Here’s what’s new:

Extend expert-led protection with new capabilities from Microsoft Defender Experts

Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence delivers expert-led threat intelligence and actionable insights tailored to your geography, industry, and risk profile to help security teams anticipate cyberthreats, assess risk, and take informed action. Microsoft Defender Experts MDR now covers third-party data sources ingested through Microsoft Sentinel. This extends around-the-clock managed detection and response and threat hunting to deliver protection across both Microsoft native and third-party data sources, including Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Okta, and more. This coverage is available through Microsoft Defender Experts MDR P2.

Strengthen identity foundations for the AI era with Microsoft Entra

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance brings an organization’s tenants into a single view to help address security gaps and blind spots. Centralized policies and cross-tenant delegated administration of multi-tenant environments help reduce shadow-tenant risk, configure policies, monitor configuration drift, and strengthen identity foundations for AI-powered operations.

Accelerate your move to cloud-native endpoint management with Microsoft Intune

Windows Autopilot device association lets admins link devices to their tenant and configure pre-enrollment experiences. Admins can optimize the out-of-box experience and rename devices, reducing onboarding friction.

Windows Unattended Support with Remote Sign-In allows IT and support staff to sign in to devices remotely, without involving the user. Role-based permissions, compliance checks, and session auditing are built in.

Speed up Microsoft Copilot readiness with scalable Microsoft Purview auto-labeling

Auto-labeling policies in Microsoft Purview now process up to 500,000 SharePoint and OneDrive files per day, up from 100,000. This increased limit helps organizations label and protect more content, extending data protection coverage. Because sensitivity labels help apply key security controls, including encryption and data loss prevention (DLP), organizations can extend data protection across more content and support their Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption efforts.

Contain agents with Microsoft Security Exposure Management

New Secure Now guidance for agentic containment helps organizations put controls in place before autonomous agent action expands across the environment. The recommendations focus on constraining agent-initiated actions that occur without explicit user approval, and hardening attack surfaces, limiting impact, governing identities and permissions, and increasing visibility across the environment.

Stay in the Loop

Microsoft Security is focused on delivering innovations across our portfolio, along with research-driven insights and reports for the security community. In the Loop posts are your reliable source of what’s new across Microsoft Security and what it means for your security strategy. Check back for the next drop.

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 ​​​​​​What’s new in Microsoft Security: August 2026 appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

We are excited to announce that we have been named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide MDR/MXDR for the Enterprise Vendor Assessment (Doc #US54792426, July 2026). Read the excerpt here.

Expert-led MDR, built on the Microsoft Defender platform

Microsoft Defender Experts MDR is a round-the-clock, expert-led managed detection and response service that helps security teams triage, investigate, and respond to incidents so they can stop cyberattackers in their tracks and prevent future compromise. Rather than bolting a separate stack of tools and connectors onto your environment, the service operates natively on Microsoft Defender, with built-in protection across endpoints, identities, email, cloud apps, cloud workloads, and network security, as well as around-the-clock proactive threat hunting with Microsoft Defender Experts Hunting.

Because the service is delivered on the same platform it monitors, detection and intelligence improvements reach customers continuously. The insights our experts generate also strengthen protection across the broader Defender ecosystem, so every customer benefits from what we learn defending the next environment.

Threat intelligence at internet scale

Great detection starts with great intelligence. Defender Experts MDR draws on Microsoft’s global threat intelligence: more than 10,000 security researchers and 100 trillion signals analyzed every day across billions of users and millions of organizations.¹ That breadth lets our analysts recognize subtle patterns early, often before a campaign escalates, and respond with higher-confidence attribution than intelligence sourced from any single customer’s telemetry could provide.

AI-accelerated operations, expert-led decisions

Defender Experts MDR also combines advanced AI and generative AI with seasoned human experts. AI filters noise, grades and classifies incidents, and accelerates investigation at machine speed and scale, while our analysts own the outcome. According to the IDC MarketScape, “70% AI-assisted workflows are enabled through automated noise filtering, AI-based grading, and agentic operations while maintaining expert decision-making.” Furthermore, “quantified outcomes noted include 97% AI classification accuracy, 77% malware/phishing agent-investigated, 72% faster resolution combining AI and humans, and 45% autonomous investigations.”

The impact shows up in the work. Over the past year, Defender Experts mitigated 27,000 high-severity incidents, and the team’s threat research now contributes a meaningful share of all Defender detections, enriching protection for customers well beyond the MDR service itself. Throughout, a dedicated security delivery expert and on-demand access to our experts keep customers informed with proactive check-ins, live dashboards, and clear, actionable reporting.

Managed threat hunting, included

Many providers treat proactive threat hunting as a premium add-on. Defender Experts MDR includes it as a core part of the service with Defender Experts Hunting, extending your team with Microsoft experts who continuously look for advanced threats across your environment. These hunts are informed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, Defender telemetry, and human analysis, in order to better identify malicious activity and improve security operations center (SOC) response.

When a threat is found, Defender Expert notifications appear as incidents in the Defender portal with technical context, recommended remediation, and, when needed, access to on-demand support for additional guidance. The work also feeds back into hunter-trained AI and reporting, so customers can see what was investigated, how the activity maps to MITRE tactics, and how threats are categorized by behavior, characteristics, and impact.

Get started

Read the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide MDR/MXDR for the Enterprise 2026 Vendor Assessment excerpt, and visit the Microsoft Defender Experts MDR webpage to see how expert-led, round-the-clock managed detection and response can extend your team, drive SOC efficiency, and help you stay ahead of emerging cyberthreats.

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

¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025.

The post Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for MDR/MXDR for the Enterprise  appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Microsoft has long helped organizations secure their digital estates using Zero Trust principles. That leadership was recently recognized by KuppingerCole analysts, which named Microsoft as the Overall Leader in its Zero Trust Platform Leadership Compass, ranking Microsoft highest for both product and innovation leadership.

As organizations accelerate AI adoption, secure software development becomes more important than ever. That’s why we are expanding the Zero Trust for AI strategy with two major additions: a new AI-focused Zero Trust Assessment experience and a new DevSecOps pillar in the Zero Trust Workshop. Together, they help organizations get ready for AI by assessing exposure, risks, prioritizing remediation, and securing AI-enabled development from source code to deployment.

