That model increasingly reflects a world that no longer exists.

Today’s enterprises operate thousands of interconnected workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments. Mission-critical applications power revenue-generating services, customer experiences, and core business operations that cannot simply be taken offline whenever a security update becomes available. At the same time, vulnerabilities are becoming more visible, more widely distributed, and more rapidly weaponized than ever before.

The result is a growing gap between how quickly organizations can safely remediate vulnerabilities and how quickly adversaries can exploit them. It is time to rethink how the industry approaches security during the critical period between disclosure and remediation. 

The patch window has collapsed 

Traditional vulnerability management was built on the assumption that defenders could move faster than attackers. In many cases, they could.

When a vulnerability was disclosed, organizations had time to understand the issue, assess affected systems, test patches, coordinate change windows, and deploy fixes before widespread exploitation occurred.

Today that timeline is rapidly shrinking.

Modern attack campaigns operate at internet scale. Security research, public disclosures, proof-of-concept exploits, and threat intelligence circulate globally within hours. A vulnerability announced in the morning can become the focus of active scanning and exploitation efforts by the afternoon.

Meanwhile, the operational realities of enterprise environments have not changed. Organizations still must: 

• Understand the vulnerability and its business impact. 
• Identify affected systems across large estates. 
• Evaluate dependencies and compatibility concerns. 
• Validate fixes in test environments. 
• Coordinate deployment schedules. 
• Monitor for regressions and operational risk. 

These are not signs of inefficiency. They are necessary safeguards for business-critical environments. The challenge is that while defensive processes continue to require days or weeks, offensive timelines are increasingly measured in hours. 

That creates one of the most dangerous periods in modern cybersecurity: the window between awareness and remediation.

AI is expanding the defender’s challenge 

AI is helping organizations modernize operations, accelerate development, and improve security outcomes. But the same technological advances are also changing the economics of offensive operations.

Historically, transforming a newly disclosed vulnerability into an effective attack often required extensive manual research and deep technical expertise. Security researchers and attackers alike needed to analyze documentation, understand exploit conditions, study affected software, and develop attack techniques.

Many of those steps can now be accelerated.

AI-assisted workflows can help analyze vulnerability disclosures, identify likely attack paths, evaluate technical dependencies, and summarize complex technical information far more quickly than traditional manual processes.

As these capabilities become more accessible, the timeline between disclosure and exploitation continues to compress. The result is a structural imbalance. 

Defenders remain responsible for protecting entire environments that may include thousands of servers, applications, databases, containers, and network assets. Attackers only need to identify a single viable path to exploitation. 

This asymmetry is driving organizations to ask an increasingly important question: What happens before the patch is deployed?

Why existing security approaches fall short 

The security industry has invested heavily in improving visibility.

Organizations today have access to more vulnerability data, threat intelligence, analytics, and detection capabilities than ever before. Security platforms can rapidly identify affected systems, prioritize remediation, and alert defenders to emerging threats.

These capabilities are essential. But awareness alone does not reduce exposure. Many organizations find themselves in a position where they know exactly which systems are vulnerable but cannot immediately patch them. 

For example, a business-critical application may require extensive validation before updates can be deployed. A manufacturing system may depend on software that cannot be taken offline during production hours. A regulated environment may require additional testing and approval processes before changes can be implemented.

In these situations, the challenge is not identifying risk. The challenge is reducing risk while remediation is still underway.

Visibility, detection, and prioritization help organizations understand the problem. They do not necessarily provide a mechanism for containing that risk immediately.

As attack timelines continue to compress, the industry needs a complementary approach focused on exposure reduction rather than simply exposure awareness.

Why the network is emerging as the fastest control plane 

When a workload cannot immediately defend itself, another layer must help provide protection. Increasingly, organizations are looking to the network. 

Unlike endpoint-based controls, network-level protections operate around workloads rather than inside them. This distinction becomes particularly important during periods of elevated risk.

The network already understands communication patterns, connectivity requirements, trust relationships, and traffic flows. It sits at a strategic position where organizations can influence how systems interact with one another without necessarily modifying the applications themselves.

This creates opportunities to reduce exploitability while remediation efforts are underway. Network-enforced protections can help: 

• Restrict access to vulnerable systems. 
• Limit exposure to potential attack paths. 
• Reduce opportunities for lateral movement. 
• Segment high-risk assets. 
• Contain potential blast radius. 
• Adjust controls dynamically as new information becomes available. 

Perhaps most importantly, network controls can often be implemented significantly faster than enterprise software patches can be validated and deployed.

The objective is not to avoid patching. The objective is to create a meaningful layer of defense during the period when patching has not yet been completed.

As AI compresses the time between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation, organizations need a defensive layer that can act immediately, without waiting for every workload to be patched, every application to be modified, or every endpoint agent to understand a new threat.

The network is uniquely positioned to become that control point: it already sits in the path of communication, has visibility across heterogeneous workloads, and can enforce protections consistently across large cloud estates without changing the applications themselves. More importantly, network controls can increasingly move beyond simple IP, port, and signature-based blocking toward context-aware, adaptive enforcement that constrains the specific behavior an exploit depends on while preserving legitimate traffic.

Consider an HTTP/2 denial-of-service vulnerability: the safest interim guidance may be to disable HTTP/2 entirely until systems are patched, but that can carry significant application and performance impact. A more precise network and workload-aware response could instead bound the exploitable behavior—limiting concurrent streams, tightening request constraints, or rate-limiting abusive connection patterns—while keeping the service available. This is why the network is becoming more than a connectivity layer: it can serve as a programmable, ubiquitous enforcement fabric that buys organizations the most valuable commodity during a zero-day—the time to patch safely.

In an era where vulnerabilities may be weaponized within hours, every day of risk reduction matters.

The rise of adaptive security 

The next evolution of cybersecurity is unlikely to rely solely on static policies or manual response processes. Modern environments are simply too large, dynamic, and interconnected. 

Organizations increasingly need security systems capable of understanding risk, evaluating context, and adapting protections as conditions change. This shift points toward a broader industry trend: adaptive security. 

Adaptive security systems aim to move beyond predefined rules toward continuously improving risk management. Rather than treating every vulnerability equally, they seek to understand the specific conditions that make a flaw exploitable and determine the most effective way to reduce exposure. At a high level, these systems must solve three critical challenges. 

First, they must understand the vulnerability itself. 

This requires ingesting information from security advisories, vulnerability disclosures, threat intelligence, exploit research, and other sources to develop a meaningful understanding of how a threat operates.

Second, they must correlate that understanding with real-world environments. 

A vulnerability only becomes a material risk when specific systems, configurations, connectivity paths, and exposure conditions exist. Understanding this context is essential to determining actual risk.

Third, they must translate intelligence into action. 

Insight without enforcement provides limited value. The ultimate goal is to reduce exposure through controls that can be applied quickly, consistently, and at scale.

AI is expected to play a significant role throughout this process, not merely as an analytical tool, but as an enabling technology that helps security systems understand complex relationships and make informed decisions faster than would otherwise be possible.

Looking at the future of cybersecurity

The cybersecurity industry has spent decades improving vulnerability management, patch deployment, and security operations. Those investments remain essential and will continue to be foundational elements of every organization’s security strategy. But the environment around us is changing.

Attackers are moving faster. Infrastructure is becoming more complex. AI is compressing timelines across the entire threat landscape. In this new reality, organizations cannot rely on patching alone. 

