AI innovation is impacting every industry, business process, and individual. About 75% of knowledge workers today are currently using some sort of AI in their day to day.¹ At the same time, the regulatory landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Around the world, at least 69 countries have proposed more than 1,000 AI-related policy initiatives and legal frameworks to address public concerns around AI safety and governance.² With the need to adhere to regulations and policy frameworks for AI transformation, a comprehensive solution is needed to address security, governance, and privacy concerns. Additionally, with the convergence of the responsibilities of cybersecurity and data teams, customers are asking for a solution that turns data security and data governance into a team sport to address issues such data discovery, data classification, data loss prevention, and data quality in a unified way. Microsoft Purview delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that address these needs, helping customers seamlessly secure and confidently activate their data in the era of AI.

We are excited to announce new innovations that help security and data teams accelerate their organization’s AI transformation:

1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) support for lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access.
2. Expanding Purview DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to send users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data.
3. Microsoft Purview integration with Copilot in Fabric, specifically for Power BI.
4. Data Observability within the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.

Seamlessly secure data

Microsoft Purview is extending its proven data security value delivered to millions of Microsoft 365 users worldwide, to the Microsoft data platform. This helps users drive consistency across their multicloud and multiplatform data estate and simplify risks related to data leaks, oversharing, and risky user behavior as more users are managing and handling data in the era of AI.

1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) support for lakehouse in Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access

Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities are used by hundreds of thousands of customers for their integration with Microsoft 365 data. Since last year’s Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, Microsoft Purview has extended Microsoft Purview Information Protection and Purview DLP policy tip value across the data estate, including Fabric. Currently, Purview DLP supports the ability to show users notifications for when they are working with sensitive data in lakehouse. We are excited to share that we are enhancing the DLP value in lakehouse to prevent sensitive data leakage to guest users by restricting access. Data Security admins can configure policies and limit access to only internal users or data owners based on the sensitive data found. This control is valuable for when a Fabric tenant includes guest users and domain owners want to limit access to internal proprietary data in their lakehouses. 

Figure 1. DLP policy restricting access for guest users into lakehouse due to personally identifiable information (PII) data discovered 

2. Expanding DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to show users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data

A key part of securing sensitive data is to provide visibility to your users on where and how they are interacting with sensitive data. Purview DLP policies can help notify users when they are working with sensitive data through policy tips in lakehouse in Fabric. We are excited to announce that we are extending policy tips support for additional Fabric items—KQL databases and Mirrored databases in preview. (Mirrored Database sources include Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Databricks Unity Catalog, and Snowflake, with more sources available soon). KQL databases are the only databases used for real-time analytics so detecting sensitive data that comes through real-time analytics is huge for Fabric customers. Purview DLP for Mirrored databases reduces the security risk of sensitive data leakage when data is transferred in Fabric. We are happy to extend Purview DLP value to more data sources, providing end-to-end protection for customers within their Fabric environments, all to prepare for the safe deployment of AI.

Figure 2. Policy tip triggered by Purview DLP due to PII being discovered in KQL databases.

Figure 3. Policy tip triggered by Purview DLP due to PII being discovered in Mirrored databases.

3. Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Fabric

As organizations adopt AI, implementing data controls and a Zero Trust approach is crucial to mitigate risks like data oversharing and leakage, and potential non-compliant usage in AI. We are excited to announce Microsoft Purview capabilities in preview for Copilot in Fabric, starting with Copilot for Power BI. By combining Microsoft Purview and Copilot for Power BI, users can:

• Discover data risks such as sensitive data in user prompts and responses and receive recommended actions in their Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) dashboard to reduce these risks.
• Identify risky AI usage with Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management to investigate risky AI usage, such as an inadvertent user who has neglected security best practices and shared sensitive data in AI or a departing employee using AI to find sensitive data and exfiltrating the data through a USB device.
• Govern AI usage with Microsoft Purview Audit, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, retention policies, and non-compliant usage detection.

Figure 4. Purview DSPM for AI provides admins with comprehensive reports on Copilot in Fabric’s user activities, as well as data entered and shared within the copilot.

Confidently activate data

4. Data observability, now in preview, within Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog

Within the Unified Catalog in Microsoft Purview, users can easily identify the root cause of data quality issues by visually investigating the relationship between governance domains, data products, glossary terms, and data assets associated with them through its lineage. Data assets and their respective data quality are visible across your multicloud, hybrid data estate. Maintaining high data quality is core to driving trustworthy AI innovation forward, and with the new data observability capabilities in Microsoft Purview, users can now improve how fast they can investigate and resolve root cause issues to improve data quality and respond to regulatory reporting requirements.

Figure 5. Lineage view of data assets that showcases data quality within a Data Product.

Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric can help secure and activate data

As your organization continues to implement AI, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview will serve as key solutions to safely activate your data for AI. Stay tuned for even more exciting innovations to come and check out the Fabric blog to read more about the innovations in Fabric.

Learn more

Explore these resources to stay updated on our product innovations in security and governance for your data:

• Learn how to secure and govern your entire data estate with Microsoft Purview.
• Learn more about Microsoft Purview Data Governance.
• Get started with Microsoft Fabric.

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.

1Work Trends Index

2AI Regulations around the World – 2025

The post New innovations in Microsoft Purview for protected, AI-ready data appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Secure and govern AI apps built with the DeepSeek R1 model on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub 

Develop with trustworthy AI 

Last week, we announced DeepSeek R1’s availability on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, joining a diverse portfolio of more than 1,800 models.   

Customers today are building production-ready AI applications with Azure AI Foundry, while accounting for their varying security, safety, and privacy requirements. Similar to other models provided in Azure AI Foundry, DeepSeek R1 has undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations, including automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks. Microsoft’s hosting safeguards for AI models are designed to keep customer data within Azure’s secure boundaries. 

With Azure AI Content Safety, built-in content filtering is available by default to help detect and block malicious, harmful, or ungrounded content, with opt-out options for flexibility. Additionally, the safety evaluation system allows customers to efficiently test their applications before deployment. These safeguards help Azure AI Foundry provide a secure, compliant, and responsible environment for enterprises to confidently build and deploy AI solutions. See Azure AI Foundry and GitHub for more details.

Start with Security Posture Management

AI workloads introduce new cyberattack surfaces and vulnerabilities, especially when developers leverage open-source resources. Therefore, it’s critical to start with security posture management, to discover all AI inventories, such as models, orchestrators, grounding data sources, and the direct and indirect risks around these components. When developers build AI workloads with DeepSeek R1 or other AI models, Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s AI security posture management capabilities can help security teams gain visibility into AI workloads, discover AI cyberattack surfaces and vulnerabilities, detect cyberattack paths that can be exploited by bad actors, and get recommendations to proactively strengthen their security posture against cyberthreats.

By mapping out AI workloads and synthesizing security insights such as identity risks, sensitive data, and internet exposure, Defender for Cloud continuously surfaces contextualized security issues and suggests risk-based security recommendations tailored to prioritize critical gaps across your AI workloads. Relevant security recommendations also appear within the Azure AI resource itself in the Azure portal. This provides developers or workload owners with direct access to recommendations and helps them remediate cyberthreats faster. 

Safeguard DeepSeek R1 AI workloads with cyberthreat protection

While having a strong security posture reduces the risk of cyberattacks, the complex and dynamic nature of AI requires active monitoring in runtime as well. No AI model is exempt from malicious activity and can be vulnerable to prompt injection cyberattacks and other cyberthreats. Monitoring the latest models is critical to ensuring your AI applications are protected.