• Zero Trust Assessment tool updates: New set of assessment checks for AI, Security Operations (SecOps), and Infrastructure.
• Zero Trust Workshop updates: New dedicated pillar focused on Developer Security (DevSecOps) and additional guidance for AI Memory.
• New guidance: New practical guidance for security practitioners and a new e-book titled Zero Trust for AI, rebuilding security controls for autonomous and agentic systems.

This builds directly on the Zero Trust for AI strategy announced at RSA Conference 2026 and moves the conversation from architecture to implementation. If that announcement was about establishing Zero Trust for AI, this one is about operationalizing it: giving security, engineering, and platform teams the specific controls they need to act.

To learn more about our work in applying Zero Trust for AI and agents watch this Microsoft Mechanics video:

New AI pillar in Zero Trust Assessment tool

The Zero Trust Assessment provides an automated view of security posture by evaluating tenant configuration and activity signals across the environment and translating those findings into prioritized recommendations. As organizations adopt AI agents, Copilots, developer tools, and autonomous workflows, the Assessment helps security and platform teams establish a baseline, measure progress, and identify gaps across both traditional and AI-powered environments. It now includes expanded coverage with new pillars for AI, Security Operations, and Infrastructure (in addition to existing Identity, Devices, Network, and Data pillars), with Zero Trust for AI-focused checks that help organizations evaluate the controls required for secure AI adoption.

Additionally, enhanced reporting delivers both practitioner-level guidance and executive-ready summaries that communicate risk, progress, and next steps. Results map directly into the Zero Trust Workshop’s First, Then, Next framework, transforming assessment findings into a prioritized roadmap for remediation and implementation. Together, the Assessment and Workshop help organizations move from understanding risk to executing a structured plan for continuous improvement across their Zero Trust and AI security journey.

What’s New in the Zero Trust Workshop

AI is fundamentally changing software development. Developers increasingly rely on AI assistants to generate code, recommend packages, create infrastructure configurations, and automate testing. While these capabilities accelerate delivery, they also amplify the consequences of governance gaps, excessive permissions, insecure dependencies, and compromised supply chains.

That is why Microsoft is introducing a new DevSecOps pillar (with 15 control groups and 91 tasks that help teams apply Zero Trust from source code to cloud deployment) in the Zero Trust Workshop. The pillar translates the three Zero Trust principles—verify explicitly, use least privilege, and assume breach—into practical guidance and controls for developer platforms, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, source repositories, dependencies, artifacts, and infrastructure-as-code.

The Zero Trust Workshop also improves the AI pillar to include guidance based on the Microsoft AI Memory framework, helping teams treat memory as a governed security boundary with clear intent, provenance, lifecycle visibility, and user control.

How to run Zero Trust Workshop

The Zero Trust Workshop follows a simple three-step motion: plan the right pillars and stakeholders, run the Zero Trust Assessment to establish a baseline, and use the facilitated workshop to turn findings into a 12- to 24-month roadmap.

Tasks are organized into First, Then, Next phases so teams can start with foundational controls and build momentum. The new DevSecOps pillar also highlights cross-pillar work that strengthens Identity, Infrastructure, and Security Operations, plus four tasks focused directly on AI-assisted development: code governance, tool allowlisting, data protection, and AI and machine learning pipeline supply-chain security.

Get practical guidance in the new Zero Trust for AI e-book

To help organizations navigate this shift, Microsoft recently published Zero Trust for AI: Rebuilding security controls for autonomous and agentic systems, a practical guide that applies Zero Trust principles to AI agents, tools, memory, data, and runtime operations. The e-book provides security leaders, architects, and practitioners with a framework for evaluating AI risks and implementing controls that scale with AI adoption.

Zero Trust for AI e-book

Practical guidance for securing AI systems.

Get the e-book

Knowing what to do is one thing. Knowing how to operationalize it at scale is another. Our patterns and practices provide repeatable, proven approaches to the most complex AI security challenges, much like software design patterns offer reusable solutions to common engineering problems.

The table below highlights our practical recommendations aligned with Zero Trust principles to help practitioners translate strategy into concrete implementation.

How can partners help?

Partners can use the Zero Trust Assessment tool and Workshop to turn broad security interest into a focused, outcome-driven customer engagement. The Assessment tool helps establish a baseline across one or more Zero Trust pillars, including AI and DevSecOps scenarios, so customers can see where they are today and where to prioritize first. The Workshop then translates those findings into an executive summary, prioritized recommendations, and a phased roadmap. For customers, this creates a clear path from risk visibility to practical action plans that partners—as trusted advisors—can help prioritize and execute.

Learn how Microsoft partners deliver the Zero Trust Workshop through Frontier Accelerate for Security: Envisioning and POC.

Customer success stories

Ford Motor Company: Microsoft Security solutions offered Ford a unified, AI-powered platform to detect, address, and prevent cyberthreats across its hybrid environment. Grounded in a Zero Trust architecture, every access request—whether from users, devices, or applications—is continuously verified. This principle guided Ford’s approach to securing its hybrid environment, reinforcing protection before expanding visibility. Read more about how Ford builds trust across global operations.

The Microsoft security stack is more than technology. It contributes to Ford’s business in moving faster against cyberthreats and building a more secure future.”

—Weston Maggetti, Platform Manager, Ford Motor Company

SEB Group: SEB based its Zero Trust journey on identity, deploying Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Defender for Identity. It removed online identity exposure with Windows Hello for passwordless access, and extended protection with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Read more about how SEB implements Zero Trust.

Our Microsoft Security solutions are vital to our Zero Trust journey. That enhanced visibility helps to keep our SaaS (software as a service) landscape as simple as possible so that it’s easier to defend.”

—Ulf Larsson, Security Chief Technology Officer (CTO), SEB Group

Get started

To get started, use the Assessment and Workshop together to turn Zero Trust for AI into a practical implementation plan:

• Use the Zero Trust Assessment tool to establish a baseline and prioritize the Workshop roadmap across Identity, Devices, Data, Infrastructure, and Network.
• Run the Zero Trust Workshop with the new DevSecOps pillar to secure developer platforms, pipelines, code, and artifacts.
• Complement your Zero Trust journey by assessing your posture and acting where attackers strike most. SecureNow, in Microsoft Security Exposure Management, helps you improve security across patching, open-source software, source code, internet-facing assets, and hygiene.