The future of cybersecurity will depend on an organization’s ability to reduce risk during the time between disclosure and remediation. Success will come from combining strong patch management practices with compensating controls capable of responding at machine speed.

The organizations that thrive will be those that treat security as a continuous, adaptive process rather than a sequence of point-in-time responses. The fundamental question is no longer whether vulnerabilities will emerge. They will. 

The question is how effectively organizations can protect themselves while they work to eliminate them.

As the patch window continues to collapse, the industry will need new approaches that complement traditional remediation strategies, reduce exposure quickly, and help defenders regain the one resource that has become increasingly scarce in modern cybersecurity: time.

Microsoft is investing in new and innovative capabilities able to provide immediate protection from the storm, buying organizations the time they need to safely validate and deploy a permanent patch without exposing their environment to unnecessary risk.

The post The patch window is collapsing: Why security needs a new control plane appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

DDoS activity across Bing and other online services at Microsoft has seen a large uptick in the past five to six years. As reported in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025, Microsoft now processes more than 100 trillion security signals, blocks approximately 4.5 million new malware attempts, analyzes 38 million identity risk detections, and screens 5 billion emails for malicious content each day. This helps illustrate both the breadth of modern attack surfaces and the automation cyberattackers can now wield at industrial scale. When we narrow in specifically on DDoS, an even clearer trend emerges: beginning in mid-March of 2024, Microsoft observed a rise in network DDoS attacks that eventually reached approximately 4,500 cyberattacks per day by June 2024. And this persistent volume was paired with a shift toward more stealthy application-layer techniques.

In my role as Vice President, Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud Platform at Microsoft, I focus on helping the Microsoft AI and Bing teams build systems that are safe, resilient, and worthy of user trust, even under the sustained pressure we’re receiving from today’s cyberattackers. Whether you are responsible for a single public website or a large portfolio of consumer-facing applications, defending against modern DDoS attacks means more than just absorbing traffic. It means building defense-in-depth robust enough that, even if some attack traffic gets through, your service stays usable for the people who rely on it.

The nature of modern DDoS attacks

Early DDoS attacks were largely about volume. Cyberattackers would flood a target with traffic in an attempt to saturate network capacity and force an outage. While volumetric attacks still happen, most large services now have baseline protections that make this approach less effective on its own.

Modern DDoS attacks are more nuanced. They are often multi-vector, with a single campaign potentially including network-layer floods and application-layer abuse at the same time. Along with the exponential increase in the scale of these cyberattacks, they are also getting more tailored to stress specific applications and user flows. Application-layer attacks are gaining popularity because they are harder to distinguish from legitimate usage.

We also see threat actors utilizing a broader range of devices in botnets, including consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices and misconfigured cloud workloads. In some cases, cyberattackers abuse legitimate cloud infrastructure to generate traffic that blends in with normal usage patterns. Edge systems, such as content delivery networks (CDNs) and front-door routing services, are increasingly targeted because they sit at the boundary between users and applications.

When attack traffic looks like normal user traffic, typical network-level blocklists aren’t very effective. You need sophisticated fingerprinting (starting with JA4), layered controls, and good operational visibility. This evolution is part of what makes defending against DDoS more than a networking problem. It is now a system design problem, an operational monitoring problem, and ultimately a trust problem.

A defense-in-depth framework

Even if you block 95% of malicious traffic, the remaining 5% can still be enough to take you down if it hits the right bottleneck. That’s why defense-in-depth matters.

A strong defensive posture starts with making abnormal traffic easier to spot and harder to exploit. Techniques like rate limiting, geo-fencing, and basic anomaly detection remain foundational. They are most effective when tuned to your specific traffic patterns. Cloud-native DDoS protection services play an important role here by absorbing large-scale attacks and surfacing telemetry that helps teams understand what is happening in real time. If you run on Azure, there are built-in options that can help when used as part of a broader design. Azure DDoS Protection is designed to mitigate network-layer cyberattacks and is intended to be used alongside application design best practices. At the edge, services like Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) on Azure Front Door can provide centralized request inspection, managed rule sets, geo-filtering, and bot-related controls to reduce malicious traffic before it reaches your origins.

Microsoft publishes a range of Secure Future Initiative (SFI) guidance and engineering blogs that describe patterns we use internally to harden consumer services at scale, and if you’re looking to assess how robust your site’s current DDoS resilience posture is, here’s a simple tabular framework to work from:

Planning for graceful degradation

One of the most common misconceptions about DDoS defense is that success means “no reduction in services.” In reality, even a partially successful attack can degrade performance enough to frustrate users or erode trust, without triggering a full outage. Graceful degradation is about maintaining core functionality even when systems are under stress. It means being deliberate about which user flows must remain available and which can be temporarily limited without causing disproportionate harm.

For example, our systems prioritize core scenarios over secondary features during extremely large cyberattacks. In practice, this can mean temporarily delaying nonessential personalization or shedding load from less critical features to preserve overall responsiveness. These decisions are made in advance and tested, not improvised during an incident. Here’s an example of how we might do that:

• Prioritizing core user flows: We would focus on keeping core scenarios responsive. That might mean protecting one or two core scenarios while de-emphasizing secondary experiences.

• Reducing expensive work first: Some parts of an experience are computationally heavier. Under attack pressure, those are candidates for temporary reduction, so the overall service stays usable.

• Tiered experience under load: In extreme conditions, you can provide a better experience for users with higher trust signals while still offering an acceptable experience to everyone else. This is not about punishing lower trust users. It is about making sure your system can still serve legitimate demand when resources are constrained.

• Clear user messaging: If you need to disable or simplify a feature temporarily, communicate it in a way that is honest and calm. You do not need to explain your internal architecture. You do need to be predictable.

Designing for resilience means assuming that individual components will fail or be stressed at some point. Systems that are built with that expectation tend to recover faster and maintain user trust more effectively than systems that aim for perfect uptime at all costs.

Get started improving your DDoS defense

If I could leave you with a single practical concept, it would be this: treat DDoS as a normal operating condition for internet-facing services. Build defense in depth. Assume some cyberattack traffic will get through. Design your service so it can degrade gracefully while protecting the user experiences that matter most.

Consumer trust is fragile and hard-earned. Developers and operators who think beyond raw availability, and who design for transparency, prioritization, and resilience, are better positioned to handle the realities of today’s cyberthreat landscape. Modern defensive strategies combine proactive controls, thoughtful architecture, and a clear understanding of what matters most to users.

For those interested in going deeper, I encourage you to explore the Secure Future Initiative resources and the other Office of the CISO blogs provided by my peers at Microsoft. Both of these resources frequently share practical patterns for building and operating resilient services at scale.

Microsoft
Deputy CISOs

To hear more from Microsoft Deputy CISOs, check out the OCISO blog series:

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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 Defending consumer web properties against modern DDoS attacks appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Here we’ll talk about one key part of that: how we secure the models and the runtime environment itself. How do we protect against a bad model compromising your AI system, your larger cloud estate, or even Microsoft’s own infrastructure?  

How Microsoft protects data and software in AI systems

But before we set off on that, let me set to rest one very common misconception about how data is used in AI systems. Microsoft does not use customer data to train shared models, nor does it share your logs or content with model providers. Our AI products and platforms are part of our standard product offerings, subject to the same terms and trust boundaries you’ve come to expect from Microsoft, and your model inputs and outputs are considered customer content and handled with the same protection as your documents and email messages. Our AI platform offerings (Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI Service) are 100% hosted by Microsoft on its own servers, with no runtime connections to the model providers. We do offer some features, such as model fine-tuning, that allow you to use your data to create better models for your own use—but these are your models that stay in your tenant. 