Integrated with Azure AI Foundry, Defender for Cloud continuously monitors your DeepSeek AI applications for unusual and harmful activity, correlates findings, and enriches security alerts with supporting evidence. This provides your security operations center (SOC) analysts with alerts on active cyberthreats such as jailbreak cyberattacks, credential theft, and sensitive data leaks. For example, when a prompt injection cyberattack occurs, Azure AI Content Safety prompt shields can block it in real-time. The alert is then sent to Microsoft Defender for Cloud, where the incident is enriched with Microsoft Threat Intelligence, helping SOC analysts understand user behaviors with visibility into supporting evidence, such as IP address, model deployment details, and suspicious user prompts that triggered the alert. 

Additionally, these alerts integrate with Microsoft Defender XDR, allowing security teams to centralize AI workload alerts into correlated incidents to understand the full scope of a cyberattack, including malicious activities related to their generative AI applications. 

Secure and govern the use of the DeepSeek app

In addition to the DeepSeek R1 model, DeepSeek also provides a consumer app hosted on its local servers, where data collection and cybersecurity practices may not align with your organizational requirements, as is often the case with consumer-focused apps. This underscores the risks organizations face if employees and partners introduce unsanctioned AI apps leading to potential data leaks and policy violations. Microsoft Security provides capabilities to discover the use of third-party AI applications in your organization and provides controls for protecting and governing their use.

Secure and gain visibility into DeepSeek app usage 

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides ready-to-use risk assessments for more than 850 Generative AI apps, and the list of apps is updated continuously as new ones become popular. This means that you can discover the use of these Generative AI apps in your organization, including the DeepSeek app, assess their security, compliance, and legal risks, and set up controls accordingly. For example, for high-risk AI apps, security teams can tag them as unsanctioned apps and block user’s access to the apps outright.

Comprehensive data security 

In addition, Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI provides visibility into data security and compliance risks, such as sensitive data in user prompts and non-compliant usage, and recommends controls to mitigate the risks. For example, the reports in DSPM for AI can offer insights on the type of sensitive data being pasted to Generative AI consumer apps, including the DeepSeek consumer app, so data security teams can create and fine-tune their data security policies to protect that data and prevent data leaks. 

Prevent sensitive data leaks and exfiltration  

The leakage of organizational data is among the top concerns for security leaders regarding AI usage, highlighting the importance for organizations to implement controls that prevent users from sharing sensitive information with external third-party AI applications.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) enables you to prevent users from pasting sensitive data or uploading files containing sensitive content into Generative AI apps from supported browsers. Your DLP policy can also adapt to insider risk levels, applying stronger restrictions to users that are categorized as ‘elevated risk’ and less stringent restrictions for those categorized as ‘low-risk’. For example, elevated-risk users are restricted from pasting sensitive data into AI applications, while low-risk users can continue their productivity uninterrupted. By leveraging these capabilities, you can safeguard your sensitive data from potential risks from using external third-party AI applications. Security admins can then investigate these data security risks and perform insider risk investigations within Purview. These same data security risks are surfaced in Defender XDR for holistic investigations.

This is a quick overview of some of the capabilities to help you secure and govern AI apps that you build on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, as well as AI apps that users in your organization use. We hope you find this useful!

To learn more and to get started with securing your AI apps, take a look at the additional resources below:  

• AI security posture management in Microsoft Defender for Cloud 
• Threat protection for AI workloads in Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Get visibility into your DeepSeek use with Defender for Cloud Apps 
• Microsoft Purview data security and compliance protections for generative AI apps 

Learn more with Microsoft 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 on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity. 

The post Securing DeepSeek and other AI systems with Microsoft Security appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

I’m often asked how long it takes to deploy Microsoft Purview. The answer depends on the specifics of the organization and what they want to achieve. Microsoft Purview should enable a comprehensive data governance program but it can provide risk mitigation for generative AI in the short term while the program is underway.

Microsoft Purview

Secure and govern your entire data estate.

Explore solutions

Organizations need AI solutions to add value for their customers and to stay competitive. They can’t wait for years to secure and govern these systems.

For the organizations deploying generative AI, “how long does it take to deploy Microsoft Purview?” isn’t the right question.

The risk mitigation Microsoft Purview provides for AI can begin on day one. This includes Microsoft AI, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, AI that an organization builds in-house, and AI from third parties like Google Gemini or ChatGPT.

This post will discuss ways we can secure and govern data used or generated by AI quickly, with minimal user impact, change management, and resources required.

These Microsoft Purview solutions are:

• Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI
• Microsoft Purview Information Protection
• Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention
• Microsoft Purview Communications Compliance
• Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management
• Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management
• Microsoft Purview Audit and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
• Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Here are short term steps you can take while the comprehensive data governance program is underway.

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI) provides visibility into data security risks. It reports on:

• User’s interactions with AI.
• Sensitive information in the prompts users share with the AI.
• Whether the sensitive information users share is labeled and thus is protected by durable security policy controls.
• Whether and how user interactions may be violating company policy including codes of conduct and attempts at jailbreak, where users manipulate the system to circumvent protections.
• The risk level of users interacting with the system, such as inadvertent or malicious activities they may be involved in that put the organization at risk.

DSPM for AI reports on this for each AI application and can drill down from the reports to the individual user activities. DSPM for AI collects and surfaces insights from the other Microsoft Purview solutions around generative AI risks in a single screen.

Custom sensitive information types, sensitivity labels, and information protection rules are reasoned over by DSPM for AI, but if these are not available, more than 300 out-of-the-box sensitive information types are available from day one.  

DSPM for AI will use these to report on risk for the organization without additional configuration. The organization’s administrators can configure policy to mitigate these risks directly from the DSPM for AI tool.

Figure 1. DSPM for AI shows interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot, enterprise generative AI from other providers, and AI developed in-house.

Figure 2. DSPM for AI Reports on generative AI user interactions with sensitive data.

A big concern that organizations have in widely deploying generative AI is that it will return results that contain sensitive information that the user should not have access to. SharePoint sites have been created over the years, are unlabeled, and may be accessible to the entire organization through the AI. The “security by obscurity” that may have prevented the sensitive information from being inappropriately shared is now negated by the AI that reasons over and returns the data.

Data assessments, part of DSPM for AI, and currently in preview, identifies potential oversharing risks and allows the administrator to apply a sensitivity label to the SharePoint sites, the sensitive data, or initiate an Microsoft Entra ID user access review to manage group memberships.

The administrator can engage the business stakeholder who has knowledge of the risk posed by the data and invite them to mitigate the risk or apply the policy at scale from the Microsoft Purview administration portal.

Figure 3. Data assessment—visualize risk, review access, and deploy policy.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection

The document access controls of Microsoft Purview Information Protection, including sensitivity labels, are enforced when the data is reasoned over by AI. The user is given visibility in context that they are working with sensitive information. This awareness empowers users to protect the organization. 

The sensitivity labels that enforce scoped encryption, watermarking, and other protections travel with the document as the user interacts with the AI. When the AI creates new content based on the document, the new content inherits the most restrictive label and policy.

Microsoft Purview can automatically apply sensitivity labels to AI interactions based on the organization’s existing policy for email, desktop applications, and Microsoft Teams, or new policy can be deployed for the AI.

These can be based on out-of-the-box sensitive information types for a quick start.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

The Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies that the organization currently uses for email, desktop applications, and Teams can be extended to the AI or new policy for the AI can be created. Cut and paste of sensitive information or transfer of a labeled document into the AI can be prevented or only allowed with an auditable justification from the user.

A rule can be configured to prevent all documents bearing a specific label from being reasoned over by the AI. Out-of-the-box sensitive information types can be used for a quick start.

Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance

Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance provides the ability to detect regulatory compliance (for example, SEC or FINRA) and business conduct violations such as sensitive or confidential information, harassing or threatening language, and sharing of adult content.

Out-of-the-box policies can be used to monitor user prompts or AI-generated content. It provides policy enforcement in near real time and also audit logs and reporting.

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates signal to identify potential malicious or accidental behaviors from legitimate users. Pre-configured generative AI-specific risk detections and policy templates are now available in preview.

As the Insider Risk Management solution algorithms determine a user to be engaging in risky behavior, the data loss prevention (DLP) policies for that user can be made stricter using a feature called Adaptive Protection. It can be configured with out-of-the-box policies. This continuous monitoring and policy modulation mitigates risk while reducing administrator workload.

AI analytics can be activated from the Microsoft Purview portal to provide insights even before the Insider Risk Management solution is deployed to users. This quickly surfaces AI risks with minimal administrative workload.

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Purview can enforce AI Data Lifecycle Management, with retention of AI prompts, prompt returns, and the documents AI creates for a specified time period. This can be done globally for every interaction with an AI solution. It can be done with out-of-the-box or custom policies. This will keep these interactions available for future investigations, for regulatory compliance, or to tune policies and inform the governance program.

A policy for deletion of AI interactions can be enforced so information is not over-retained.

Microsoft Purview Audit and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

The organization will need to support internal investigations around the use of AI. Microsoft Purview Audit logs and retains these interactions. They also need to support their legal team should they have to produce AI interactions to support litigation.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery can put a user’s interactions with the AI as well as their other Microsoft 365 documents and communications on hold so that their availability to support investigations is maintained. It allows them to be searched based metadata, enhancing relevancy, annotated, and produced.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager has pre-built assessments for AI regulations including:

• EU Artificial Intelligence Act.
• ISO/IEC 23894:2023.
• ISO/IEC 42001:2023.
• NIST AI Risk Management Framework (RMF) 1.0.

These assessments are available to benchmark compliance over time, report on control status, and maintain and produce evidence for both Microsoft and the organization’s activities that support the regulatory compliance program.

Microsoft Purview is an AI enabler

Without security, governance, and compliance bases being covered, the AI program puts the organization at risk. An AI program can be blocked before it deploys if the team can’t demonstrate how it is mitigating these risks.

The actions suggested here can all be taken quickly, and with limited effort, to set up a generative AI deployment for success.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Purview.

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 Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Fast-track generative AI security with Microsoft Purview appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Historically, organizations have relied on the traditional approach to data security and governance, largely involving stitching together fragmented solutions. According to Gartner®, “75% of security leaders are actively pursuing a security vendor consolidation strategy as of 2022.”² Consolidation, however, is no easy feat. In a recent study, more than 95% of security leaders acknowledge that unifying the handling of data security, compliance, and privacy across teams and tools is both a priority and a challenge.³ These approaches often fall short because of duplicate data, redundant alerts, and siloed investigations, ultimately leading to increased data risks. Over time, this approach has been increasingly difficult for organizations to maintain.

Unify how you protect and govern your data with Microsoft Purview

Unlike traditional data security and governance strategies that require disparate solutions to achieve comprehensive data protection, Microsoft Purview is purpose-built to unify data security, governance, and compliance into a single platform experience. This integration aims to reduce complexity, simplify management, and mitigate risk, while helping enhance efficiency across teams to support a culture of collaboration. With Microsoft Purview you can:

• Enable comprehensive data protection.
• Support compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Help safeguard AI Innovation.

What’s new in Microsoft Purview?

To meet our growing customer needs, the team has been delivering a lot of innovation at a rapid pace. In this blog, we’re excited to recap all the new capabilities we announced at Microsoft Ignite last month.

Enable comprehensive data protection

Microsoft Purview enables you to discover, secure, and govern data across Microsoft and third-party sources. Today, Microsoft Purview delivers rich data security capabilities through Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention, Microsoft Purview Information Protection, and Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management, enhanced with AI-powered Adaptive Protection. To drive AI transformation, you need to build and maintain a strong data foundation, categorized by data that is not just secured but also governed. Microsoft Purview also addresses your data governance needs with the newly reimagined Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog. These data security and data governance products leverage shared capabilities such as a common data catalog, connectors, classifications, and audit logs—helping reduce inconsistencies, inefficiencies, and exposure gaps, commonly experienced by using disparate tools.

Introducing Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) provides visibility into data security risks and recommends controls to protect that data. DSPM provides contextual insights, usage analysis, and continuous risk assessments of your data, helping you mitigate risks and enhance data security. With DSPM, you get a shared understanding of key risks through a series of reports that correlate insights across location and type of sensitive data, risky user activities, and common exfiltration channels. In addition, DSPM provides actionable, scenario-based recommendations for detection and protection policies. For example, DSPM can help you create an Insider Risk Management policy that identifies risky behavior such as downgrading labels in documents followed by exfiltration, and a data loss prevention (DLP) policy to block that exfiltration at the same time.

DSPM also brings a view of historical trends and insights based on sensitivity labels applied, sensitive assets covered by at least one DLP policy, and potentially risky users so show the effectiveness of your data security policies over time. And finally, DSPM leverages the power of generative AI through its deep integration with Microsoft Security Copilot. With this integration, you can easily uncover risks that might not be immediately apparent and drive efficient and richer investigations—all in natural language.

With DSPM, you can easily identify possible labeling and policy gaps such as unlabeled content and users that aren’t scoped in a DLP policy, unusual patterns and activities that might indicate potential risks, as well as opportunities to adapt and strengthen your data security program.

Figure 1. DSPM overview page provides centralized visibility across data, users, and activities, as well as access to reports.

Learn more about this announcement in the Data Security Posture Management blog.

Increasing data security and security operations center integration

Understanding data and user context is vital for improving security operations and prioritizing investigations, especially when sensitive data is at stake. By integrating insights such as data classification, access controls, and user activity into the security operations center (SOC) experience, organizations can better assess the impact of security incidents, reduce false alerts, and enhance containment efforts. In addition to the already present DLP alerts in the Microsoft Defender XDR incident investigation and data security remediation actions enabled directly from Defender XDR, we’ve also added Insider Risk Management context to the user entity page to provide a more comprehensive view of user activities.

With Microsoft Purview’s latest integration with Microsoft Defender, now in preview, you get insider risk alerts in Defender XDR and can correlate them with incidents. This gives you critical user context for your security investigations. SOC teams can now better distinguish internal incidents from external cyberattacks and refine their response strategies. For more complex analysis to identify risks such as attack patterns, we are integrating insider risk signals into Defender XDR’s Advanced Hunting, giving you deeper insights and allowing you to improve your policies in partnership with data security teams. Together, these advancements allow your organization to stay ahead of evolving cyberthreats, providing a collaborative and data-driven approach to security.

Learn more about this announcement in the Purview Insider Risk Management blog.

Protecting data and preventing sensitive data loss

As AI generates new data in unprecedented volumes, the need to secure that data and prevent the loss of sensitive information has become even more crucial. Our new DLP capabilities help you effectively investigate DLP incidents, fortify existing protections, and refine your overall DLP program. You can now customize Purview DLP to the established processes of your organization with the Microsoft Power Automate connector in preview. This lets you automate and customize your DLP policy actions through Power Automate workflows to integrate your DLP incidents into new or established IT, security, and business operations workflows, like stakeholder awareness or incident remediation.

