four new Compliance Manager assessment templates, now in preview, are available to help you assess, implement, and strengthen compliance with AI regulations and standards, including EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 23894:2023, and ISO/IEC 42001. The new assessment insights will also be surfaced within the Purview AI Hub, providing recommended actions to support compliance as you onboard and deploy AI solutions.

Together we can help everyone pursue the benefits of AI, by thoughtfully addressing the new risks. The new capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Purview, which build on top of the innovations we shared at Microsoft Ignite 2023 and Microsoft Secure 2024, are important advancements in empowering security teams to discover, protect, and govern AI—whether you’re adopting software as a service (SaaS) AI solutions or building your own.

Read more about all of the new capabilities and features that help you secure and govern AI.

Strengthening end-to-end security with a unified security operations platform

We continue investing in our long-standing commitment to providing you with the most complete end-to-end protection for your entire digital estate. There is an immediate need for tool consolidation and AI to gain the speed and scale required to defend against these new digital threats. Microsoft integrates all of the foundational SOC tools—cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM), comprehensive native extended detection and response (XDR), unified security posture management, and generative AI—to deliver true end-to-end threat protection in a single platform, with a common data model, and a unified analyst experience.  

The new unified security operations platform experience, in preview, transforms the real-world analyst experience with a simple, approachable user experience that brings together all the security signals and threat intelligence currently stuck in other tools. Analysts will have more context at every stage, with helpful recommendations and suggestions for automation that make investigation and response easier than ever before. We are also introducing new features across Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR, including global search, custom detections, and automation rules.

We are also pleased to announce a number of additional new features and capabilities that will empower your security operations center (SOC) to work across Microsoft security products for stronger end-to-end security.

• Microsoft Security Exposure Management initiatives help your security team identify risky exposures and instances of insufficient implementation of essential security controls, to find opportunities for improvement.
• SOC analysts can now use insider risk information as part of their investigation in Microsoft Defender XDR.
• Microsoft Defender XDR expands to include native operational technology (OT) protection, enabling automatic correlation of OT threat signal into cross-workload incidents and the ability to manage OT and industrial control system vulnerabilities directly within Defender XDR.
• Expanded attack disruption in Microsoft Defender XDR, powered by AI, machine learning, and threat intelligence, will cover new attack scenarios like disabling malicious OAuth apps and will significantly broaden compromised user disruption, such as leaked credentials, stuffing, and guessing.
• Microsoft Sentinel launches SOC Optimizations to provide tailored guidance to help manage costs, increase the value of data ingested, and improve coverage against common attack techniques.

Expanded Microsoft Copilot for Security integrations

When it comes to supporting security teams and relieving complexity, Microsoft Copilot for Security offers a great advantage. Greater integration of Copilot across the Microsoft security portfolio and beyond provides richer embedded experiences and Copilot capabilities from familiar and trusted products. We are proud to announce new Microsoft Copilot for Security integrations, including Purview, new partner plugins, Azure Firewall, and Azure Web Application Firewall. These integrations provide your security teams with real-time guidance, deeper investigative insights, and expanded access to data from across your environment.  

Security for the era of AI

An end-to-end security platform will be a determining factor in every organization’s transformation and will play a critical role in the durability of AI-powered innovation. Organizations that focus on securing AI and invest in using AI to strengthen security will be the lasting leaders in their industries and markets. Microsoft is committed to empowering these industry and market leaders with security solutions that can help them achieve more. We bring together four critical advantages: large-scale data and threat intelligence; the most complete end-to-end platform; industry leading, responsible AI; and tools to help you secure and govern AI.

With the general availability of Copilot for Security, Microsoft has delivered on our promise to put industry-leading generative AI into the hands of IT and security professionals of all levels of experience. Now, with today’s release of new capabilities in Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Purview, we are also delivering on our commitment to empower IT and security teams with the tools they need to take advantage of AI safely, responsibly, and securely.

Lastly and importantly, security is a team sport. We look forward to working together with the industry and our partners on advancing cyber security for all. 

I do hope you’ll connect with us at RSAC this week, where we will be demonstrating our comprehensive security portfolio and how it helps you protect your environment from every angle to prepare for and confidently adopt and deploy AI. 

Learn more

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 New capabilities to help you secure your AI transformation appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Microsoft commends the DoD for approaching Zero Trust as a mindset, not a capability or device that may be bought.¹ Zero Trust can’t be achieved by a single technology, but through tight integration between solutions across product categories. Deciphering how security products achieve Zero Trust based on marketing materials alone is a daunting task. IT leaders need to select the right tools. Security architects need to design integrated solutions. Implementers need to deploy, configure, and integrate tools to achieve the outcomes in each Zero Trust activity.