So, turning to model security: the first thing to remember is that models are just software, running in Azure Virtual Machines (VM) and accessed through an API; they don’t have any magic powers to break out of that VM, any more than any other software you might run in a VM. Azure is already quite defended against software running in a VM attempting to attack Microsoft’s infrastructure—bad actors try to do that every day, not needing AI for it, and AI Foundry inherits all of those protections. This is a “zero-trust” architecture: Azure services do not assume that things running on Azure are safe! 

Now, it is possible to conceal malware inside an AI model. This could pose a danger to you in the same way that malware in any other open- or closed-source software might. To mitigate this risk, for our highest-visibility models we scan and test them before release: 

• Malware analysis: Scans AI models for embedded malicious code that could serve as an infection vector and launchpad for malware. 

• Vulnerability assessment: Scans for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and zero-day vulnerabilities targeting AI models. 

• Backdoor detection: Scans model functionality for evidence of supply chain attacks and backdoors such as arbitrary code execution and network calls. 

• Model integrity: Analyzes an AI model’s layers, components, and tensors to detect tampering or corruption. 

You can identify which models have been scanned by the indication on their model card—no customer action is required to get this benefit. For especially high-visibility models like DeepSeek R1, we go even further and have teams of experts tear apart the software—examining its source code, having red teams probe the system adversarially, and so on—to search for any potential issues before releasing the model. This higher level of scanning doesn’t (yet) have an explicit indicator in the model card, but given its public visibility we wanted to get the scanning done before we had the UI elements ready. 

Defending and governing AI models

Of course, as security professionals you presumably realize that no scans can detect all malicious action. This is the same problem an organization faces with any other third-party software, and organizations should address it in the usual manner: trust in that software should come in part from trusted intermediaries like Microsoft, but above all should be rooted in an organization’s own trust (or lack thereof) for its provider.  

For those wanting a more secure experience, once you’ve chosen and deployed a model, you can use the full suite of Microsoft’s security products to defend and govern it. You can read more about how to do that here: Securing DeepSeek and other AI systems with Microsoft Security.

And of course, as the quality and behavior of each model is different, you should evaluate any model not just for security, but for whether it fits your specific use case, by testing it as part of your complete system. This is part of the wider approach to how to secure AI systems which we’ll come back to, in depth, in an upcoming blog. 

Using Microsoft Security to secure AI models and customer data

In summary, the key points of our approach to securing models on Azure AI Foundry are: 

1. Microsoft carries out a variety of security investigations for key AI models before hosting them in the Azure AI Foundry Model Catalogue, and continues to monitor for changes that may impact the trustworthiness of each model for our customers. You can use the information on the model card, as well as your trust (or lack thereof) in any given model builder, to assess your position towards any model the way you would for any third-party software library. 

2. All models hosted on Azure are isolated within the customer tenant boundary. There is no access to or from the model provider, including close partners like OpenAI. 

3. Customer data is not used to train models, nor is it made available outside of the Azure tenant (unless the customer designs their system to do so). 

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 generative AI models on Azure AI Foundry appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Delivering on identity and access management for customers

We believe our 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ recognition validates our commitment to delivering a comprehensive, AI-powered and automated identity portfolio to customers, with Microsoft Entra. It empowers customers to protect their digital everything with a simplified user experience that makes identity and access management (IAM) easier than ever before. And it’s informed by our customers and partners—to whom we thank and share this honor.

Microsoft Entra is a unified identity and network access solution that protects any identity and secures access to any application or resource, in any cloud or on-premises. It’s a single place with a simplified user experience for security professionals. Microsoft Entra allows organizations to: 

• Use adaptive identity and network access controls to secure access to any app or resource, from anywhere. 
• Protect and verify every identity with consistent security policies for every user—employees, frontline workers, customers, and partners—as well as apps, devices, and workloads across multicloud and hybrid environments. 
• Provide only the access necessary with right-size permissions, access lifecycle management, and least-privilege access for any identity. 

We’re especially proud of this recognition in our eighth year recognized as a Leader, and share our thanks to our customers, partners, and team members for their contributions and support.

Looking to the future

As we celebrate this year’s recognition, we’re also hard at work on new and expanded features—looking ahead to meet customers’ changing IAM needs as our collective threat landscape continues to evolve.

Microsoft Entra ID currently supports device-bound passkeys stored on FIDO2 security keys and in Microsoft Authenticator. And we’re investing in both synced and device-bound passkeys for work accounts. For enterprises that use passwords today, passkeys provide a seamless way for workers to authenticate without entering a username or password. Passkeys provide improved productivity for workers and have better security. Read more about requirements and instructions to enable passkeys for your organization. 

Microsoft Security Copilot, now in public preview, is embedded in Microsoft Entra—helping customers investigate and resolve identity risks, assess identities and access with AI-powered intelligence, and complete complex tasks quickly. Built on top of real-time machine learning, Copilot in Microsoft Entra can help your teams find gaps in access policies, generate identity workflows, and troubleshoot faster. You can also unlock new skills that allow admins at all levels to complete complex tasks such as incident investigation, sign-in log analysis, and more, to gain savings in time and resources. Read more about the key features of Copilot in Microsoft Entra. 

Microsoft is working with a diverse community to create a decentralized identity solution that puts individuals in charge of their own digital identities, providing a secure and private way to manage identity data without relying on centralized authorities or intermediaries. With Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID, enterprises can perform high-assurance verifications securely, simply, and at scale. Powered by Azure AI services, Face Check adds a critical layer of trust by performing facial matching between a user’s real-time selfie and a photo. Read more about the prerequisites and set up requirements for Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID.

Learn more

You can learn more by reading the full 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management report. To learn more about the Microsoft Entra portfolio and its products, visit our website. 

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

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

¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report, Microsoft. 2024.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

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

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Access Management, 2 December 2024, By Brian Guthrie, Nathan Harris, Abhyuday Data, Josh Murphy.  

The post ​​8 years as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management​​ appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Figure 1. This graphic shows how software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) work together in a comprehensive security strategy.

Microsoft Security—extending our multicloud reach

At Microsoft, we have long embraced our commitment to protecting our customers’ multicloud environments. The journey began in July 2021, when we acquired CloudKnox Security to help customers manage permissions across clouds and strengthen their Zero Trust strategy.² That cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution has evolved to become Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and is part of our comprehensive identity product family: Microsoft Entra. In February 2022, Microsoft Defender for Cloud expanded to include GCP and AWS, becoming the first cloud provider to offer integrated cloud-native application protection (CNAPP) for the three main public clouds—from development to runtime.³ This past March, we introduced Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management for multicloud environments, including new data-aware security posture management capabilities to help customers identify risks across their data estate, and an improved multicloud security benchmark to better unify security and compliance across services. And finally, earlier this year we announced enhancements to Microsoft Purview to continue building on the promise of securing both structured and unstructured data wherever it lives.

Figure 2. Timeline of Microsoft Security’s journey to multicloud, starting in 2021 with the acquisition of CloudKnox Security, to the launch of Microsoft Entra and the extension of Microsoft Defender for Cloud to GCP and AWS in 2022, continuing with enhancements to Microsoft Purview in 2023, with more capabilities to come.

