Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 21 is now available

The latest volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is now available for free download at www.microsoft.com/sir.

This new volume of the report includes threat data from the first half of 2016 as well as longer term trend data on industry vulnerabilities, exploits, malware, and malicious websites. The report also provides specific threat data for over 100 countries/regions.

Our Featured Intelligence content for this volume of the report includes three deep dive sections:

Protecting cloud infrastructure; detecting and mitigating threats using Azure Security Center:
As organizations move workloads to cloud-based services it is important that security teams keep abreast of changes in their threat posture. New threats can be encountered when adopting solutions that are fully cloud based, or when connecting on-premises environments to cloud services. This section of the report details common threats that organizations may encounter, and explains how security teams can use Azure Security Center to protect, detect, and respond to security threats against Azure cloud-based resources.

PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM: parallel zero-day attacks targeting individuals in Europe:
Microsoft proactively monitors the threat landscape for emerging threats, including observing the activities of targeted activity groups. The new report chronicles two activity groups, code-named PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM, both of which target individuals in a specific area of Europe. Both attack groups launched attack campaigns in May 2016 using the same zero-day exploit to seek information about specific individuals. Microsoft is sharing information about these groups to raise awareness of their activities, and to help individuals and organizations implement existing mitigation options that significantly reduce risk from these attack groups and other similar groups.

Ten years of exploits: a long-term study of exploitation of vulnerabilities in Microsoft software:
Microsoft researchers conducted a study of security vulnerabilities and the exploitation of the most severe vulnerabilities in Microsoft software over a 10-year period ending in 2015. In the past five years vulnerability disclosures have increased across the entire industry. However, the number of remote code execution (RCE) and elevation of privilege (EOP) vulnerabilities in Microsoft software has declined significantly. The results of the study suggest that while the risk posed by vulnerabilities appeared to increase in recent years, the actualized risk of exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft software has steadily declined.

There is a lot of other new data in this report that I hope you’ll find useful.

You can download Volume 21 of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report at www.microsoft.com/sir.

Ken Malcolmson
Executive Security Advisor, Microsoft Enterprise Cybersecurity Group