DLP policy insights in Security Copilot, also in preview, summarize existing DLP policies in natural language and helps you understand any gaps in policy coverage across your environment. This makes it easier for you to quickly and easily understand the full breadth of DLP policy coverage across your organization and address gaps in protection. We are also enhancing DLP protections on endpoints by expanding our file type coverage from more than 40 to more than 110 file types. Users can also now store and view full files on Windows devices as evidence for forensic investigations using Microsoft-managed storage. With the Microsoft-managed option, your admins can save time otherwise spent configuring additional settings, assigning permissions, and selecting the storage in the policy workflow. Finally, you can now enforce blanket protections on file types that cannot currently be scanned or classified by endpoint DLP, such as blocking copy to removable media for all computer-aided design (CAD) files regardless of those files’ contents. This helps ensure that the diverse range of file types found in your environment are still protected even if they cannot currently be scanned and classified by Microsoft Purview endpoint DLP. 

Learn more about these announcements in our Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention blog.

Microsoft Purview Data Governance innovations to drive greater business value

Research indicates that data practitioners spend 80% of their time finding, cleaning, and organizing data, leaving only 20% of time to process and analyze it.⁴ To simplify the data governance practice in the age of AI, the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog is a comprehensive enterprise catalog that automatically inventories and tags your organization’s critical data assets. This gives your business users the ability to search for specific business data when building analytics reports or AI models. The Unified Catalog gives you visibility and confidence in your data across your disparate data sources and local catalogs with built-in data quality management and end-to-end lineage. You can integrate metadata from diverse catalogs such as Fabric OneLake, Databricks Unity, and Snowflake Polaris, into a unified catalog for all your data stewards, data owners, and business users.

Now in preview, Unified Catalog provides deeper data quality through a new scan engine that supports open standard file and table formats for big data platforms, including Microsoft Fabric, Databricks Unity Catalog, Snowflake, Google Big Query, and Amazon S3. This new scan engine enables rich data quality management at the asset level for improved data quality management at the asset level for overall improved data quality health. Lastly, Microsoft Purview Analytics in OneLake (preview) allows you to extract tenant-specific metadata from the Unified Catalog and export it directly into OneLake. You can then use Microsoft Power BI to analyze the metadata to further understand and report on your data’s quality and lineage.

Learn more about these announcements in our Microsoft Purview Data Governance blog.

Support compliance and regulatory requirements

As regulatory requirements evolve with the proliferation of AI, it is more critical than ever for businesses to keep compliance and privacy top of mind. However, adhering to requirements is becoming increasingly complex, while consequences for non-compliance are growing more severe. Microsoft Purview empowers you to address regulatory demands and comply with corporate policies by offering compliance and privacy controls that are both scalable and adaptable to changing needs.

New templates in Compliance Manager to help simplify compliance

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager provides insights into your organization’s compliance status through compliance templates and provides suggested actions and next steps to help you along your compliance journey. Compliance Manager continues to add new templates to help you address new and evolving regulations, including templates for the European Union AI Act (EUAI Act), NIST 2 AI, ISO 42001, ISO 23894, Digital Operations Resiliency Act (DORA), and additional industry and regional regulations. Compliance Manager now includes historical records that help track your organization’s compliance and provides actionable next steps to understand how new regulations or policies affect your compliance score over time. In addition, you can now leverage custom templates to address both regulatory and your organization’s specific policies and preferences.

Figure 2. EUAI Act Assessment in Compliance Manager.

Learn more about this announcement in the Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager blog.

New Microsoft Purview controls for ChatGPT Enterprise with integration with OpenAI for improved compliance

Microsoft Purview now integrates with ChatGPT Enterprise, allowing you to gain visibility and govern the prompts and responses of your ChatGPT Enterprise interactions. This integration, currently in preview, includes Microsoft Purview Audit for auditing ChatGPT Enterprise interactions, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management for enabling retention and deletion policies, Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance to proactively detect regulatory and corporate policy violations, and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery to streamline legal investigations.

Learn more about all these announcements in our Security for AI blog.   

Microsoft Purview is built to help safeguard AI Innovation

With the rapid adoption of AI, new vulnerabilities have emerged, highlighting the need for strong data security and governance of AI workloads. Microsoft Purview is built to secure and govern data related to pre-built and custom-built AI apps.

Introducing Microsoft Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI)

Security teams often find themselves in the dark when it comes to data security and compliance risks associated with AI usage. Without proper visibility, organizations often struggle to safeguard their AI assets effectively. DSPM for AI, now generally available, gives you visibility through a centralized dashboard and reports, enables you to proactively discover and manage your AI-related data risks, such as sensitive data in user prompts, and gives you actionable recommendations and real-time insights to respond effectively to security incidents.

Microsoft Purview controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot help prevent data oversharing

Data oversharing occurs when users have access to more data than necessary for their job duties. Organizations need effective data security controls to help mitigate this risk. At Microsoft Ignite we announced a number of new Microsoft Purview capabilities in preview to prevent data oversharing in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Data oversharing assessments: Discover data that is at risk of oversharing by scanning files containing sensitive data, identifying risky data sources such as SharePoint sites with overly permissive user access, and by providing recommendations such as auto-labeling policies and default labels to prevent sensitive data from being overshared. The oversharing assessment report can identify unlabeled files accessed by users before deploying Copilot or can be run post-deployment to identify sensitive data referenced in Copilot responses. 

Label-based permissions: Microsoft 365 Copilot honors permissions based on sensitivity labels assigned by Microsoft Purview when referencing sensitive documents.

Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot: You can create DLP policies to exclude documents with specified sensitivity labels from being processed, summarized, or used in responses in Microsoft 365 Copilot, preventing sensitive data from being inadvertently overshared.

New Microsoft Purview capabilities to detect risky activities in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Security teams need ways to detect risky use of AI applications like deliberate or accidental access to sensitive data, jailbreaks, and copyright violations. Insider Risk Management and Communication Compliance now provide risky AI usage indicators, a policy template, and an analytics report in preview to help detect and investigate the risky use of AI. These new capabilities not only help detect risky activities and prompts but also integrate with Microsoft Defender XDR, enabling your security teams to investigate new AI-related risks holistically alongside other risks, such as identity risks through Microsoft Entra and data oversharing and data loss risks through Purview DLP.

New Microsoft Purview capabilities for agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio

When new and citizen developers are building low code or no-code AI, they often lack security expertise and tools to enable security and compliance controls. Microsoft Purview now provides data controls for agents built in Copilot Studio to enable low code and no-code developers to build more secure agents. For example, when an agent built with Copilot Studio accesses sensitive data, it will recognize and honor the sensitivity labels of the data being accessed. Microsoft Purview will also protect sensitive data generated by the agent through label inheritance and will enforce label permissions, ensuring only authorized users have access.

Data security admins also get visibility into the sensitivity of data in user prompts and agent responses within DSPM for AI. Moreover, Microsoft Purview will enable you to detect anomalous user activity and risky or non-compliant AI use and apply retention or deletion policies on your agent prompts and responses. These new controls give you visibility and and insights into risks for your agents built with Copilot Studio, strengthening your data security posture.

Learn more about all these announcements in our Security for AI blog.   

Unified solutions that empower your organization

As you navigate the complexities of AI proliferation, regulatory requirements, and security threats, we are excited to innovate, invest in, and expand the capabilities of Microsoft Purview to address your most pressing data security, governance, and compliance challenges.

Get started with Microsoft Purview today

To get started, we invite you to try Microsoft Purview free and to learn more about Microsoft Purview today.

• Read the Data Security Index report.
• Read our new whitepaper: Accelerating AI transformation by prioritizing security, a path to implementing effective security for AI that enables innovation.
• Watch Microsoft Purview sessions from Microsoft Ignite.
• Try Microsoft Purview for free.

