For cybercriminals, speed is the name of the game. It takes newly released malware an average of just four hours to achieve its goal—steal financial information, extort money, or cause widespread damage.
Advanced cyberattacks emphasize stealth and persistence: the longer they stay under the radar, the more they can move laterally, exfiltrate data, and cause damage. To avoid detection, attackers are increasingly turning to cross-process injection. Cross-process injection gives attackers the ability to run malicious code that masquerades as legitimate programs.
On Friday May 12th, and for several days afterwards, more than a quarter-million computers around the world fell victim to the ransomware known as WannaCrypt or WannaCry. As that recent event has shown, malicious actors bring nearly boundless time and skill to commit cybercrime that can cause harm to millions of people.
Multiple high-profile incidents have demonstrated that ransomware can have catastrophic effects on all of us.
In this blog, we provide an early analysis of the end-to-end ransomware attack. Please note this threat is still under investigation.
Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) is a post-breach solution that alerts security operations (SecOps) personnel about hostile activity. As the nature of attacks evolve, Windows Defender ATP must advance so that it continues to help SecOps personnel uncover and address the attacks.
Targeted attacks are typically carried out against individuals to obtain intellectual property and other valuable data from target organizations. These individuals are either directly in possession of the targeted information or are able to connect to networks where the information resides.
Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. And we take this responsibility very seriously. Recently, the activity group that Microsoft Threat Intelligence calls STRONTIUM conducted a low-volume spear-phishing campaign.
We released the latest volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report last week. The latest data on how different versions of the Windows operating system are mitigating modern malware attacks suggests that newer versions are performing better than older versions.
Spyware is a general term used to describe software that performs certain actions—generally without appropriately obtaining your consent—such as: Advertising Collecting personal information Changing the configuration of your computer If your computer is running Windows 8, you can use the built-in Windows Defender to help you detect and get rid of spyware and other malware.
