A year ago, we reported the steady increase in the use of web shells in attacks worldwide. The latest Microsoft 365 Defender data shows that this trend not only continued, it accelerated. Read our investigation into the escalating prevalence of web shells.
Sweeping research into massive attacker infrastructures, as well as our real-time monitoring of malware campaigns and attacker activity, directly inform Microsoft security solutions, allowing us to build or improve protections that block malware campaigns and other email threats, both current and future, as well as provide enterprises with the tools for investigating and responding to
In recent months, Microsoft has detected cyberattacks targeting security researchers by an actor we track as ZINC. Observed targeting includes pen testers, private offensive security researchers, and employees at security and tech companies.
Our continued investigation into the Solorigate attack has uncovered new details about the handover from the Solorigate DLL backdoor (SUNBURST) to the Cobalt Strike loader (TEARDROP, Raindrop, and others).
The new Surface Pro 7+ for Business will ship with virtualization-based security (VBS) and Hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI, also commonly referred to as memory integrity) enabled out of the box to give customers even stronger security that is built-in and turned on by default.
We, along with the security industry and our partners, continue to investigate the extent of the Solorigate attack. While investigations are underway, we want to provide the defender community with intel to understand the scope and impact, remediation guidance, and detections and protections we have built as a result.
Partnering with organizations like Carnegie Mellon University allows us to bring their rich research and insights to our products and services, so customers can fully benefit from our breadth of signals.
UPDATE: Microsoft continues to work with partners and customers to expand our knowledge of the threat actor behind the nation-state cyberattacks that compromised the supply chain of SolarWinds and impacted multiple other organizations.
A persistent malware campaign has been actively distributing Adrozek, an evolved browser modifier malware at scale since at least May 2020. At its peak in August, the threat was observed on over 30,000 devices every day. The malware is designed to inject ads into search engine results pages and affects multiple browsers.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) in block mode in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint turns EDR detections into real-time blocking of threats. Learn how it stopped an IcedID attack.
BISMUTH, which has been running increasingly complex cyberespionage attacks as early as 2012, deployed Monero coin miners in campaigns from July to August 2020. The group’s use of coin miners was unexpected, but it was consistent with their longtime methods of blending in.
Key to defending the hypervisor, and by extension the rest of the OS, from low-level threats is protecting System Management Mode (SMM), an execution mode in x86-based processors that runs at a higher effective privilege than the hypervisor.
