Partnering with the industry to minimize false positives

Every day, antivirus capabilities in Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) protect millions of customers from threats. To effectively scale protection, Windows Defender ATP uses intelligent systems that combine multiple layers of machine learning models, behavior-based detection algorithms, generics, and heuristics that make a verdict on suspicious files, most of the time in…
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Use Windows Information Protection (WIP) to help make accidental data leakage a thing of the past

Have you always wished you could have mobile application management (MAM) on Windows? Now you can! Windows Information Protection (WIP) is an out-of-the box data leakage prevention feature for Windows 10 that can automatically apply protection for work files and data to prevent accidental data leakage. With 600 million active Windows 10 devices, corporate customers…
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Building a world without passwords

Nobody likes passwords. They are inconvenient, insecure, and expensive. In fact, we dislike them so much that we’ve been busy at work trying to create a world without them – a world without passwords. In this blog, we will provide a brief insight into how we at Microsoft think about solving this problem, along with…
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Teaming up in the war on tech support scams

Beyond customer education, the scale and complexity of tech support scams require cooperation and broad partnerships across the industry. Given the scale and complexity of tech support scams, how can the security industry at large work together to deal a major blow to this enduring threat?
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SSN for authentication is all wrong

Unless you were stranded on a deserted island or participating in a zen digital fast chances are you’ve heard plenty about the massive Equifax breach and the head-rolling fallout. In the flurry of headlines and advice about credit freezes an important part of the conversation was lost: if we didn’t misuse our social security numbers,…
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Been shopping lately? Fake credit card email can spook you into downloading Cerber ransomware

As the shopping sprees become increasingly frenetic during holiday season, it’s hard not to worry about how much credit card debt we’re piling. Some of us rely on email notifications from our banks to track the damage to our finances. So what happens when we suddenly get notified about charges for things we never bought?…
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Windows 10: protection, detection, and response against recent Depriz malware attacks

A few weeks ago, multiple organizations in the Middle East fell victim to targeted and destructive attacks that wiped data from computers, and in many cases rendering them unstable and unbootable. Destructive attacks like these have been observed repeatedly over the years and the Windows Defender and Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Threat Intelligence teams…
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Don’t let this Black Friday/Cyber Monday spam deliver Locky ransomware to you

We see it every year: social engineering attacks that take advantage of the online shopping activities around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, targeting customers of online retailers. This year, we’re seeing a spam campaign that Amazon customers need to be wary of. The fake emails pretend to be notifications from the online retailer that a…
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No payment necessary: Fighting back against ransomware

Any IT professional who’s ever had an experience with malware knows how fast an intrusive attack can happen, and how difficult it can be to educate employees to be vigilant against such threats. And with ransomware attacks only growing, having information, tools and technologies to help protect your network can mean the difference between serious…
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Top Five Security Threats Facing Your Business and How to Respond

This post was authored by Ann Johnson, Vice-President, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group Headlines highlighting how vulnerable we are to cyber threats are now all too commonplace. The statistics on security events and successful network breaches continue a trend that favors attackers. These bad actors are getting faster at network compromise and data theft while their dwell…
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