Learn more about Microsoft Security solutions on our website and bookmark the Microsoft Security blog for expert insights on security matters. Follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest cybersecurity news and updates.

The post Advance Zero Trust for AI: New tools and guidance to secure AI agents and DevSecOps appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

What happened?

The investigation revealed a multi-stage intrusion that blended familiar ransomware activity with quieter, more deliberate techniques designed to establish deep and lasting access. DART found that Storm-2603 had been targeting on-premises SharePoint servers since mid-2025, exploiting known vulnerabilities while simultaneously probing for additional entry points through reconnaissance activity—such as requests for sensitive configuration files often used to validate local file inclusion weaknesses. In this case, initial access was likely attempted through a separate vulnerability, with requests for files like win.ini and web.config, indicating probing for local file inclusion. While exploitation wasn’t confirmed, the timing and activity suggest reconnaissance for entry points.

Once inside, the threat actor shifted focus to persistence and control. Using legitimate tools to blend in, they deployed Velociraptor with SYSTEM-level privileges to map the environment, then established multiple remote access channels through Cloudflare tunneling, Zoho Assist, and Secure Shell (SSH) connections configured through Visual Studio Code. Velociraptor, a legitimate forensic and incident response tool, was deployed by the threat actor to map the environment and operate with high-level privileges—blending malicious activity with trusted administrative behavior. Privilege escalation followed, with new local and domain administrator accounts created to maintain access, while defense evasion techniques—including the use of a vulnerable driver to tamper with memory and disable protections—helped reduce their visibility.

As DART correlated activity across the environment, investigators uncovered signs of a second, unrelated threat actor operating in parallel. Malicious dynamic link library (DLL) sideloading and custom backdoors—techniques not associated with Storm-2603—introduced an additional layer of complexity, obscuring attribution and complicating detection. Together, these overlapping activity streams enabled sustained access while masking the full scope of the intrusion.

How did Microsoft respond?

DART moved quickly to contain the active intrusion involving multiple threat actors and stabilize the environment, activating a structured response playbook focused on limiting threat actor impact and restoring control. By correlating telemetry across identities, endpoints, and cloud resources, responders established a unified view of the intrusion, enabling them to detect abnormal behavior, uncover credential misuse, and track threat actor activity as it evolved. Continuous coordination with the customer, including daily briefings, ensured that containment actions were timely, aligned, and effective in reducing further threat actor movement.

At the same time, collaboration with Microsoft Threat Intelligence provided critical context that reshaped the investigation. By connecting incident data with broader intelligence, DART identified two distinct threat actors operating simultaneously within the same environment—each masking the other’s activity and complicating detection. Beyond containment, the team delivered targeted guidance to strengthen the organization’s security posture, helping close visibility gaps and improve resilience against future identity compromise and ransomware-driven attacks.

What can customers do to strengthen their defenses?

This case underscores the importance of closing common gaps across exposure, identity, and visibility. Organizations should prioritize rigorous patching and vulnerability management—especially for internet-facing systems—to reduce the risk of initial access. At the same time, strengthening identity security is critical to limiting threat actor escalation and persistence. At a high level, customers can avoid similar cyberattacks by focusing on ways to:

• Establish broad, continuous visibility:
  Deploy endpoint protection widely and retain telemetry centrally to support detection, investigation, and correlation.
• Monitor and restrict trusted tools:
  Validate and oversee the use of remote access, tunneling, and administrative tools that threat actors may exploit for persistence and lateral movement.
• Prepare for rapid, coordinated response:
  Maintain tested incident response playbooks and ensure teams can quickly isolate compromised users, devices, and access paths to reduce dwell time.

Today’s modern cyberattacks can quickly evolve beyond a single incident-blending tactic, spanning environments, and even involving multiple threat actors operating in parallel. For security teams, the takeaway is clear: isolated signals rarely tell the full story. Organizations that invest in connected telemetry, coordinated response, and operational preparedness will be better positioned to detect adversary activity such as credential abuse and lateral movement earlier, contain active intrusions faster, and limit their overall impact.

What is the Cyberattack Series?

In our Cyberattack Series, customers discover how DART investigates unique and notable attacks. For each cyberattack story, we share:

• How the cyberattack happened.
• How the breach was discovered.
• Microsoft’s investigation and eviction of the threat actor.
• Strategies to avoid similar cyberattacks.

DART is made up of highly skilled investigators, researchers, engineers, and analysts who specialize in handling global security incidents. We’re here for customers with dedicated experts to work with you before, during, and after a cybersecurity incident.

Learn more

To learn more about DART capabilities, please visit our website, or contact your Microsoft account manager or Premier Support contact. To learn more about the cybersecurity incidents described above, including more insights and information on how to protect your own organization, download the full report.

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 One intrusion, two cyberattackers: Uncovering parallel threat activity appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

In the report, Forrester writes that “Microsoft articulates a compelling vision to build a Frontier approach to security, bringing people and AI together while the platform continuously shields against and disrupts attacks.”

A new frontier for XDR

That recognition reflects how Microsoft sees the next phase of XDR evolution. As cyberattackers use AI to scale and accelerate their campaigns, defenders need more than correlated signals. They need a system that brings together data, people, and workflows so security can operate with the same speed and coordination.  

At Microsoft, XDR is that foundation. It connects signals across identities, endpoints, email, software as a service (SaaS) apps, and cloud workloads into a shared layer of context bringing together the signals, workflows, and actions security runs on. 

That foundation extends directly into how protection and operations are delivered. Microsoft Defender’s native capabilities continuously shield against attacks with built-in, system-level defenses, while embedded agents help triage alerts, hunt for threats, and deliver intelligence in the flow of work. The result is a shift from fragmented response to coordinated, system-level defense—where decisions, actions, and protection move together by default.

Attack disruption is one of the clearest expressions of that vision today. It uses cross-domain signals and AI to stop multi-stage cyberattacks like ransomware and adversary-in-the-middle attacks while they are active and unfolding.