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.

¹Microsoft internal research, May 2023. 

²Gartner, Innovation Insight for Security Platforms, Peter Firstbrook, Craig Lawson. October 16, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

³Microsoft internal research, August 2024. 

⁴Overcoming the 80/20 Rule in Data Science, Pragmatic Institute.

The post New Microsoft Purview features help protect and govern your data in the era of AI 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.

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.

As many of you look to AI transformation to drive the next wave of innovation, you now also need to account for data being both consumed and created by generative AI applications. The risks that come with implementing and deploying AI are not fully known, and it is only a matter of time before you start to see broader regulatory policies on AI. According to Gartner®, by 2027 at least one global company will see its AI deployment banned by a regulator for noncompliance with data protection or AI governance legislation.² AI will be a catalyst for regulatory changes, and having secure and compliant AI will become fundamental.

With these trends converging all at once, securing and governing all your data is a complex and multifaceted undertaking. You need to secure and govern different types of data (structured, unstructured, and data generated by AI). You need to secure and govern it in different locations across multiple clouds, and you need to account for existing and future data security, governance, and AI regulations.

Most organizations experience an average of 59 data security incidents per year and use an average of 10 solutions to secure their data estate.¹ This fragmented approach requires many of you to stitch together multiple tools to address data security and governance, which can lead to higher costs and difficulty in both procurement and management. The lack of integration between the disparate tools can cause unnecessary data transfers, duplicate copies of data, redundant alerts, siloed investigations, and exposure gaps that lead to new types of data risks and ultimately worse security outcomes.

A simpler approach: Microsoft Purview

To address these challenges, you need a simplified approach to data security, governance, and compliance that covers your entire data estate. Microsoft Purview is an integrated solution that helps you understand, secure, and manage your data—and delivers one unified experience for our customers.

With Microsoft Purview, you can:

• Gain end-to-end visibility and understanding of your entire data estate, across on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) environments, and for structured, unstructured, and data created by generative AI applications.
• Apply comprehensive data protection across your data estate, using AI-powered data classification technology, data maps, extensive audit logs and signals, and management experience.
• Improve your risk and compliance posture with tools to identify data risk and manage regulatory requirements.

Microsoft Purview

Help keep your organization’s data safe with a range of solutions for unified data security, data governance, and risk and compliance management.

What’s new in Microsoft Purview?

In this blog post, we will outline some of the exciting new capabilities for Microsoft Purview that we announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023.

Expanding data protection across the data estate

As we unveiled earlier this year, Microsoft Purview is expanding the sphere of protection across your entire data estate, including structured and unstructured data types. We are excited to share some of the next steps in that journey by providing you with:

• A unified platform that enables you to discover, label, and classify data across various data sources, including Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other cloud environments.
• Consistent protections across structured and unstructured data types such as Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), and Amazon S3 buckets.  
• Expanded risk detections enabling signals from infrastructure clouds and third-party apps such as AWS, Box, DropBox, and GitHub.

With these capabilities, you can gain visibility across your data estate, apply consistent controls, and ensure that your data is protected and compliant across a larger digital landscape. For example, you can scan and label your data in Microsoft Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Amazon S3 buckets, and enforce policies that restrict access to sensitive data based on data labels or user roles from one control plane—just like you do for Microsoft 365 sources. Check out this short Microsoft Mechanics video covering an end-to-end scenario. To learn more, we invite you to read the “Expanding data protection” blog.

Securing AI with Microsoft Purview

We are committed to helping you protect and govern your data, no matter where it lives or travels. Building on this vision, Microsoft Purview enables you to protect your data across all generative AI applications—Microsoft Copilots, custom AI apps built by your organization, as well as more than 100 commonly used consumer AI apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat, and more.³ We announced a set of capabilities in Microsoft Purview to help you secure your data as you leverage generative AI. Microsoft Purview will provide you with:

• Comprehensive visibility into the usage of generative AI apps, including sensitive data usage in AI prompts and total number of users interacting with AI. To enable customers to get these insights, we announced preview of AI hub in Microsoft Purview.
• Extensive protection with ready-to-use and customizable policies to prevent data loss in AI prompts and protect AI responses. Customers can now get additional data security capabilities such as sensitivity label citation and inheritance when interacting with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and prevent their users from pasting sensitive information in consumer generative AI applications.
• Compliance controls to help detect business violations and easily meet regulatory requirements with compliance management capabilities for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is built on our security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI framework, so it is enterprise ready. With these Microsoft Purview capabilities, you can strengthen the data security and compliance for Copilot. The protection and compliance capabilities for Copilot are generally available, and you can start using them today. To learn more, read the Securing AI with Microsoft Purview blog.

Supercharge security and compliance effectiveness with Microsoft Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview capabilities for Microsoft Security Copilot are now available in preview. With these capabilities you can empower your security operations center (SOC) teams, your data security teams, and your compliance teams to address some of their biggest obstacles. Your SOC teams can use the standalone Security Copilot experience to analyze signals across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview into a single pane of glass. Your data security and compliance teams can use the embedded experiences in Microsoft Purview for real-time analysis, summarization, and natural language search, for data security and compliance built directly into your investigation workflows.

Microsoft Purview capabilities in Security Copilot

To help your SOC team gain comprehensive insights across your security data, Microsoft Purview capabilities in Security Copilot will provide your team with data and user risk insights, identifying specific data assets that were targeted in an incident and users involved to understand an incident end to end. For example, in the case of a ransomware attack, you can leverage user risk insights to identify the source of the attack, such as a user visiting a website known to host malware, and then leverage data risk insights to understand which sensitive files that user has access to that may be held for ransom.

Security Copilot embedded in Microsoft Purview

We’ve also embedded Security Copilot into Microsoft Purview solutions to help with your data security and compliance scenarios. You can now leverage real-time guidance, summarization capabilities, and natural language support to catch what others miss, accelerate investigation, and strengthen your team’s expertise. Here’s where these capabilities will light up:

• Summarize alerts in Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention: Investigations can be overwhelming for data security admins due to the large number of sources to analyze and varying policy rules. To help alleviate these challenges, Security Copilot is now natively embedded in Data Loss Prevention to provide a quick summary of alerts, including the source, attributed policy rules, and user risk insights from Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management. This summary helps admins understand what sensitive data was leaked and associated user risk, providing a better starting point for further investigation. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention announcement.
• Summarize alerts in Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management: Insider Risk Management provides comprehensive insights into risky user activities that may lead to potential data security incidents. To accelerate investigations, Security Copilot in Insider Risk Management summarizes alerts to provide context into user intent and timing of risky activities. These summaries enable admins to tailor investigations with specific dates in mind and quickly pinpoint sensitive files at risk. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management announcement.
• Contextual summary of communications in Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance: Organizations are subject to regulatory obligations related to business communications, requiring compliance investigators to review lengthy communication violations. Security Copilot in Communication Compliance helps summarize alerts and highlights high-risk communications that may lead to a data security incident or business conduct violation. Contextual summaries help you evaluate the content against regulations or corporate policies, such as gifts and entertainment and stock manipulation violations. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance announcement.
• Contextual summary of documents in review sets in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery: Legal investigations can take hours, days, even weeks to sift through the list of evidence collected in review sets. This often requires costly resources like outside council to manually go through each document to determine the relevancy to the case. To help customers address this challenge, we are excited to introduce Security Copilot in eDiscovery. This powerful tool generates quick summaries of documents in a review set, helping you save time and conduct investigations more efficiently. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview eDiscovery announcement.
• Natural language to keyword query language in eDiscovery: Search is a difficult and time-intensive workflow in eDiscovery investigations, traditionally requiring input of a query in keyword query language. Security Copilot in eDiscovery now offers natural language to keyword query language capabilities, allowing users to provide a search prompt in natural language to expedite the start of the search. This empowers analysts at all levels to conduct advanced investigations that would otherwise require keyword query language expertise. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview eDiscovery blog.