Securing your data wherever it travels

The amount of data being created and transferred is growing exponentially. This is taking place at a time when employees don’t just gather around the water cooler; they’re communicating across digital channels on personal and corporate devices. Modern workforces are distributed, and the digital fabric of any given organization is made up of multiple threads, adding layers of complexity. Additionally, the shift to multicloud makes the surface area of your data even larger. Without unified visibility across your multicloud data security posture, the shift adds to the complexity of identifying risks such as misconfigured object storage and databases.⁴ You can hear more about this in the most recent Uncovering Hidden Risks podcast, which discusses the risks of running a multicloud strategy as customers accelerate their digital transformation. Organizations looking to proactively protect and manage multicloud environments often face challenges around data risk, data protection, and data compliance.

Data Risk—Data doesn’t move itself; people move and interact with data, and that’s where the majority of data security risks stem from. In fact, data security incidents are commonly caused by insider actions, accounting for nearly 35 percent of all unauthorized incidents.⁴ Even the strongest cybersecurity programs can be undermined by insiders who either intentionally or unintentionally compromise an enterprise. To assist you in identifying data risks across various environments, we are pleased to share that you can now bring your own risk detections into Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management. For example, you can import events from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, such as Salesforce, or developer tools like GitHub. These user activities can then be used as custom indicators in insider risk policies, combined with other built-in indicators, offering organizations a comprehensive view and understanding of potential data security risks posed by an insider. You can learn more about it from our blog “Manage insider risks in multicloud environments.”

Data Protection—The loss of sensitive data remains the top security concern for IT and security professionals. This often leads to the deployment of multiple solutions to manage data loss across different environments, which could lead to both blind spots and data leakage. It is crucial to have integrated solutions that can protect sensitive data across your digital landscape. In addition to supporting Microsoft 365 apps, services, Microsoft Edge, and Windows endpoints, Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) supports macOS endpoints, as well as virtualized environments such as Citrix, Windows Virtual Desktop, Amazon Workspaces, and Hyper-V platforms, as well as Google Chrome and Firefox browsers. We are continuing to expand our capabilities to allow you to cover all egress risks. Today we are excited to announce that organizations can now leverage Purview DLP to prevent their users from pasting sensitive content in websites on supported browsers. For example, let’s say a user copies customer information from an internal CRM system or SQL database, and pastes it into personal email, social media sites, or generative AI prompts on a supported browser like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or Firefox. Based on the pre-set policy, Purview DLP will audit, warn, or block the action to prevent leaking sensitive information. Learn more in our blog here.

Data Compliance—The compounding impact of a complex regulatory environment and the growing adoption of cloud services makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to identify compliance risks. We are excited to share that you can now run multicloud assessments in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager. This feature lets you assess your compliance posture across your organization’s multicloud estate, including Azure, AWS, GCP, and services like Zoom and Salesforce. For example, for a regulation such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, you can aggregate and automate your compliance posture across all in-scope services. You can learn more about it in our latest blog.

Be sure to explore our videos on Multicloud Assessments from Microsoft Mechanics, and delve into the latest overview of Microsoft Defender for Cloud by Microsoft Solution Architect, John Savill. This is the first of a series of exciting multicloud innovations, with more in store over the next few months. Stay tuned!

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

¹2023 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera. 2023.

²Microsoft acquires CloudKnox Security to offer unified privileged access and cloud entitlement management, Microsoft Security Team. July 21, 2021.

³Microsoft Announces new Security Capabilities for the Multicloud World, Microsoft Stories Asia. February 24, 2022.

⁴Insider threat peaks to highest level in Q3 2022, Maria Henriquez. November 10, 2022.

The post Expanding horizons—Microsoft Security’s continued commitment to multicloud appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

In the first half of 2022, the cyberthreat landscape was focused around the war in Ukraine and the rise of nation state attacks and hacktivism across the world. In February, Ukraine was hit with the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever in the country’s history, impacting government websites and banking web services. As the conflict continued, there was a ripple effect to western countries, including the UK, US, and Germany. UK financial services firms experienced a significant increase in DDoS attacks as they were heavily targeted by nation state attackers and hacktivists looking to disrupt Ukraine’s allies.

Hacktivism continued to be rampant throughout the year, including Taiwanese websites experiencing outages in August 2022 due to DDoS attacks ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s arrival in Taiwan. Beyond attacks with political motives, DDoS attacks also impacted a wide range of industries. In particular, the gaming industry continued to be highly targeted. In March 2022, a DDoS attack brought down the game servers of Among Us, preventing players from accessing the popular multiplayer game for a few days. A new version of RapperBot (heavily inspired by the Mirai botnet) was used in the second half of 2022 to target game servers running Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

In this blog, we share trends and insights into DDoS attacks we observed and mitigated throughout 2022.

2022 DDoS attack trends

Large volume of attacks during the holiday season

In 2022, Microsoft mitigated an average of 1,435 attacks per day. The maximum number of attacks in a day recorded was 2,215 attacks on September 22, 2022. The minimum number of attacks in a day was 680 on August 22, 2022. In total, we mitigated upwards of 520,000 unique attacks against our global infrastructure during 2022.

This year, we saw a lower volume of attacks in June through August and a high volume of attacks during the holiday season until the last week of December. This is in line with attacks trends we have seen in the last few years, except for 2021 where there were fewer attacks during the holiday season. In May, we mitigated a 3.25 terabits per second (TBps) attack in Azure, the largest attack in 2022.

DDoS protection tip: Make sure to avoid having a single virtual machine backend so it is less likely to get overwhelmed. Azure DDoS Protection covers scaled out costs incurred for all resources during an attack, so configure autoscaling to absorb the initial burst of attack traffic while mitigation kicks in.

TCP attacks remain the most common attack vector

TCP attacks were the most frequent form of DDoS attack encountered in 2022, comprising 63% of all attack traffic, which includes all TCP attack vectors: TCP SYN, TCP ACK, TCP floods, etc. Since TCP remains the most common networking protocol, we expect TCP-based attacks to continue to make up most DDoS attacks. UDP attacks were significant as well with 22% of all attacks (combined for UDP flood and UDP amplification attacks), while Packet anomaly attacks made up 15% of attacks.

Out of UDP flood attacks, spoofed floods consumed most of the attack volume with 53%. The remaining attack vectors were reflected amplification attacks, with the main types being CLDAP, NTP, and DNS.

We observed TCP reflected amplification attacks becoming more prevalent, with attacks on Azure resources using diverse types of reflectors and attack vectors. This new attack vector is taking advantage of improper TCP stack implementation in middleboxes, such as firewalls and deep packet inspection devices, to elicit amplified responses that can reach infinite amplification in some cases. As an example, in April 2022, we monitored a reflected amplified SYN+ACK attack on an Azure resource in Asia. The attack reached 30 million packets per second (pps) and lasted 15 seconds. Attack throughput was not very high, however there were 900 reflectors involved, each with retransmissions, resulting in high pps rate that can bring down the host and other network infrastructure.

DDoS protection tip: To protect against UDP and TCP attacks, we recommend using Azure DDoS Protection. For gaming customers, consider using A10 virtual appliances and Azure Gateway Load Balancers to help with volume-based attacks.