Today, we are excited to announce Zero Trust activity-level guidance for DoD Components and DIB partners implementing the DoD Zero Trust Strategy. To learn more, see Configure Microsoft cloud services for the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

In this blog, we’ll review the DoD Zero Trust Strategy and discuss how our new guidance helps DoD Components and DIB partners implement Zero Trust. We’ll cover the Microsoft Zero Trust platform and relevant features for meeting DoD’s Zero Trust requirements, and close with real-world DoD Zero Trust deployments.

Microsoft supports the DoD’s Zero Trust Strategy

The DoD released its formal Zero Trust Strategy in October 2022.¹ The strategy is a security framework and mindset that set a path for achieving Zero Trust. The strategy outlines strategic goals for adopting culture, defending DoD Information Systems, accelerating technology implementation, and enabling Zero Trust.

The DoD Zero Trust Strategy includes seven pillars that represent protection areas for Zero Trust:

1. User
2. Device
3. Applications and workloads
4. Data
5. Network
6. Automation and orchestration
7. Visibility and analytics

In January 2023, the DoD published a capabilities-based execution roadmap for implementing Zero Trust.² The roadmap details 45 Zero Trust capabilities spanning the seven pillars. The execution roadmap details the Zero Trust activities DoD Components should perform to achieve each Zero Trust capability. There are 152 Zero Trust activities in total, divided into Target Level Zero Trust and Advanced Level Zero Trust phases with deadlines of 2027 and 2032, respectively.

The Zero Trust activity-level guidance we’re announcing in this blog continues Microsoft’s commitment to supporting DoD’s Zero Trust strategy.³ It serves as a reference for how DoD Components should implement Zero Trust activities using Microsoft cloud services. Microsoft product teams and security architects supporting DoD worked in close partnership to provide succinct, actionable guidance side-by-side with the DoD Zero Trust activity text and organized by product with linked references.

We scoped the guidance to features available today (including public preview) for Microsoft 365 DoD and Microsoft Azure Government customers. As the security landscape changes, Microsoft will continue innovating to meet the needs of federal and DoD customers.⁴ We’re excited to bring entirely new Zero Trust technologies like Microsoft Copilot for Security and Security Service Edge to United States Government clouds in the future.⁵

Look out for announcements in the Microsoft Security Blog and check Microsoft’s DoD Zero Trust documentation to see the latest guidance.

Microsoft’s Zero Trust platform

Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.⁶ The Microsoft Zero Trust platform is a modern security architecture that emphasizes proactive, integrated, and automated security measures. Microsoft 365 E5 combines best-in-class productivity apps with advanced security capabilities that span all seven pillars of the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

“Single products/suites can be adopted to address multiple capabilities. Integrated vendor suites of products rather than individual components will assist in reducing cost and risk to the government.”

 —Department of Defense Zero Trust Reference Architecture Version 2.0⁷

Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive and extensible Zero Trust platform.⁸ It’s a hybrid cloud, multicloud, and multiplatform solution. Pre-integrated extended detection and response (XDR) services coupled with modern cloud-based device management, and a cloud-based identity and access management service, provide a direct and rapid modernization path for the DoD and DIB organizations.

Read on to learn about Microsoft cloud services that support the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Figure 1. Microsoft Zero Trust Architecture.

Microsoft Entra ID is an integrated multicloud identity and access management solution and identity provider. Microsoft Entra ID is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR services to provide a comprehensive suite Zero Trust capabilities including strict identity verification, enforcing least privilege, and adaptive risk-based access control.

Microsoft Entra ID is built for cloud-scale, handling billions of authentications every day. It uses industry standard protocols and is designed for both Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps. Establishing Microsoft Entra ID as your organization’s Zero Trust identity provider lets you configure, enforce, and monitor adaptive Zero Trust access policies in a single location. Conditional Access is the Zero Trust authorization engine for Microsoft Entra ID. It enables dynamic, adaptive, fine-grained, risk-based, access policies for any workload.

Microsoft Entra ID is essential to the user pillar and has a role in all other pillars of the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Microsoft Intune is a multiplatform endpoint and application management suite for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, and Android devices. Microsoft Intune configuration policies manage devices and applications. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps organizations prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats on devices. Microsoft Intune and Defender for Endpoint work together to enforce security policies, assess device health, vulnerability exposure, risk level, and configuration compliance status. Conditional Access policies requiring a compliant device help achieve comply-to-connect  outcomes in the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint help achieve capabilities in the device pillar.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform where you can store, share, and work together with others to write code. GitHub Advanced Security includes features that help organizations improve and maintain code by providing code scanning, secret scanning, security checks, and dependency review throughout the deployment pipeline. Microsoft Entra Workload ID helps organizations use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) with GitHub Actions.