To learn more about Security Copilot and Microsoft Purview, read our Microsoft Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview blog.

Additional product updates

New Microsoft Purview Communications Compliance capabilities

Copilot for Microsoft 365 support introduces an advanced level of detection within Communication Compliance, allowing organizations to identify and flag risky communication, regardless of source. Investigative scenarios across various Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and more, showcase the precision of this feature, identifying patterns, keywords, and sensitive information types. With additional features for policy creation and user privacy protection, administrators can also fine-tune their management strategy, ensuring secure, compliant, and respectful communications. Integration with Security Copilot further enhances data security and regulatory adherence, providing concise contextual summaries for swift investigation and remediation. Leveraging AI technology, Communication Compliance detects and categorizes content, prioritizing content that requires immediate attention. Reporting inappropriate content within Microsoft Viva Engage and ensuring compliance in Microsoft Teams meetings further strengthens the multilayered compliance defense. Stay ahead of compliance challenges and embrace these innovative features to secure, comply, and thrive in the digital age.

Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance announcement.

New to Information Protection in Microsoft Purview

As organizations prepare to use generative AI tools such as Copilot for Microsoft 365, leveraging Microsoft Purview Information Protection, discovery and labeling of sensitive data across the digital estate is now even more important than ever. New releases to Microsoft Purview Information Protection include intelligent advanced classification and labeling capabilities at an enterprise scale, contextual support for trainable classifiers that improve visibility into effectiveness and discoverability, better protection for important PDF files, secure collaboration on labeled and encrypted documents with user-defined permissions, as well support for Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and third-party clouds.

You can learn more about the new Information Protection capabilities in the Information Protection announcement.

New Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention capabilities

We are excited to announce a set of new capabilities in Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) that can help comprehensively protect your data and efficiently investigate DLP incidents. Our announcements can be grouped into three categories:

• Efficient investigation: Capabilities that empower admins by making their everyday tasks easier, including enriching DLP alerts with user activity insights from Insider Risk Management, DLP analytics to help find the biggest risk and recommendations to finetune DLP policies, and more.
• Strengthening protection: Capabilities that help protect numerous types of data and provide granular policy controls, including predicate consistency across workloads, enhancements to just-in-time protection for endpoints, support for optical character recognition (OCR), and performance improvements for DLP policy enforcements.
• Expanding protection: Capabilities that extend your protection sphere to cover your diverse digital estate, including support for Windows on ARM and several enhancements to macOS endpoints.

Purview DLP is easy to turn on; protection is built into Microsoft 365 apps and services as well as endpoint devices running on Windows 10 and 11, eliminating the need to set up agents on endpoint devices. 

Learn more in our Microsoft Purview DLP blog.

New Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management and Adaptive Protection capabilities

To secure data in diverse digital landscapes, including cloud environments and AI tools, detecting and mitigating data security risks arising from insiders is a pivotal responsibility. At Microsoft Ignite, we made a few exciting announcements for Insider Risk Management and Adaptive Protection: 

• Intelligent detection across diverse digital estate: Insider Risk Management will now detect critical data security risks generated by insiders in AWS, Azure, and SaaS applications, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub. Additionally, security teams can also gain visibility into AI usage with our new browsing to generative AI sites indicator.  
• Adaptive data security from risk detection to response: User context can help security teams make better data security decisions. Security teams can now gain user activity summary when a potential DLP incident is detected in Microsoft Purview DLP and Microsoft Defender portal. With this update and Adaptive Protection, user risk context is available from DLP incident detection to response, making data security more effective. In addition, security teams can now leverage human resources resignation date to define risk levels for Adaptive Protection, addressing common incidents, such as potential data theft from departing employees.  
• Streamlined admin experience for effective policies: To enable better policies management experience, Insider Risk Management will support admin units and provide recommended actions to fine tune policies and receive more high-fidelity alerts. 

Learn more details about all these announcements in our Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management blog.  

Get started today

These latest announcements have been exciting additions to help you secure and govern your data, across your entire data estate in the era of AI. We invite you to learn more about Microsoft Purview and how it can empower you to protect and govern your data. Here are some resources to help you get started:

• Watch the Microsoft Purview on-demand sessions from Microsoft Ignite, outlined in this guide.
• Try Microsoft Purview for free.
• Read the Data Security Index report.
• 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.

¹Microsoft Data Security Index: Trends, insights, and strategies to secure data, October 2023.

²Gartner, Security Leader’s Guide to Data Security, Andrew Bales. September 7, 2023.

³Microsoft sets new benchmark in AI data security with Purview upgrades, VentureBeat. November 13, 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post New Microsoft Purview features use AI to help secure and govern all your data appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

While our in-person tickets have sold out, registration for the virtual event is still available to participate in the Microsoft Security experience at Microsoft Ignite, which includes sessions on security strategies and practical applications. In both tracks,​ you’ll learn about the latest innovations and implementation strategies from Microsoft Security across comprehensive security, unified visibility, and Microsoft Security Copilot. Keep reading this blog post for ideas on keynotes, breakout sessions, and discussions to check out. Register to browse our session catalog and bookmark sessions you’d like to attend.

Catch the news highlights during our keynote

Our announcement-packed keynote from Charlie Bell, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Security, and Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management, Microsoft, will be highlighted on Day 2 of Microsoft Ignite. Don’t miss insights from them during their keynote, “The Future of Security with AI.” They will share how Microsoft is delivering AI for security with Microsoft Security Copilot, and how we enable organizations to secure and govern AI with new capabilities. This new era of AI offers unprecedented opportunities to elevate human potential but also challenges organizations with unknowns and risks.

Learn security strategies for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges 

Our cybersecurity strategy sessions are focused on equipping you to leverage AI and Microsoft Security solutions to strengthen your threat defense strategy. Join these sessions to take your strategies to the next level across identity protection, code-to-cloud approaches, industry best practices for AI, and the latest learnings in threat intelligence.   

Strategy sessions to consider joining include:

