Three cybersecurity New Year’s resolutions to follow
Cybersecurity was a major talking point in 2018, and this will continue as we draw nearer to the digital age. As attacks evolve, staying ahead of these threats is getting harder.
But by using the cloud, Microsoft can help. Every day, we practice security operations at a global scale to protect our customers, in the process analyzing more than 6.5 trillion signals. Our Microsoft Threat Intelligence Centre (MSTIC) learned to build multi-dimensional telemetry to support security use cases, and to spot that rogue exploit in a distant crash dump bucket. Today, more than 3,500 full-time security professionals work to secure datacenters, run our Cyber Defense Operations Centre, hack our own defenses, and hunt down attackers.
As we head into 2019, we know cybersecurity remains a concern for our customers in MEA region. That’s why we’ve suggested three cybersecurity New Year’s resolutions for organizations to follow to ensure you remain secured and cybersafe all year long:
1. Declare an end of the password era
Microsoft has declared the "end of the password era" by bringing its Authenticator sign-in app to the enterprise with support for the Azure Active Directory (AD) identity management service. The Authenticator app replaces your password with a more secure multi-factor sign-in that combines your phone and your fingerprint, face, or PIN. Using a multi-factor sign-in method, you can reduce compromise by 99.9 percent, and you can make the user experience simpler by eliminating passwords.
2. Commit to improving your security posture
Microsoft Secure Score is the only enterprise-class dynamic report card for cybersecurity. By using it, organisations get assessments and recommendations that typically reduce their chance of a breach by 30-fold. It guides you to take steps like securing admin accounts with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), securing user accounts with MFA, and turning off client-side email forwarding rules. Secure Score was also recently expanded to cover all of Microsoft 365. We are also introducing Secure Score for your hybrid cloud workloads in the Azure Security Center, so you have full visibility across your estate.
3. Put cloud intelligence into your own hands
To help security operations professionals benefit from our experience, we created a community where our researchers and others from the industry can share advanced queries to hunt attackers and new threats, giving us all more insight and better protection. By connecting our cloud intelligence to our threat protection solutions, we can stem a mass outbreak or find a needle in a haystack. A recent malware campaign, for example, targeted just under 200 home users and small businesses in a few U.S. cities. It was designed to fly under the radar, but Windows Defender’s cloud-based machine learning models detected the malicious behaviour and stopped it cold.
We also recently announced Microsoft Threat Protection, an integrated experience for detection, investigation, and remediation across endpoints, email, documents, identity, and infrastructure in the Microsoft 365 admin console. This will let analysts save thousands of hours as they automate the more mundane security tasks.
Cyber threats are unlikely to go away. In fact, as we head into the new year, they’re expected to intensify. Protect your staff and your business today by committing to these cybersecurity life hacks.
For more on Microsoft’s commitment to cybersecurity, click here.
Mehmet Uner