Forrester specifically notes attack disruption in the report, “As well as its roadmap, it (Microsoft) has built unique features, like automatic attack disruption, to help deliver on its vision.”

World-class threat intelligence at the core

Threat intelligence is a brand-new evaluation criterion in this Wave and Microsoft earned the highest possible score. This reflects a broader shift: intelligence is no longer a bolt-on, but fundamental to how modern XDR platforms detect, prioritize, and disrupt cyberattacks.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence is built on a broad vantage point, analyzing 100 trillion signals each day. That intelligence is delivered directly into the analyst experience, which provides context on threat actors: their motivations and tactics appear inside incidents, alongside affected assets, and tied to response actions.

The intelligence is built into detections, attack disruption, hunting, and AI that helps analysts make sense of what they’re seeing. It’s also continuously informed by Microsoft’s global security research teams tracking nation-state actors, ransomware groups, and emerging cyberthreats, which brings frontline insight directly to defenders.

Innovation that reinforces continued leadership

We believe Microsoft’s ranking as a leader in this report is a reflection of the pace of innovation across the Defender portfolio over the past year. Highlights include:

Adaptive defense to contain active attacks: Attack disruption now expands autonomous protection to predict and shield against a threat actor’s next move during active cyberattacks. It acts just in time to defend against common attacker tactics such as group policy objects (GPOs), Safeboot, and identity compromise, with new controls that now include device isolation.

Native protection across cloud, identity, and SIEM: Microsoft delivers differentiated protection across cloud and identity by natively harnessing signals from Azure and Microsoft 365 coverage. Combined with Microsoft Sentinel’s powerful security information and event management (SIEM) and threat hunting capabilities, this foundation goes beyond detection, enabling disruption of attacks directly within the SOC for critical data sources including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Okta, and Proofpoint, fundamentally turning your SIEM into a threat protection solution. 

Microsoft Security Copilot alert triage agent: Security Copilot agents in Defender help security operations center (SOC) teams investigate faster, automate response, and prioritize high-risk cyberthreats. Microsoft recently extended the Security Copilot alert triage agent to cloud and identity, extending assistive and autonomous AI to two of the most critical attack surfaces security teams defend every day. By helping analysts triage alerts faster, surface high-value context, and move more quickly from signal to action, these new capabilities strengthen the SOC where speed and precision matter most. That momentum reinforces that Microsoft received the highest possible scores in both identity detection and cloud detection.

Securing local AI agents: Microsoft recently announced endpoint security for local AI agents at Microsoft Build 2026. Defender helps security teams gain visibility into AI agents running on devices, assess exposure across identities and resources, block malicious activity in real time, and investigate agent activity through Advanced Hunting.

What this recognition means for our customers

Being named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Extended Detection and Response Platforms, Q2 2026 reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to helping defenders stay ahead of modern cyberattacks. We believe this recognition reflects the strength of our vision, the breadth of our protection across identities, endpoints, email, cloud, and applications, and our continued investment in bringing people and AI together in the SOC.

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, we remain focused on helping customers investigate faster, respond more effectively, and strengthen their security operations with an integrated platform built for today’s cyberattacks.

Learn more

• Access the full Forrester Wave™ report to read the full analysis behind Microsoft’s positioning as a Leader.
• Learn more about Microsoft Defender.
• Try Microsoft Defender today with a free trial.

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.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .  

The post ​​Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2026 Extended Detection and Response Platforms Wave™ report appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

A year ago, we set out to change how email security effectiveness is measured. With our first benchmarking report in July 2025, we committed to publishing real-world performance data, not synthetic tests, so security teams could make decisions grounded in evidence. With each quarterly update, we refined our methodology, expanded our analysis, and listened to customer and partner feedback.

Alongside it, we established the Microsoft Defender ICES vendor ecosystem, designed to enable seamless integration with trusted third-party vendors and streamline security operations center (SOC) workflows for organizations who have chosen a multi-vendor email security strategy.

Key insights from a year of email benchmarking

With four consecutive quarters, several findings have proven to be durable insights, highlighting the sustained realities of how layered email security performs in production:

1. Defender consistently leads in pre-delivery detection. Across every benchmarking period since July 2025, Defender has missed fewer high-severity cyberthreats than every SEG vendor evaluated, while the next closest SEG vendor had 2.5 times more misses.

2. ICES vendors add the most value in promotional and bulk email filtering. Promotional filtering uplift has been the clearest area of ICES value with an average uplift of 15% over the four quarters of evaluation. Meanwhile ICES vendor uplift for malicious catch and spam has consistently remained relatively nominal, averaging at 0.29% and 0.68%, respectively. In addition, over the last three quarters we’ve seen a consistent downward trend in these numbers, as we have continued to drive innovation in post-delivery mail detection.

3. Defender’s share of post-delivery remediation has grown significantly. In our second report, we introduced insights on the contribution of Defender to post-delivery malicious catch. Initially, Defender contributed 45% of post-delivery malicious catch, which has since risen to an average of 96%. This trajectory underscores that Microsoft’s post-delivery catch is an increasingly critical backstop, operating even when ICES solutions are in place, and that Defender is delivering the majority of post-delivery remediation.

SEG vendor benchmarking results

For SEG vendors, a threat is classified as “missed” if it was not detected prior to delivery. Using this definition, Microsoft Defender once again missed fewer high-severity email threats than all other solutions evaluated, consistent with every prior benchmarking period.

This quarter, Defender missed 59% fewer high-severity threats than the next-closest SEG vendor, a gap that has remained consistent across all four benchmarking periods.

ICES vendor benchmarking results

ICES solutions operating on top of Microsoft Defender continue to provide benefit, particularly in reducing promotional and bulk email, with an average improvement of 16.85% over the last quarter. This helps minimize inbox clutter and improves user productivity in environments where promotional noise is a concern. For malicious messages and spam, the average improvement across vendors was 0.13% for malicious and 0.28% for spam catch, compared to 0.24% and 0.29% in the prior report.

Focusing only on malicious messages that reached the inbox, the latest quarter shows Microsoft Defender’s post-delivery catch continues to improve, catching the majority of post‑delivery remediation. It removes an average of 96.03%, up from 70.8% in the previous quarter, highlighting the effectiveness of our continuous investments in this area. Post‑delivery remediation remains a critical backstop when cyberthreats evade initial filtering.