Shorter attacks continue to be popular

Shorter duration attacks were more commonly observed this past year, with 89% of attacks lasting less than one hour. Attacks spanning one to two minutes made up 26% of the attacks seen this year. This is not a new trend as attacks that are shorter require less resources and are more challenging to mitigate for legacy DDoS defenses. Attackers often use multiple short attacks over the span of multiple hours to make the most impact while using the fewest number of resources.

Short attacks take advantage of the time it takes systems to detect the attack and for mitigation to kick in. While time to mitigation may only take one or two minutes, the information from those short attacks can make it into the backend of services, impacting legitimate usage. If a short attack can cause a reboot of the systems, this can then trigger multiple internal attacks as every legitimate user tries to reconnect at the same time.

DDoS protection tip: Use Azure Web Application Firewall to protect web applications.

US, India, and East Asia top regions targeted by attacks

As with previous years, most attacks were launched against US-based resources, with India, East Asia, and Europe making up a large portion of remaining attacks. The rising adoption of smartphones and popularity of online gaming in Asia will likely contribute to increased exposure to DDoS attacks. This also applies to countries accelerating digital transformation and cloud adoption.

DDoS Protection Tip: Frequent and regular DDoS simulation testing done by any of our testing partners helps ensure consistent protection for services.

Hacktivism is back

We saw politically motivated DDoS attacks ramping up on a large scale in 2022. Notably, a hacking group named Killnet targeted western government, healthcare, education, and financial firms. Killnet has been a vocal supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, using DDoS attacks as its primary weapon to create chaos in western countries. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis (MS-ISAC) published a guide to help governments and organizations respond effectively against DDoS attacks, especially those launched by hacker groups like Killnet.

IoT devices increasingly used to launch DDoS attacks

In 2022, Internet of Things (IoT) devices were consistently used in DDoS attacks, which expanded into use in cyber warfare, such as in Ukraine. A growing number of attacks repurposed existing malware or leveraged the modular nature of botnets to carry out these attacks. Threat actors have also turned to a growing criminal black market to purchase malware and solutions to grow their malicious toolkit.

Well-known botnets, such as Mirai, have also been observed in use by nation-state threat actors and growing criminal enterprises. The persistence of malware like Mirai from year to year has highlighted its adaptability and its potential to infect a wide range of IoT devices and compromise new attack vectors. While Mirai is still a major player in the field of botnets, the threat landscape in the field of IoT malware is evolving, with new botnets emerging such as Zerobot and MCCrash.

What’s ahead for 2023?

In 2023, cybercrime will likely continue to rise as new threats and attack techniques emerge. We increasingly see DDoS attacks becoming used as distractions to hide more sophisticated attacks happening at the same time, such as extortion and data theft. New IoT DDoS botnets will emerge and attacks from them will continue to be prevalent and cause significant disruption. We are also observing a rise in DDoS attacks from account takeovers where malicious actors gain unauthorized access to resources to launch DDoS attacks. As geopolitical tensions continue to emerge globally, we will likely continue to see DDoS being used as a primary tool for cyberattacks by hacktivists.

With DDoS attacks becoming more frequent, sophisticated, and inexpensive to launch, it’s important for organizations of all sizes to be proactive, stay protected all year round, and develop a DDoS response strategy.

Cloud-native DDoS protection at any scale

Azure provides comprehensive solutions to protect your valuable data and resources from the most sophisticated DDoS attacks at any scale. Azure DDoS Protection provides always-on traffic monitoring to automatically mitigate an attack when detected, adaptive real time tuning that compares your actual traffic against predefined thresholds, and full visibility on DDoS attacks with real-time telemetry, monitoring, and alerts. Customers using Azure DDoS Protection have access to the DDoS Rapid Response support (DRR) team to engage experts for help during an active attack. Protection is simple to enable and designed to meet the needs of all organizations, including a cost-effective SKU for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

For more insights on the latest threat intelligence, visit Security Insider.

References

• https://venturebeat.com/security/ddos-attack-was-largest-ever-in-ukraine-russia-suspected/
• https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/40955/uk-finance-suffers-surge-in-ddos-attacks
• https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/taiwanese-websites-hit-ddos-attacks-pelosi-begins-visit-rcna41144
• https://www.pcmag.com/news/ddos-attack-takes-among-us-servers-offline-for-entire-weekend
• https://thehackernews.com/2022/11/warning-new-rapperbot-campaign-aims-to.html

The post 2022 in review: DDoS attack trends and insights appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Authentication and authorization

Operating Azure Cosmos DB databases requires valid credentials to be provided for each request. The main type of credentials is a pair of access keys, known as primary and secondary, which are generated as part of the Azure Cosmos DB account creation and can be retrieved through management API using the ListKeys operation. These keys provide full control over the account, including configuration of databases, deployment of server-side logic, and common read and write data transactions. The keys are generated as a pair to enable continuous availability during key rotations. When the primary key is in use, the secondary key is being rotated, and vice versa.

Another type of authentication and access control supported by Azure Cosmos DB is the role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism based on Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).¹ Principals authenticated in Azure AD can be assigned distinct roles that grant specific permissions to the databases and various objects in the Cosmos DB account. The roles can be chosen from several built-in alternatives or customized by the account owner.

Secured architecture controls

When an application design contains a database there are access control security practices that should be applied to improve the security posture. These practices are well known in database security and should be implemented through the built-in capabilities of Azure Cosmos DB. Here are two examples:

1. Employ three-tier architecture to restrict access to databases only by application servers but not directly by clients. Implementation of such a design can be achieved by properly configuring the Cosmos DB firewall to provide access only to specific IP addresses or subnets.
2. Assign least privileged access to the entities that communicate with the databases. By using RBAC authorization, as mentioned previously, it is possible to set a strict access model to Azure Cosmos DB and minimize its attack surface. Application servers that perform data transactions should be authorized to perform those, but not environment configuration activities such as deleting collections or uploading stored procedures. On the other hand, authorization to deployment operations can be given to engineering teams and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems. When all the entities are configured with proper roles and access, it is advised to disable the access keys to mitigate a leaked key threat.

Cloud-based attack vector

With all the aforementioned security controls in place, there is another attack vector that needs to be addressed when securing a cloud application. The potential threat can be realized through authorized control plane access to Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which is responsible for resource provisioning and their configuration. In the context of Azure Cosmos DB, ARM can be queried to retrieve Cosmos DB access keys, as well as handle requests for changes in the database firewall rules. Bypassing the access control of the management interface is a high barrier for threat actors, so their widely adopted tactic is to get credentials through attacks on the users. Therefore, a supplemental layer of security against compromised customer accounts is achieved by continuous monitoring of authorized operations.

If the access keys are disabled according to security practices, then the key leakage scenario is not valid. An interesting point to note is that in these cases there are no entities that should perform the ListKeys operation. Thus, if it is monitored by a security service it serves as a detection of a potential compromise of the acting identity.

Monitoring suspicious key extractions

Data traffic of your Azure Cosmos DB accounts—including any attempts to access, read, or change the stored data—is monitored by Microsoft Defender for Azure Cosmos DB. Defender contains a growing collection of detections that cover various security scenarios. For example, signals are triggered when the account is accessed from an anomalous or suspicious location, an abnormally high amount of data is extracted, or a potentially malicious query is executed. In case a significantly suspicious pattern is detected, a security alert is sent to the account’s security administrator, with descriptive information and suggested steps to mitigate the detected threats and prevent future attacks. Securing and monitoring access to Azure Cosmos DB content is important and should be augmented with monitoring of control plane operations. In modern databases, such as Cosmos DB, authentication is provided using shared keys. If keys are leaked or compromised, their use by malicious actors blends among legitimate usage—as no individual user profile is visible in the data plane logs. Additionally, in case of attacks (such as data exfiltration for theft and data encryption for ransomware), early detection increases the effectiveness of incident response and reduces the damage.