• “How we secure the Microsoft estate” (BRK291H: in-person and online): Join a fireside chat with Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, on Microsoft’s approach to security and how Microsoft plans to adapt as the industry continues to embrace the new era of AI.
• “Boosting ID Protection Amid Sophisticated Attacks” (BRK294H: in-person and online): Alex Weinert, Vice President, Identity Security, and Mia Reyes, Director, Foundational Security—Cybersecurity, will offer a deep dive into the escalating landscape of cyberthreats targeting digital identities amid the evolving tech realms of the Internet of Things, operational technology, and hybrid workspaces. Learn about innovation in automated key management and Hardware Security Modules for fortified key storage, crucial in mitigating human errors and bolstering defenses against sophisticated aggressors.
• “This Year In Threats: Tales From Microsoft’s Global Fight Against APTs” (BRK299: in-person only): Sherrod DeGrippo, Director of Threat Intelligence, and John Lambert, Corporate Vice President, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Security Research, will discuss how Microsoft defends customers at the nexus of the cyber and physical worlds and how they can join our global alliance to help give bad actors nowhere to hide. This year, Microsoft Threat Intelligence stood with its partners on the leading edge of the global response to the most impactful threats and incidents. In this session, look back at the threat actors and campaigns that defined 2023 and hear our experts tell their favorite stories from the front line.
• “Secure access in the AI era: What’s new in Microsoft Entra” (BRK297H: in-person and online): Jade D’Souza, Product Manager; John Savill, Cloud Solution Architect; and Joy Chik, President, Identity and Network Access, will offer details on innovations for Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) that can help you automatically prevent identity compromise, enforce granular access policies, govern permissions, and leverage AI to secure access for anyone to anything from anywhere. This demo-centric session will follow an employee as they onboard, access resources, and collaborate.
• “Unifying XDR + SIEM: A new era in SecOps” (BRK293H: in-person and online): Preeti Krishna, Principal Product Manager, and Rob Lefferts, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Threat Protection, will offer insights on how the latest innovations in generative AI, automatic attack disruption, embedded threat intelligence, decoy assets, a reimagined user interface, and cloud posture management capabilities will supercharge your threat detection, response, and defense.
• “Secure and govern your data in the era of AI” (BRK296H: in-person and online): Erin Miyake, Principal Product Manager; Herain Oberoi, Marketing Leader; Tina Ying, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Insider Risk Management; and Rudra Mitra, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Data Security and Compliance, will demonstrate how Microsoft Purview’s comprehensive approach to data security, compliance, and privacy helps empower organizations to protect and govern their data.
• “Security for AI: Prepare, protect, and defend in the AI era” (BRK298H: in-person and online): Douglas Santos, Senior Product Manager; Maithili Dandige, Partner Group Program Manager, Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance; and Shilpa Bothra, Senior Product Marketing Manager, will discuss the importance of preventing sensitive data leaks in AI as third-party AI apps grow exponentially and hackers continue to launch adversarial attacks using generative AI. Leave this session with a solid defense and ways to secure data as you interact with AI using Microsoft’s comprehensive security suite.

Gain practical applications with in-depth product views

When strategizing a security approach, technology solutions play a critical role. To help you become an expert on security solutions and implement new features within your organization, Microsoft Ignite will include sessions exploring the use cases of Microsoft solutions, including Security Copilot, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Intune.

Practical application sessions to consider joining include:

• “Boost multicloud security with a comprehensive code to cloud strategy” (BRK261H: in-person and online): Safeena Begum, Principal Product Manager, and Yuri Diogenes, Principal Product Manager, will talk about how Microsoft Defender for Cloud can help you fortify your defenses and enhance your incident response strategy with cloud security graphic insights and tailored analytics from Defender for Cloud workload protection plans.
• “Fortified security and simplicity come together with Microsoft Intune” (BRK263H: in-person and online): Archana Devi Sunder Rajan, Partner Group Product Manager, Microsoft Intune; Dilip Radhakrishnan, Partner Group Product Manager, Microsoft Intune; Jason Roszak, Chief Product Officer, Microsoft Intune; and Sangeetha Visweswaran, Partner Director of Engineering, will discuss how the next generation of endpoint management and security capabilities from Microsoft Intune help transform security and IT operations. Learn how to simplify app updates, cut the cost of public key infrastructure lifecycle management, mitigate risks with AI-derived insights, and free up resources by automating IT workflows.
• “Modern management innovation shaping endpoint security” (BRK295H: in-person and online): Jeff Pinkston, Director of Engineering; Ramya Chitrakar, Corporate Vice President, Intune Engineering; and Steve Dispensa, Corporate Vice President, will explore how to defend against the evolving sophistication of cyberthreats while ensuring a productive workforce. The newest wave of Microsoft Intune innovation can shape your defense-in-depth strategy for a secure and productive end user computing estate.
• “Beyond traditional DLP: Comprehensive and AI-powered data security” (BRK262H: in-person and online): Maithili Dandige, Shilpa Bothra, and Talhah Mir, Product Manager, will share how AI-powered Microsoft Purview Information Protection and Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management can transform your data loss prevention (DLP) program, enabling Adaptive Protection and fortifying your data security posture. You will also hear about new features that enhance incident response and expand endpoint coverage and gain insights on how to enhance their data security strategies.
• “How Microsoft Purview helps you protect your data” (OD07: online only): Anna Chiang, Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Tony Themelis, Principal Product Manager, will explore organizational paradoxes and how Microsoft Purview can help strengthen your data security posture. They will also demonstrate how our latest AI-powered and contextual classifiers can identify sensitive trade secrets, personally identifiable information, and more in seconds across your digital estate.
• “Effortless application migration using Microsoft Entra ID” (OD03: online only): David Gregory, Director of Product Marketing, Identity Compete, will share how our newly proposed tool supplies a one-click configuration to integrate applications into Microsoft Entra ID. During this on-demand session, we will provide an overview of how our tool offers a guided experience to seamlessly facilitate the migration of your applications from Active Directory Federation Services to Microsoft Entra ID.
• “Bringing Passkey into your Passwordless journey” (OD02: online only): Calvin Lui, Product Manager; Erik Dauner, Senior Program Manager; and Mayur Santani, Product Manager, walk you through the background of where passkeys came from, their impact on the passwordless ecosystem, and the product features and roadmap bringing passkeys into the Microsoft Entra passwordless portfolio and phishing-resistant strategy.
• “The power of Microsoft’s XDR: they attempted, we disrupted” (BRK265H: in-person and online): Dustin Duran, Director of Security Research, and Kim Kischel, Director of Product Marketing—XDR, will discuss Microsoft 365 Defender’s automatic attack disruption technology and give you a clear understanding of attack disruption and how it’s providing immediate value to customers in the real world today.
• “Making end-to-end security real” (BRK267H: in-person and online): Mark Simos, Lead Cybersecurity Architect, and Sarah Young, Senior Cloud Security Advocate, will share quick wins that solve real-world problems using Microsoft’s integrated security products. This session will show you how to make progress on end-to-end security across identity, security operations, and more.

Interact with the experts

Bring your questions about Microsoft solutions. Our experts have answers. Connect with them during live discussions to learn more.

Opportunities to interact with the experts include:

• “Windows 11, Windows 365, & Microsoft Intune Q&A” (DIS657H: in-person and online): Gabe Frost, Group Product Manager; Harjit Dhaliwal, Senior Product Marketing Manager; Jason Githens, Principal Group Product Manager; and Joe Lurie, Senior Product Manager, will participate in a collaborative question and answer session about where we are today with Windows 11 and device management—and what you need to propel your organization and IT strategies. We’ll quickly outline a few of the latest commercial enhancements, but the focus here is on your thoughts and questions.
• “Preventing loss of sensitive data: Microsoft Purview DLP Q&A” (DIS666H: in-person and online): Shekhar Palta, Principal Product Marketing Manager, and Shilpa Bothra will discuss Microsoft Purview DLP and the way it can prevent accidental or intentional loss of sensitive data across apps and devices. Join us to discuss how you can modernize your DLP and get started quickly, and learn how DLP works with Microsoft Defender products.
• “Panel discussion: Resilient. Compliant. Secure by default” (DISFP375: online only): Joye Purser, Global Lead, Field Cybersecurity, Veritas Technologies; Saurabh Sensharma, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft; Simon Jelley, General Manager for SaaS Protection, Endpoint and Backup Executive, Veritas Technologies; and Tim Burlowski, Senior Director of Product Management, Veritas Technologies, will discuss security strategies. Join Veritas experts for an interactive question and answer on ensuring your cloud applications are resilient and your data is protected, compliant, and recoverable when it matters most.

Socialize with us and your peers

As you’ve probably experienced yourself at previous conferences and business networking events, some of the best ideas are sparked during conversations with other security professionals. Get social and join us and your cybersecurity peers at two incredible networking events.