Innovation shaped by benchmarking insights

Benchmarking doesn’t just help customers make better decisions. It shapes what we build. Over the past year we’ve used the insights from our benchmarking reports, as well as insights from the growing ICES vendor ecosystem, to directly shape our innovation and product outcomes. Below are some of the most recent highlights, that we directly attribute to the continued improvements in Microsoft Defender performance.

Native promotion and bulk mail filtering in Outlook: A dedicated Promotions folder, natively provisioned in Outlook, now keeps legitimate bulk mail out of the primary inbox. Promotional content is separated from priority emails without being sent to Junk, which means users can still access and browse newsletters and updates at their own pace. The folder appears at the top level of the mailbox for easy discovery and is visible across all Outlook experiences. Once generally available it will be on by default, improving the native promotional filtering. Learn more.

System-level AI advancements: Among other AI enhancements, in November 2025 we introduced an agentic grading system that reduces the reliance on manual review in the submission and analysis pipeline. It helps deliver lower wait times, faster responses, and higher-quality results when emails are submitted to Microsoft for review. That means security teams can investigate reported messages more efficiently, respond more promptly, and act with greater confidence against phishing threats. Learn more.

Accelerating investigation with AI: The growing role of post-delivery remediation in our benchmarking data highlights a related challenge: when threats reach users and get reported, SOC teams need to triage those submissions quickly and accurately. The Microsoft Security Copilot Alert Triage Agent uses language model-powered reasoning to classify user-reported phishing emails, resolve false positives, and escalate confirmed threats for analyst review. Results show analysts identify 6.5 times more malicious alerts, improve verdict accuracy by 77%, and spend 53% more time investigating real cyberthreats. Security Copilot’s Email Summary further speeds investigations by turning email detection data into clear, actionable insights in the Email entity page. Learn more.

A year into this effort, our commitment to transparent benchmarking remains unchanged. We’ll continue using these insights to shape product innovation, share real-world performance data with customers, and invest in a strong ecosystem that meets organizations where they are—supporting the layered email security strategies that work best for their environments.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Defender.

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

The post Microsoft Defender email security benchmarking: Key insights from one year of data 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:

To stay on top of important security industry updates, explore resources specifically designed for CISOs, and learn best practices for improving your organization’s security posture, join the Microsoft CISO Digest distribution list.

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.

KuppingerCole Analysts’ 2026 Emerging AI Security Operations Center (SOC) reflects this shift clearly: the future of security automation is not defined by static rules or isolated workflows, but by intelligence‑driven automation that supports analyst decision‑making across the full security lifecycle. This evolution mirrors what many security leaders already experience day to day, that the limiting factor is no longer alert volume, but human capacity.

Microsoft is excited to be named an Overall Leader, and the Market Leader, in this report, as we see automation as a core component of the future of cybersecurity.

From playbook‑driven SOAR to intelligence‑led automation

Traditional security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions were built to automate predictable, repeatable tasks: enrichment steps, ticket creation, notifications, and predefined containment actions. These capabilities remain valuable, but they were designed for an era when incidents followed more deterministic patterns.

This is a critical change. In many SOCs today, analysts still spend significant time:

• Stitching together context across alerts and data sources.
• Manually triaging incidents that turn out to be benign.
• Following repetitive investigation and response steps.

The result is slower response times and analyst burnout—at exactly the moment attackers are moving faster and operating more quietly.

Automation built into the analyst experience

Microsoft has evolved the way these common challenges can be addressed, leveraging machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agents, including releases such as:

• Automatic attack disruption: An always-on capability that limits lateral attackers and reduces the overall impact of an attack, from associated costs to loss of productivity, leaving security operations teams in complete control of investigating, remediating, and bringing assets back online.
• Phishing triage agent: An agent that runs sophisticated assessments—including semantic evaluation of email content, URL and file inspection, and intent detection—to determine whether a submission is a true phishing threat or a false alarm.
• AI powered incident prioritization: A machine learning prioritization model to surface the incidents that matter most, assigning each incident a priority score from 0–100 and explaining the key factors behind the ranking. 
• Playbook generator: An experience that allows users to create python-code playbooks using natural language for flexible workflow automation.

These capabilities are just the beginning of how we are introducing agents and automation to help users move faster, freeing analysts to focus on higher‑value tasks like proactive hunting and threat analysis.

The next evolution: The agentic SOC

The KuppingerCole report reinforces a broader industry trend, that security platforms must do more than automate pre‑defined workflows. They must support adaptive, intelligence‑driven operations that can respond to novel and fast‑moving threats.

This is where Microsoft is making its next set of investments: agentic security operations.

With innovations such as the Microsoft Sentinel MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server, shared security data and graph context, and deep integration with Microsoft Security Copilot, Sentinel is evolving into a platform where AI agents can:

• Reason across identity, endpoint, cloud, and network signals.
• Summarize incidents and investigations in natural language.
• Assist with decision‑making by correlating weak signals over time.
• Take action—with human oversight—when confidence thresholds are met.

These agents are designed to work alongside analysts, augmenting expertise and dramatically accelerating time to response.

Why this matters for security teams

The direction highlighted by KuppingerCole, and reflected in Microsoft’s roadmap, isn’t about chasing AI for its own sake. It’s about addressing real SOC pain points:

• Scale: Human‑only operations don’t scale with modern attack surfaces.
• Consistency: Automated and agent‑assisted workflows reduce variance and errors.
• Speed: Faster reasoning and response directly reduce attacker dwell time.

By combining automation, rich context, and intelligent agents, Microsoft Sentinel helps SOC teams move from reactive alert handling to proactive, intelligence‑led defense without forcing teams to re‑architect their operations overnight.

Looking ahead

Security automation is no longer a bolt‑on capability. As KuppingerCole’s research makes clear, it is becoming a foundational element of modern security operations. The evolution of SOAR reflects the reality of a shift from static playbooks to adaptive, context‑aware assistance that scales human expertise.

Microsoft is investing accordingly, advancing an AI‑first approach to security analytics that helps SOC teams operate with greater speed, confidence, and resilience as threats continue to evolve. Read the Emerging AI Security Operations Center (SOC) report to learn more.