Control plane monitoring enables the analyses of management activities of resources (such as changing access policies, and listing and setting access keys) and allows mapping them to authorized users. It is important to monitor management operations that are relevant for security scenarios. For example, accessing data in Azure Cosmos DB requires getting access keys, which appear as ListKeys operation in the control plane log. Other examples of operations include encryption and changing access policies or keys.

These operations are important, but in most cases they are normal and legitimate. However, if the operation is significantly anomalous (performed from an unexpected IP address, by a seldomly seen user, or using weak authentication, for example), it might indicate a malicious attempt to access the account and should be investigated by the resource owner. Alternatively, massive execution of such operations could indicate a breach even if no anomalous pattern exists.

We recommend flagging suspicious important management operations based on several types of indicators:

1. New anomalous entity, such as previously unseen and unexpected source IP, application, and authentication type. In case the set of known entities is small enough, and no new entities are routinely appearing, any new entity is deemed unexpected. Thus, it might indicate either addition of a legitimate entity or the appearance of a malicious actor, and should be investigated.
2. Anomalous pairing indicates an anomalous connection between two existing variables. For example, an important operation performed by a known user who previously never worked on a related resource group might indicate something like a compromised identity, or a connection between the source device and target resource that have never communicated before. This can be detected by modeling the probability of similarity of connection between meaningful pairs of variables.
3. Suspicious indicators, such as source IPs flagged with threat intelligence signals, operation patterns resembling known penetration testing, or attack tool usage. Additional secondary indicators that increase the likelihood of potential misuse should be monitored as well. Examples include operations performed using weak authentication (no multifactor authentication) and suspicious errors (indicating potential reconnaissance efforts). These indicators are commonly derived from security research of known vulnerabilities and attack patterns.
4. Mass operation: Even in case no anomalous indicators exist, a sufficiently high amount of successful or failed operations should be investigated due to potential high impact. Such an event can indicate enumerating or gaining access to resources en masse. Even though a substantial number of failed operations is a weaker signal, it is important, since it can be an early indication of an attack that employs blind scanning.

Various indicators can be integrated into cumulative anomaly scores for individual operations or a batch, depending on the scenario. Since the monitored operations are important, high anomaly scores may indicate a malicious access attempt and need to be investigated promptly. In the case of a true positive, real damage can be prevented before a malicious payload is executed. In the case of a false positive, the item can be quickly dismissed by the resource owner after steps for future prevention of such cases are considered.

Detect security threats with Microsoft Defender for Azure Cosmos DB

Microsoft Defender for Azure Cosmos DB is a part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It covers alerts on both the data plane and the control plane, detecting potential SQL injections, known bad actors based on Microsoft threat intelligence, suspicious access patterns, and potential exploitation of databases by compromised identities or malicious insiders. Read Overview of Defender for Azure Cosmos DB to learn about its capabilities and detections.

Microsoft encourages you to develop a security strategy for your deployments in the cloud and protect Cosmos DB instances with the proposed detection solution.

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.

¹Early RBAC capabilities are also provided by a legacy authentication method based on resource token, but it is largely obsolete now.

The post Detecting malicious key extractions by compromised identities for Azure Cosmos DB appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Subsequently, we did a survey to understand the top concerns around the security of IoT devices, and we shared the findings in a previous blog about best practices for managing IoT security concerns. The following list summarizes the top security concerns from companies that have adopted IoT solutions:

• Ensuring data privacy (46 percent).
• Ensuring network-level security (40 percent).
• Security endpoints for each IoT device (39 percent).
• Tracking and managing each IoT device (36 percent).
• Making sure all existing software is updated (35 percent).
• Updating firmware and other software on devices (34 percent).
• Performing hardware/software tests and device evaluation (34 percent).
• Updating encryption protocols (34 percent).
• Conducting comprehensive training programs for employees involved in IoT environment (33 percent).
• Securely provisioning devices (33 percent).
• Shifting from device-level to identity-level control (29 percent).
• Changing default passwords and credentials (29 percent).

To help address these concerns, Microsoft is thrilled to announce today the general availability of the extension of our Secured-core platform to IoT devices along with new Edge Secured-core certified devices from our partners Aaeon, Asus, Lenovo and Intel in the Azure certified device catalog. We have added this new device certification for our Edge Secured-core platform so customers can more easily select IoT devices that meet this advanced security designation.   

As outlined in Microsoft’s Zero Trust paper, a key investment, especially around new devices, is to choose devices with built-in security. Devices built with Azure Sphere benefit from industry-leading built-in security, with servicing by Microsoft.

Announcements for Edge Secured-core

Edge Secured-core is a certification in the Azure Certified Device program for IoT devices. Devices that have achieved this certification provide enterprises the confidence that the devices they’re purchasing deliver the following security benefits:

• Hardware-based device identity: In addition to the various security properties that a hardware-based device identity provides, this also enables the use of the hardware-backed identity when connecting to Azure IoT Hub and using the IoT Hub device provisioning service.  
• Capable of enforcing system integrity: Using a combination of processor, firmware, and OS support to facilitate measurement of system integrity to help ensure the device works well with Microsoft Azure Attestation.
• Stays up-to-date and is remotely manageable: Receives the necessary device updates for a period of at least 60 months from the date of submission.
• Provides data-at-rest encryption: The device provides built-in support for encrypting the data at rest using up-to-date protocols and algorithms.
• Provides data-in-transit encryption: IoT devices such as gateways, which are often used to connect downstream devices to the cloud, need inherent support for protecting data in transit. Edge Secured-core devices help support up-to-date protocols and algorithms that are used for data-in-transit encryption.
• Built-in security agent and hardening: Edge Secured-core devices are hardened to help reduce the attack surface and include a built-in security agent to help secure from threats.

In addition to addressing many of the top concerns that we’ve heard from customers around the security of their IoT devices, our data shows that Secured-core PCs are 60 percent more resilient to malware than PCs that don’t meet the Secured-core specifications. We’ve brought the learnings from Secured-core PCs to define the requirements for Edge secured-core devices.

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of Windows IoT Edge Secured-core devices available in the Azure Certified Device catalog.

Additionally, Microsoft invests with semiconductor partners to build IoT-connected industry-certified MCU security platforms that align with Microsoft’s security standards.  

Get started with Microsoft Security

Email us to request a call for more information about Azure Sphere, Edge Secured-core devices, or industry-certified devices. Learn more about Azure IoT 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 Securing your IoT with Edge Secured-core devices appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

In this blog, we start by surveying the anatomy and landscape of amplification attacks, while providing statistics from Azure on most common attack vectors, volumes, and distribution. We then describe some of the countermeasures taken in Azure to mitigate amplification attacks. 

DDoS amplification attacks, what are they? 

Reflection attacks involve three parties: an attacker, a reflector, and a target. The attacker spoofs the IP address of the target to send a request to a reflector (e.g., open server, middlebox) that responds to the target, a virtual machine (VM) in this case. For the attack to be amplified the response should be larger than the request, resulting in a reflected amplification attack. The attacker’s motivation is to create the largest reflection out of the smallest requests. Attackers achieve this goal by finding many reflectors and crafting the requests that result in the highest amplification. 