GitHub and Azure DevOps are essential to the applications and workloads pillar.

Microsoft Purview is a range of solutions for unified data security, data governance, and risk and compliance management. Microsoft Purview Information Protection lets you define and label sensitive information types. Auto-labeling within Microsoft 365 clients ensure data is appropriately labeled and protected. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention integrates with Microsoft 365 services and apps, and Microsoft Defender XDR components to detect and prevent data loss.

Microsoft Purview features align to the data pillar activities.

Azure networking services include a range of software-defined network resources that can be used to provide networking capabilities for connectivity, application protection, application delivery, and network monitoring. Azure networking resources like Microsoft Azure Firewall Premium, Azure DDoS Protection, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Azure API Management, Azure Virtual Network, and Network Security Groups, all work together to provide routing, segmentation, and visibility into your network.

Azure networking services and network segmentation architectures are essential to the network pillar.

Microsoft Defender XDR is a unified pre- and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response actions. It correlates millions of signals across endpoints, identities, email, and applications to automatically disrupt attacks. Microsoft Defender XDR’s automated investigation and response and Microsoft Sentinel playbooks are used to complete security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) activities.

Microsoft Defender XDR plays a key role in automation and orchestration and visibility and analytics pillars.

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) you deploy in Azure. Microsoft Sentinel operates at cloud scale to accelerate security response and save time by automating common tasks and streamlining investigations with incident insights. Built-in data connectors make it easy to ingest security logs from Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure, non-Microsoft clouds, and on-premises infrastructure.

Microsoft Sentinel is essential to automation and orchestration and visibility and analytics pillars along with any activities requiring SIEM integration.

Real-world pilots and implementations

The DoD is embracing Zero Trust as a continuous modernization effort. Microsoft has partnered with DoD Components for several years, onboarding Microsoft 365 services, integrating apps with Microsoft Entra, migrating Azure workloads, managing devices with Microsoft Intune, and building security operations around Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel.

One such example is the United States Navy’s innovative Flank Speed program. The Navy’s large-scale deployment follows Zero Trust capabilities put forth in the DoD’s strategy. These capabilities include comply-to-connect, continuous authorization, least-privilege access, and data-centric security controls.⁹ To date, Flank Speed has onboarded more than 560,000 users and evaluated the effectiveness of its robust cybersecurity tools through Purple Team assessments.¹⁰

Another example is Army 365, the United States Army’s Microsoft 365 environment.¹¹ Army 365 has onboarded more than 1.4 million users and migrated petabytes of data.¹² The secure collaboration environment incorporates Zero Trust principles in a secure collaboration environment with identity and device protections and includes support for bring your own device (BYOD) through Azure Virtual Desktop.¹³

DoD Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap

Learn how to configure Microsoft cloud services for the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Learn more

Learn more

Embrace proactive security with Zero Trust.

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.

¹DoD Zero Trust strategy, DoD CIO Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office. October 2022.

²Zero Trust Capability Execution Roadmap, DoD CIO Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office. January 2023.

³Microsoft supports the DoD’s Zero Trust strategy, Steve Faehl. November 22, 2022.

⁴5 ways to secure identity and access for 2024, Joy Chik. January 10, 2024.

⁵Microsoft Entra Expands into Security Service Edge with Two New Offerings, Sinead O’Donovan. July 11, 2023.

⁶Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2023 Zero Trust Platform Providers Wave™ report, Joy Chik. September 19, 2023.

⁷Department of Defense (DoD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture Version 2.0, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), National Security Agency (NSA) Zero Trust Engineering Team. July 2022.

⁸How Microsoft is partnering with vendors to provide Zero Trust solutions, Vasu Jakkal. October 21, 2021.

⁹Flank Speed Has Paved the Way for Navy to Become ‘Leaders in Zero Trust Implementation,’ Says Acting CIO Jane Rathbun, Charles Lyons-Burt, GovCon Wire. June 2023.

¹⁰Flank Speed makes significant strides in DOD Zero Trust Activity alignment, Darren Turner, PEO Digital. December 2023.

¹¹Army launches upgraded collaboration platform; cybersecurity at the forefront, Alexandra Snyder. June 17, 2021.

¹²Cohesive teams drive NETCOM’s continuous improvement, Army 365 migration, Enrique Tamez Vasquez, NETCOM Public Affairs Office. March 2023.

¹³BYOD brings personal devices to the Army network, Army Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-6. February 2024.

The post New Microsoft guidance for the DoD Zero Trust Strategy appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.