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

The post ​​Microsoft named an overall leader in KuppingerCole Analyst’s 2026 Emerging AI Security Operations Center (SOC) report ​​ appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

The nature of cyberthreats has never been static, but it’s hard to accurately convey the scale of their recent evolution and proliferation. As we’ve seen in many other arenas, AI has become a very powerful productivity tool for would-be cybercriminals. Between April 2024 and April 2025, Microsoft stopped $4 billion in fraud attempts.¹ And as of the writing of the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025, we are tracking 100 trillion security signals each day (a 40% increase since 2023).²

This is why I decided to write a blog about risk reviews. By asking the right questions, risk reviews help us transform the utility of our security data from primarily reactive remediation and response information into key insights helping to inform our proactive security stances. And embracing strong proactive security is something we can all do to mitigate our increased exposure to security threats.  

Risk reviews are also a topic I’ve lent focus to during my first six months as Deputy CISO for Microsoft Security. It’s a very interesting role for me, as I’ve traditionally described myself as performance specialist and a systems specialist more than a security specialist. It’s not necessarily a distinction of skill set, but more one of mindset, and what I’d like to share with you is actually a bit of a synthesis of my inherent performance- and systems-first way of thinking and things I’ve brought into that practice after working with many of the other Microsoft Deputy CISOs over the last few months.

There are roughly eight points I want to bring up concerning risk reviews in this blog. Each point has the potential to help expose potential security vulnerabilities when brought up with security teams. Together, they represent a structured and approachable way to initiate necessary conversations and drive meaningful results:

1. Assets
2. Applications 
3. Authentication 
4. Authorization 
5. Network isolation 
6. Detections 
7. Auditing 
8. Things not to miss 

Now, why did I choose to highlight these areas and not others? Generally, I find that looking at problems from the lens of risk management gives me a fresh perspective. When you very consistently ask specific questions around these areas, they often effectively start the conversation you want to have.

Just one last thing before we dive in: What I’m about to tell you is only approximately correct. There will be edge cases and exceptions, but generally I think you’ll find this information helpful.

1. Assets

The best place to start a review is identifying the assets that you need to protect. This will largely define the scope of the review. A good place to find those assets is, of course, on your architecture diagrams and your threat models. The assets we’re talking about could be storage (where perhaps you’re storing sensitive or otherwise important data) or they could be highly-privileged applications like command-and-control systems or something similar. This is, in short, the list of things that your cyberattacker wants to get to. 

2. Applications

In the next step, you identify your applications. These are, broadly speaking, the active part of your system. They are the outward-facing surfaces that customers will use and the set of microservices that support your interface. These systems could be providing any set of services that you might need—and herein lies the problem. It’s entirely normal for your applications to require access to your most important assets, but that means the applications themselves can become viable targets for a cyberattacker. So how do we make this situation better? At this point, it’s reasonable to start talking about possible controls. 

Read up on Zero Trust for source code access.

3. Good quality authentication 

The next thing you will want to inspect is the form of authentication that your system is using. The best systems are using tokens for authentication, and they are getting these tokens from standard token issuers like, for instance, Microsoft Entra. It’s sometimes viable to have your own token generation system, but remember that such systems tend to have bugs. Those bugs can be exploitable. And even lacking bugs, there could be, say, gaps or vulnerabilities in your token issuing system such that perhaps the tokens cannot be properly scoped. The tokens could also tend to be too long-lived, or difficult to be made fine-grained enough, or lack the capacity to allow for flowing user context from the request to the authorization system. Many such deficiencies are possible. 

Even with a good quality token issuing system, you can easily find yourself in a situation where the tokens that you’re creating are too fungible, or too powerful, or both. Thinking back to the assets you’re trying to protect and the applications that you have, you can likely categorize some of the applications as having more “power,” if you will, than others. Sometimes we call these “highly privileged applications” because they have the capability to do something that is especially of interest to cyberattackers, like reading a lot of data, changing configuration, or anything like that. 

To best manage the privileges associated with these applications, it needs to be the case that the kinds of tokens that they use are as limited as possible. So, a particular token might authorize a capability for a certain customer, on behalf of a certain user, for a certain set of data—and nothing more than that. When privileges are very generic, like “I can do this operation for anyone, anywhere,” things become much more dangerous. So, here the idea is to make sure that the tokens that you’re getting are very specific to the intent that you have and that only the applications that need those tokens can get them, and, again, the tokens are as limited as possible. This goes a long way in reducing the possible damage that a cyberattacker could do if they found such a token errantly stored somewhere. 

A lot of the things we think about when we’re working with tokens and trying to limit them fall into the category of limiting what a cyberattacker can do if they get a foothold somewhere. This is the Zero Trust model, where you assume breach everywhere.  

Additionally, it’s essential to use standard libraries to accurately authenticate with tokens, so that all the aspects and limitations of the token are certain to be honored. 

Learn about phishing-resistant multifactor authentication from the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative (SFI). 

4. Good quality authorization  

Good quality tokens are not going to help you if they’re enforced poorly (or not at all). And bugs can creep into code. Ad hoc authorization code can render the good authentication that you’ve done moot. 

Any time you can use declarative style patterns that help you verify tokens against incoming APIs and the data that the client is attempting to access with your API, you’ll find yourself in a better place. Simple, consistent authorization yields fewer bugs and therefore less risk. 

5. Network isolation 

In addition to having good quality tokens, it’s important to isolate the pieces of your environment to the maximum extent possible. Again, this is done because it’s prudent to assume that a cyberattacker has a foothold somewhere in your network. The questions are “where exactly can that foothold be,” and “once they have that foothold, where in my network can they get to?” If a threat actor can reach any part of your system from any other part of your system, this is obviously less good than if your most sensitive systems can be accessed from exactly one or two key places and nowhere else. When properly controlled, most footholds become useless to a cyberattacker—or at least only indirectly useful.  

Use service tags to create boundaries around your various assets such that applications are used by exactly those systems that are supposed to be using them and data is accessed by exactly those applications that are supposed to be accessing the data. This goes a long way to take many cyberthreats off the table.  