The root cause for reflected amplification attacks is that an attacker can force reflectors to respond to targets by spoofing the source IP address. If spoofing was not possible, this attack vector would be mitigated. Lots of effort has thus been made on disabling IP source address spoofing, and many organizations prevent spoofing nowadays so that attackers cannot leverage their networks for amplification attacks. Unfortunately, a significant number of organizations still allow source spoofing. The Spoofer project shows that a third of the IPv4 autonomous systems allow or partially allow spoofing.  

UDP and TCP amplification attacks 

Most attackers utilize UDP to launch amplification attacks since reflection of traffic with spoofed IP source address is possible due to the lack of proper handshake.  

While UDP makes it easy to launch reflected amplification attacks, TCP has a 3-way handshake that complicates spoofing attacks. As a result, IP source address spoofing is restricted to the start of the handshake. Although the TCP handshake allows for reflection, it does not allow for easy amplification since TCP SYN+ACK response is not larger than TCP SYN. Moreover, since the TCP SYN+ACK response is sent to the target, the attacker never receives it and can’t learn critical information contained in the TCP SYN+ACK needed to complete the 3-way handshake successfully to continue making requests on behalf of the target. 

In recent years, however, reflection and amplification attacks based on TCP have started emerging.  

Independent research found newer TCP reflected amplification vectors that utilize middleboxes, such as nation-state censorship firewalls and other deep packet inspection devices, to launch volumetric floods. Middleboxes devices may be deployed in asymmetric routing environments, where they only see one side of the TCP connection (e.g., packets from clients to servers). To overcome this asymmetry, such middleboxes often implement non-compliant TCP stack. Attackers take advantage of this misbehavior – they do not need to complete the 3-way handshake. They can generate a sequence of requests that elicit amplified responses from middleboxes and can reach infinite amplification in some cases. The industry has started witnessing these kinds of attacks from censorship and enterprise middle boxes, such as firewalls and IDPS devices, and we expect to see this trend growing as attackers look for more ways to create havoc utilizing DDoS as a primary weapon.  

Carpet bombing is another example of a reflected amplification attack. It often utilizes UDP reflection, and in recent years TCP reflection as well. With carpet bombing, instead of focusing the attack on a single or few destinations, the attacker attacks many destinations within a specific subnet or classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) block (for example /22). This will make it more difficult to detect the attack and to mitigate it, since such attacks can fly below prevalent baseline-based detection mechanisms. 

One example of TCP carpet bombing is TCP SYN+ACK reflection, where attacker sends spoofed SYN to a wide range of random or pre-selected reflectors. In this attack, amplification is a result of reflectors that retransmit the TCP SYN+ACK when they do not get a response. The amplification of the TCP SYN+ACK response itself may not be large, and it depends on the number of retransmissions sent by the reflector. In Figure 3, the reflected attack traffic towards each of the target virtual machines (VMs) may not be enough to bring them down, however, collectively, the traffic may well overwhelm the targets’ network. 

UDP and TCP amplification attacks in Azure 

In Azure, we continuously work to mitigate inbound (from internet to Azure) and outbound (from Azure to internet) amplification attacks. In the last 12 months, we mitigated approximately 175,000 UDP reflected amplification attacks. We monitored more than 10 attack vectors, where the most common ones are NTP with 49,700 attacks, DNS with 42,600 attacks, SSDP with 27,100 attacks, and Memcached with 18,200 attacks. These protocols can demonstrate amplification factors of up to x4,670, x98, x76 and x9,000 respectively. 

We measured the maximum attack throughput in packets per second for a single attack across all attack vectors. The highest throughput was a 58 million packets per second (pps) SSDP flood in August last year, in a short attack campaign that lasted 20 minutes on a single resource in Azure. 

TCP reflected amplification attacks are becoming more prevalent, with new attack vectors discovered. We encounter these attacks on Azure resources utilizing diverse types of reflectors and attack vectors. 

One such example is a TCP reflected amplification attack of TCP SYN+ACK on an Azure resource in Asia. Attack reached 30 million pps and lasted 15 minutes. Attack throughput was not high, however there were approximately 900 reflectors involved, each with retransmissions, resulting in a high pps rate that can bring down the host and other network infrastructure elements. 

We see many TCP SYN+ACK retransmissions associated with the reflector that doesn’t get the ACK response from the spoofed source. Here is an example of such a retransmission: 

The retransmitted packet was sent 60 seconds after the first. 

Mitigating amplification attacks in Azure 

Reflected amplification attacks are here to stay and pose a serious challenge for the internet community. They continue to evolve and exploit new vulnerabilities in protocols and software implementations to bypass conventional countermeasures. Amplification attacks require collaboration across the industry to minimize their effect. It is not enough to mitigate such attacks at a certain location, with a pinpoint mitigation strategy. It requires intertwining of network and DDoS mitigation capabilities. 

Azure’s network is one of the largest on the globe. We combine multiple DDoS strategies across our network and DDoS mitigation pipeline to combat reflected amplification DDOS attacks.  

On the network side, we continuously optimize and implement various traffic monitoring, traffic engineering and quality of service (QoS) techniques to block reflected amplification attacks right at the routing infrastructure. We implement these mechanisms at the edge and core of our wide area networks (WAN) network, as well as within the data centers. For inbound traffic (from the Internet), it allows us to mitigate attacks right at the edge of our network. Similarly, outbound attacks (those that originate from within our network) will be blocked right at the data center, without exhausting our WAN and leaving our network. 

On top of that, our dedicated DDoS mitigation pipeline continuously evolves to offer advanced mitigation techniques against such attacks. This mitigation pipeline offers another layer of protection, on top of our DDoS networking strategies. Together, these two protection layers provide comprehensive coverage against the largest and most sophisticated reflected amplification attacks.  

Since reflected amplification attacks are typically volumetric, it is not only enough to implement advanced mitigation strategies, but also to maintain a highly scalable mitigation pipeline to be able to cope with the largest attacks. Our mitigation pipeline can mitigate more than 60Tbps globally, and we continue to evolve it by adding mitigation capacity across all network layers.  

Different attack vectors require different treatment 

UDP-based reflected amplification attacks are tracked, monitored, detected, and mitigated for all attack vectors. There are various mitigation techniques to combat these attacks, including anomaly detection across attacked IP addresses, L4 protocols, and tracking of spoofed source IPs. Since UDP reflected amplification attacks often create fragmented packets, we monitor IP fragments to mitigate them successfully.  

TCP-based reflected amplification attacks take advantage of poor TCP stack implementations, and large set of reflectors and targets, to launch such attacks. We adopt our mitigation strategies to be able to detect and block attacks from attackers and reflectors. We employ a set of mitigations to address TCP SYN, TCP SYN+ACK, TCP ACK, and other TCP-based attacks. Mitigation combines TCP authentication mechanisms that identify spoofed packets, as well as anomaly detection to block attack traffic when data is appended to TCP packets to trigger amplification with reflectors.  

Get started with Azure DDoS Protection to protect against amplification attacks 

Azure’s DDoS mitigation platform mitigated the largest ever DDoS attacks in history by employing a globally distributed DDoS protection platform that scales beyond 60Tbps. We ensure our platform and customers’ workloads are always protected against DDoS attacks. To enhance our DDoS posture, we continuously collaborate with other industry players to fight reflected amplification attacks. 