• The Lounge at Microsoft Ignite: Located in the Hub on Level 5 (Summit Convention Center), the Lounge is the main gathering area for community. The Lounge will be staffed by Microsoft full time employees and attending Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) to provide continuous question and answer opportunities.
• Microsoft Ignite Security After Party: Network and connect over drinks and appetizers on Wednesday, November 15, 2023, at The Collective. Partners, customers, Microsoft MVPs, and Microsoft subject-matter experts will mix and mingle. Register to reserve your spot.

Register today for Microsoft Ignite

Join us online from anywhere from November 15 to 16, 2023, to hear major product announcements, inspiring messages, and expert insights on the future of cybersecurity and Microsoft solutions. And if you’re not able to participate at all this year, you can still check out plenty of session content, product announcements, and keynotes after Microsoft Ignite wraps up. It will be available on demand after the event. Reserve your spot today. Hope you can join us!

Join the Security Tech Accelerator

We’re also having a Tech Accelerator event on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. Ask questions about the latest product announcements from Ignite and connect with your security peers at this virtual skilling event hosted on the Security Tech Community—register today.

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 (formerly known as Twitter) (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Digital security sessions at Microsoft Ignite to prepare you for the era of AI appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Microsoft 365 Defender is our security solution for phishing and related cyberthreats. Some great analysis has been done by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team on BazaCall’s Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). They’ve also shared how to use Microsoft 365 Defender to locate exploitation activity.

I wanted to take another perspective with this post and share the role that Microsoft Purview data security solutions play, together with Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, to provide defense-in-depth mitigation. With defense-in-depth, we create barriers to the bad actor, increasing their resources required and uncertainty, interfering with their business case.

Microsoft Purview provides important value with unified data governance and compliance solutions but it’s Microsoft Purview’s data security capabilities within Microsoft 365 we’ll be discussing in this blog.

What makes BazaCall different from most phishing attacks is using a malicious email to have the victim initiate a call to a phony call center run by the bad actor that then coaches the victim to install malware. Replacing malicious links and attachments in email with a phone number to the call center is used to evade email protection.

An overview of the BazaCall attack flow is provided at the end of this post.

The mitigations suggested here will be of value for attacks where the bad actor has control of a Microsoft 365 account and is attempting to exfiltrate sensitive data.

The data security benefits of Microsoft Purview for attack mitigation are sometimes overlooked. These solutions may be managed by other groups in the organization, such as the compliance team rather than the security team, and so may not be the go-to tools in the toolbox when preparing for or responding to an attack. These solutions should be part of a defense-in-depth strategy and Zero Trust architecture.

Microsoft Purview Mitigations

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels can be applied to protect sensitive files from unauthorized access. These sensitivity labels can have scoped encryption, among other protections, which travels with the file inside and outside of the organization’s environment. This would make the file unreadable except by the party for which the encryption is scoped—for example, only employees, a partner, or a customer organization—or it can be defined by the user to be consumable only by specific individuals.

Figure 1. Sensitivity Label with scoped encryption—accessible only to employees.

Automation, configured by the administrators, can be used to support the user in applying these labels including making the application of a label mandatory if the file contains sensitive information.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) can be used to prevent the sensitive information from being exfiltrated through several egress channels, including user’s endpoint devices, Microsoft cloud services such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online, Teams, and Microsoft PowerBI, browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Chrome, and Firefox, as well as non-Microsoft applications such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Box, and more, including the free file-sharing services used as part of the BazaCall TTPs.

Customers can create policies that block and do not allow override for their top priority sensitive information such that even if the bad actor manages to get access to the user’s account, they are blocked from exfiltrating any sensitive content. Purview DLP policies can be configured leveraging a variety of out-of-the-box or custom criteria including machine learning-based trainable classifiers as well as the sensitivity labels created in Information Protection.

Figure 2. Purview DLP preventing the upload of sensitive files into Dropbox.

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management can alert the security team to the bad actor’s activities, including the exfiltration of sensitive information to the file-sharing service. Insider Risk Management can reason over and parse through user activity signals, by leveraging more than 100 ready-to-use indicators and machine learning models, including sequence detection and cumulative exfiltration detection. With Adaptive Protection powered by Insider Risk Management, the security team can detect high-risk actors, such as a bad actor-controlled account, and automatically enforce the strictest DLP policy to prevent them from exfiltrating data.  

Figure 3. Insider Risk Management uses specialized algorithms and machine learning to identify data exfiltration and other risks.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps can make a file-sharing site used for sensitive file exfiltration unreachable from the user’s browser or it can prevent sensitive files from being moved to the site. Alternatively, the policy can be configured to only allow files to be moved to the file-sharing site if they have a sensitivity label applied that contains scoped encryption. If this protected file is exfiltrated it would not be readable by the bad actor.

Figure 4. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps blocking access to file sharing and backup site.

Microsoft Purview Audit provides forensic information to scope a possible breach. This is especially valuable when bad actors are “living off the land.” Among the audit items made available are the terms that a user searched in email and SharePoint. If the bad actor was searching for sensitive information to exfiltrate, this item will assist the investigation.

Purview Audit, recently expanded for accessibility and flexibility, will also provide insight to mail items accessed and mail sent, which would be impactful when investigating scope and possible exfiltration channels. Although a bad actor’s known TTPs may not include these channels, we need a fulsome investigation. Their TTPs are likely not static.

Purview Audit Premium provides more logging event retention capabilities, with one-year retention (up from 180 days with Standard) and an option to increase retention to 10 years among other upgraded features.

Figure 5. Premium Audit solution searching forensic events.

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management policies and labeling could be used to purge unneeded information from the organization’s environment. An auditable review can be required prior to deletion or deletion can be automated without user or administrator action.

If information is not in the environment, it cannot be exfiltrated by the bad actor or put the organization at risk.

Figure 6. Disposal of unneeded documents reduces exfiltration risk to the organization.

About BazaCall

BazaCall uses a phishing campaign that tricks unsuspecting users into phoning the attacker, who coaches them into downloading BazaLoader malware, which retrieves and installs a remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool onto the user’s device. The email typically claims that the user has reached the end of a free trial of some type, that billing will begin shortly and provides an option to cancel by phoning a call center. The threat of unjustified billing is the lever that the attacker uses to get the victim to comply.

Typically, the file download has been a malicious Excel document that purports to be a “cancellation form” for the unwanted service and charges referred to in the phishing campaign. The bad actor coaches the victim into accepting macros and disabling security solutions to complete the phony “cancellation.”

RMM software provides multiple useful purposes for attackers: The software allows an attacker to maintain persistence and deploy malicious tools within a compromised network. It can also be used for an interactive command-and-control system. With command and control established, the bad actor organization can spread laterally through the environment to steal sensitive data and deploy ransomware. Once command and control of the user’s machine is established, bad actor hands-on keyboard is used to exfiltrate data including through free cloud-based file-sharing sites. TTPs have evolved in the last two years, including the use of file-sharing sites for exfiltration in addition to open-source tools like RClone.

The user is also subject to human-operated ransomware.

The mitigations discussed in this post are focused on the data exfiltration aspects in the “hands-on-keyboard” phase of the attack.

Figure 7. BazaCall attack flow.

Microsoft Purview can help protect from BazaCall attacks

Microsoft Purview data security for Microsoft 365 is not a cure-all for phishing attacks. It is part of a defense-in-depth strategy that includes user training, antimalware, vulnerability management, email security, access control, monitoring, and response. The data security solutions within Microsoft Purview should be considered based on risk-based criteria for inclusion in the strategy.

These tools may be managed by different teams in the organization. Collaboration among these teams is critical for coordinated defense and incident response. 

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