Network isolation can happen at several levels in the network stack. Popularly, level 7 is used at the perimeter. Maybe this manifests as some kind of HTTP proxy, for example, or an HTTP routing gateway. However, protection is incomplete without additional work happening at level 3 within your network. You want to limit IP traffic to be going to exactly the places that you want it to go. You might use techniques like virtual LANs, or similar constructs like network security groups (NSGs) in Microsoft Azure. The idea is to limit connectivity to exactly what is necessary to do the job and not give the cyberattacker freedom to move around. 

With good network isolation comes the ability to log any attempts to gain access at the perimeter, and potentially even internally. Depending on what networking technology you’re using, all of this is great for hunting. We’ll talk about that in the next section.  

Learn more about network isolation and other best practices from SFI.

6. Detections  

It’s normal to think about monitoring for reliability. Systems need to stay within their operating parameters in the face of changes and external conditions. But it’s also important to think about detection from the perspective of your threat model. If you identify five or ten risks in your threat model that need controls, it’s useful to think about how you might detect if any of those things are actually happening in your environment.  

In this context, one place to look is at the perimeter—by examining your incoming HTTP traffic, for instance. But you can also look anywhere in your environment where you predict that attacks might happen. You might look for badly formatted requests, or fuzzing, or evidence of DDoS attack—whatever is appropriate to the risks you have. The idea is that you want to be able to create alerts if you have evidence of a threat actor operating in your estate.  

And, of course, security products can be very helpful here.  

7. Auditing

We separate the notions of auditing from detection. Specifically, auditing is what I will call the pieces of data that you would use after a breach to determine the extent of the breach and the customers that were affected by it. In the event that you find a vulnerability without any evidence of threat actor exploitation, you’d want to go and check your auditing again to verify those claims. That way you can have evidence that whatever problem you found was not in fact exploited. If it was exploited, you’ll know to what extent, who was affected, and who needs to be notified. 

Some parts of your endpoint detection and response (EDR) stream will be very useful for auditing. Additional auditing information can come from the logs you create in your applications that record suitable information concerning recent activity. 

8. Things not to miss 

It’s important to think about all the applications and data that you have in your estate. For instance, it’s easy to overlook the backup data that you have stored. A cyberattacker might not be able to get access to your primary systems but might find that your backups are entirely unprotected and they can just read the backup.

Similarly, support systems often go overlooked. There are frequently important customer support scenarios that require access, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of not giving those systems the highest level of scrutiny. 

We should add systems that are under development and test systems to this problematic set. In both these cases, the code that’s running those systems is less trustworthy than normal production code. Development code, for instance, can be presumed to have more bugs than production code. Some of those bugs might be authorization bugs. And if there are authorization bugs, that buggy code might provide access to important assets. Therefore, your plans should include even greater scrutiny when it comes to these kinds of systems. 

Explore actionable patterns and practices from SFI. 

In summary

If you’ve gotten as far as identifying all of your assets, all your applications, and then thinking about the access patterns and controls that you have between them—including authentication, authorization, network isolation, and the use of bug-resistant patterns—you’re in a pretty good place to write a risk summary that can guide your actions for many months. And we haven’t even touched on basic things like vulnerability management, security, bug management, and the usual software lifecycle things that are necessary to keep the system in good health. Combine all of the above and you should have a good-looking risk plan. 

Microsoft
Deputy CISOs

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

To stay on top of important security industry updates, explore resources specifically designed for CISOs, and learn best practices for improving your organization’s security posture, join the Microsoft CISO Digest distribution list.

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 Cyber Signals Issue 9. 

²Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024.

The post 8 best practices for CISOs conducting risk reviews appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

That pattern continued as defenders embraced automation and AI to manage expanding digital estates. SOCs were often early scale adopters—using machine learning to reduce noise, improve visibility, and respond faster across growing environments. Cyberattackers became more targeted and multistage, moving deliberately across identities, endpoints, cloud resources, and email, where detection was hardest. Success increasingly depended on moving fast enough to act before analysts could connect the dots. Even with this progress, security operations (SecOps) still feel asymmetrical: threat actors only need to be right once, while defenders are judged by every miss. If defense depends on human intervention to begin, defense will always feel asymmetrical.

To change the outcome, SOCs must change how defense itself works. This is the agentic SOC: where security delivers adaptive, autonomous defense, freeing defenders for strategic, high‑impact work. In this series, we’ll break down what that shift requires, what early experimentation has taught us, and where organizations can start today. Read more about how some organizations moving toward the agentic SOC and access a foundational roadmap for this transformation in our new whitepaper, The agentic SOC: Your teammate for tomorrow, today.

What we mean by “the agentic SOC”

At its core, the agentic SOC is an operating model that shifts security from reacting to incidents to anticipating how cyberattackers move—and actively reshaping the environment to cut off their paths.

It brings together a platform that can increasingly defend itself through built-in autonomous defense, with AI agents working alongside humans to accelerate investigation, prioritization, and action—so teams spend less time on execution and more time on judgment, risk, and the decisions that matter.

How does that change day-to-day work? Imagine a credential theft attempt. Built-in defenses automatically lock the affected account and isolate the compromised device within seconds—before lateral movement can begin. At the same time, an AI agent initiates an investigation, hunting for related activity across identity, endpoint, email, and cloud signals, and correlating everything into a single view.

When an analyst opens their queue, the “noise” of overwhelming alerts is already gone. Evidence has been pre-assembled. Likely next steps are suggested. The analyst can start right away by answering higher impact questions: Is this part of a broader campaign? Should this authentication method be hardened? Are there related techniques this cyberattacker commonly uses that the environment is still exposed to?

In today’s SOC, we see that sequence often takes hours—and the proactive improvement is very limited, if it ever happens; there’s simply not enough time. In an agentic SOC, it happens in minutes, and teams can spend the time they’ve gained on deeper investigation, systemic hardening, and reducing the likelihood of repeat cyberattacks.

A layered model for the agentic SOC

This model works because an agentic SOC is built on two distinct, but interdependent layers. The first is an underlying threat protection platform that has fundamentally evolved how cyberattacks are defended against and disrupted. High confidence cyberthreats are handled automatically through deterministic, policy-bound controls built directly into the platform. Known attack patterns are blocked in real time—without deliberation or creativity—shielding the environment from machine-speed cyberthreats before scarce human attention or token intensive reasoning is required. This disruption layer is not optional; it is the prerequisite that makes an agentic SOC safe, scalable, and sustainable.