Azure customers are protected against Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks as part of protecting our infrastructure and cloud platform. However, Azure DDoS Protection Standard provides comprehensive protection for customers by auto-tuning the detection policy to the specific traffic patterns of the protected application. This ensures that whenever there are changes in traffic patterns, such as in the case of flash crowd event, the DDoS policy is automatically updated to reflect those changes for optimal protection. When a reflected amplification attack is launched against a protected application, our detection pipeline detects it automatically based on the auto-tuned policy. The mitigation policy, that is automatically set for customers, without their need to manually configure or change it, includes the needed countermeasures to block reflected amplification attacks. 

Protection is simple to enable on any new or existing virtual network and does not require any application or resource changes. Our recently released Azure built-in policies allow for better management of network security compliance by providing great ease of onboarding across all your virtual network resources and configuration of logs. 

To strengthen the security posture of applications, Azure’s network security services can work in tandem to secure your workloads, where DDoS protection is one of the tools we provide. Organizations that pursue zero trust architecture can benefit from our services to achieve better protection. 

Learn more about Azure DDoS Protection Standard 

• Azure DDoS Protection product page. 
• Azure DDoS Protection Standard documentation. 
• Azure DDoS Protection Standard reference architectures. 
• DDoS Protection best practices. 
• Azure DDoS Rapid Response.  
• Protect your on-premises resources. 

Amir Dahan and Syed Pasha
Azure Networking Team

References 

1 The Spoofer project 

2 Weaponizing Middleboxes for TCP Reflected Amplification 

The post Anatomy of a DDoS amplification attack appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association guest blog series. Learn more about MISA.

The acceleration of cloud journeys fueled by the pandemic and ever-increasing concerns about data security and information privacy have made access management one of the hottest topics in application security and Zero Trust architecture discussions. Over the last several years, the industry has made tremendous progress on identity and access management, and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), with its focus on Zero Trust comprehensive cloud-based identity services, is a perfect example of this.

Achieving a secure environment is top of mind for both public and private sector organizations, with research firm markets anticipating the global Zero Trust security market will grow from USD19.6 billion in 2020 to USD51.6 billion by 2026. The United States government has mandated a federal Zero Trust architecture strategy, while businesses of every size are working to implement modern identity and access management solutions that support single sign-on (SSO), multifactor authentication, and many other key features, including adaptive and context-aware policies, governance intelligence, and automation.¹

To achieve Zero Trust for applications and services, we must ensure people are who they say they are and that only the right people have access to sensitive information. This is the only way to comply with evolving data privacy regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Consequently, companies must create a comprehensive, manageable way to authenticate and authorize every attempt to access data—based on a least-privileged access principle—while still providing users with the secure self-service access they need.

Datawiza, a cloud-delivered, no-code platform for easily implementing both authentication and authorization for all types of applications and APIs, works with Azure AD to help IT accelerate this key area of the journey to Zero Trust and get the most value from their hybrid multicloud environments.

As an access management as a service (AMaaS) platform, Datawiza dramatically reduces the time and engineering costs required to integrate applications with Azure AD, eliminating months of development effort thanks to its no-code approach. Developers don’t have to learn complex modern SSO protocols like OpenID Connect (OIDC), OAuth, and Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML), or use different software development kits (such as .NET, Java, and PHP) to write integration code for each application.

Leveraging Datawiza with Azure AD supports comprehensive SSO and multifactor authentication across applications, with fine-grained access controls. The application types can include:

• Homegrown applications that are written in different programming languages such as Java, PHP, and Python. These applications can reside in multicloud environments or on-premises.
• Legacy applications, such as those from Oracle, that were never designed for the cloud and may still rely on a legacy identity solution, such as Symantec SiteMinder, on-premises Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), or custom-built basic authentication. In fact, Datawiza can empower companies to retire their legacy identity solutions.
• Business-to-business (B2B) multi-tenant applications available to customers using Azure AD, as well as other identity platforms.
• Open-source tools that would otherwise require expensive enterprise license fees from the vendor to use the SSO feature to connect with Azure AD.

Options for integrating homegrown and legacy applications with Azure AD

Integrating homegrown or legacy applications with Azure AD is imperative. Not doing so leads to critical security gaps. It also causes frustration for users who need to sign into multiple applications, as well as administrators who must constantly update user profiles in multiple locations.

Integrating these applications with Azure AD requires coding and security expertise. And whether you use your developer resources or legacy on-premises gateways, as we hear from our customers, it usually takes more time and resources than anticipated—distracting development and DevOps teams from their strategic tasks. If your organization relies on a hybrid multicloud environment, the challenges are even greater. You may also consider using a free open-source software proxy, such as OAuth2-proxy, but this is still time-consuming, providing little benefit compared to the do-it-yourself approach. Further, with each of these approaches, all the effort that goes into integrating a single application must be repeated for each additional application.

How the Datawiza No-Code platform works

The Datawiza No-Code platform offers a new approach, providing authentication and authorization as a service, so it can be implemented quickly, without the need to deploy any hardware or heavyweight enterprise software, or having to rewrite applications or write new code. Datawiza uses a lightweight, cloud-delivered proxy for connecting any application and service to Azure AD, and it can also integrate across other public and private clouds.

Integrating each application takes only minutes, so the more applications you need to integrate, the more time you save—all with a single Datawiza license. And with security expertise built-in, the Datawiza AMaaS platform eliminates the need to hire an expensive new resource or consultant, while also facilitating improved governance by providing policy-defined, URL-level access controls based on detailed user and device attributes, such as group, role, IP, or browser.

How Datawiza and Azure AD work together

1. When a user attempts to log into any application, Datawiza intercepts the access request and authenticates it using a built-in connection to Azure AD through OIDC or SAML protocols. 
2. The user signs in through the Azure AD login page, and the OIDC or SAML message exchanges with Azure AD and Datawiza are automatically completed on behalf of the application. 
3. Datawiza authorizes the request based on the fine-grained access policies configured in the management console and user attributes from Azure AD. 
4. Datawiza then sends the correct credentials to the application, which uses the fine-grained access policies configured in the management console to display only the appropriate information.
5. An IT administrator configures the platform, applications, and access policies using the Datawiza management console, instead of having to deal with the configuration files scattered in hybrid multicloud environments. 

Datawiza, the no-code path to Zero Trust access management

The Datawiza No-Code platform can accelerate your Azure AD journey to Zero Trust for your applications and APIs by eliminating the need for developers to extend controls to support Zero Trust requirements such as SSO and multifactor authentication. Datawiza authenticates and authorizes every employee, customer, contractor, or partner each time they access an application or API—with fine-grained access controls—and supports every type of application in hybrid multicloud environments. With Datawiza, policy administrators can leverage “change once, propagate everywhere” to keep policies, roles, and permissions updated and synced across hundreds or thousands of datasets. And Datawiza maintains the relationships between applications and Azure AD as the applications are updated, future-proofing your environment.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft identity and access management.

The Datawiza Platform is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. More information and a free trial are also available on the Datawiza website.

To learn more about MISA, visit our MISA website where you can learn about the MISA program, product integrations, and find MISA members. Visit the video playlist to learn about the strength of member integrations with Microsoft products. 

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.

¹ Why companies are moving to a ‘zero trust’ model of cyber security, Bob Violino. March 3, 2022.

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