The second layer operates at the operational level, where agents take on tough analysis and correlation work to dramatically increase the leverage of security teams and shift focus from uncovering insight to acting on it. These agents reason over evidence, coordinate investigations, orchestrate response across domains, and learn continuously from outcomes. Over time, they help identify recurring attack paths, surface gaps in posture, and recommend changes that make the environment harder to exploit—not just faster to respond.

Together, they transform the SOC from a reactive workflow engine into a resilient system.

What’s real now, and why there’s reason for optimism

The optimism around our view of the agentic SOC comes from operational discipline and proven, real-world impact. Autonomous attack disruption has been operating at scale for years.

Attacks like ransomware are disrupted in an average of three minutes, and tens of thousands of attacks are contained every month by isolating compromised users and devices before lateral movement can take hold. This all done with a 99.99% confidence rating, so SOC teams can trust in its efficacy.

Building on that proven foundation, newer capabilities like predictive shielding extend autonomous defense further—anticipating how cyberattacks are likely to progress and proactively restricting high-risk paths or assets during an intrusion.

Together, these system-level protections show that platforms can safely intervene earlier in the cyberattack chain without introducing unnecessary disruption.

Agentic capabilities are also being similarly scoped. Internally, we’ve been testing task agents for triage and investigations under our expert supervision of our defenders. In live environments, these agents automate 75% of phishing and malware investigations. We’ve also tested agents on more complex analytical tasks, such as assessing exposure to specific vulnerabilities—work that once required a full day of engineering effort and can now be completed in less than an hour by an agent.

How day-to-day SOC work will change in the future

In an agentic SOC, the center of gravity will change for roles like an analyst. Fewer analysts are pulled into firefighting; more time is spent investigating how the organization is being targeted and what steps can be taken to reduce exposure. Within this new operating model, security teams will be freed to evolve the team structure and their day-to-day responsibilities.

Agentic systems increase demand for oversight, tuning, and governance. Detection and response engineering becomes more central, as teams design policies, confidence thresholds, and escalation paths. New roles emerge around supervising outcomes and refining system behavior over time.

Expertise becomes more valuable, not less. Judgment, context, and institutional knowledge are no longer consumed by repetitive tasks—they shape how the SOC operates at scale. And skilled practitioners closer to strategy, quality, and accountability.

To make this shift tangible, here’s how key roles are evolving:

• Analysts: from triaging alerts to supervising outcomes. Analysts validate agent‑led investigations, determine when deeper inquiry is needed, focus on ambiguous cases, and guide system learning over time.
• Detection engineers: from writing rules to teaching the system what matters. Engineers decide which signals are trustworthy, add the right context, and set confidence thresholds so detections can be acted on automatically—without human review every time.
• Threat hunters: from manual queries to hypothesis-driven exploration. Hunters use AI to surface anomalies and focus on creative investigation and adversary simulation.
• SOC leadership: from managing queues to orchestrating autonomy. Leaders define automation policies, oversee governance, and align AI actions with business risk.

Each shift reflects a broader truth: in the agentic SOC, people don’t do less—they do more of what matters.

The agentic SOC journey

This is a significant change in how security teams operate, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Based on our own experience, we’ve outlined a maturity model that shows how organizations can progress toward an agentic SOC over time.

Organizations begin by establishing a trusted foundation that unifies security tooling, enables the deployment of autonomous defense and begins unifying security signal in earnest. From there, they introduce agents to take on bounded, high-volume work under human supervision, learning where automation adds leverage and where judgment still matters most. Over time, as confidence, governance, and operational discipline mature, agents expand from assisting individual workflows to coordinating broader security outcomes. At every stage, progress is measured not by how much work is automated, but by how effectively human expertise is amplified.

SOC 1—Unify your platform foundation

The shift begins with a unified security platform that enables autonomous defense. Deterministic, policy-bound protections stop high confidence cyberthreats automatically—removing urgency, reducing blast radius, and eliminating the constant context switching that slows human response. By integrating signals across identity, endpoints, and cloud, defenders gain a shared view of cyberattacks instead of stitching evidence together across tools. This foundation is what makes cross-domain action possible—and separates experimental automation from production-ready operations.

SOC 2—Accelerate operations with generative AI and task agents

With urgency reduced, generative AI changes how work flows through the SOC. Instead of pushing alerts forward, AI assembles context, synthesizes signals across domains, and produces coherent investigations. Repetitive, high-volume tasks like triage, correlation, and basic investigation are absorbed by the system, allowing analysts to focus on higher impact decisions. This stage establishes new operational patterns where humans and AI work together—accelerating response while preserving judgment and accountability.

SOC 3—Deploy agentic automation

As trust grows, agents move from assistance to action. Specialized agents autonomously orchestrate specific tasks—containing compromised identities, isolating devices, or remediating reported phishing—while humans shift into supervisory roles. Over time, agents help identify patterns, anticipate attack paths, and optimize defenses across the environment. Security teams spend less time managing queues and more time shaping posture, risk, and outcomes. These shifts compound across all three stages.

What comes next for the SOC evolution?

We believe the strongest agentic SOC models will begin with autonomous defense—deterministic, policy‑bound actions that safely stop what is already known to be dangerous at machine speed. That foundation removes urgency, noise, and latency from security operations.

Additionally, agents and humans work differently. Agents assemble context, coordinate remediation, and optimize how the SOC operates. Humans provide intent, judgment, and accountability—turning time saved into smarter, more strategic security outcomes.

This is the first of a series of posts that will explore what makes the agentic SOC model real: the platform foundations required to defend autonomously, the governance and trust mechanisms that keep autonomy safe, and the adoption journey organizations take to get there. Some organizations are already rebuilding their businesses around AI, a new class of Frontier Firms. Read more about how they’re making their move toward the agentic SOC and access a foundational roadmap for this transformation in our new whitepaper, The agentic SOC: Your teammate for tomorrow, 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 (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity. 

The post The agentic SOC—Rethinking SecOps for the next decade appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.