Security News

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled Security Copilot in preview, marking its continued push to embed AI-oriented features in an attempt to offer "End-to-end defense at machine speed and scale."Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 generative AI and its own security-specific model, it's billed as a security analysis tool that enables cybersecurity analysts to quickly respond to threats, process signals, and assess risk exposure.

Microsoft says the KB5007651 Microsoft Defender Antivirus update triggers Windows Security warnings on Windows 11 systems saying that Local Security Authority Protection is off. LSA Protection is a security feature that defends sensitive information like credentials from theft by blocking untrusted LSA code injection and process memory dumping.

Microsoft is now force-installing the Microsoft Defender for Individuals application when installing or updating the Microsoft 365 apps."Starting in late February of 2023, the Microsoft Defender app will be included in the Microsoft 365 installer," the company says in a support document updated last week.

Although ransomware's share of incidents declined only slightly from 2021 to 2022, defenders were more successful detecting and preventing ransomware, according to IBM. Despite this, attackers continued to innovate with the report showing the average time to complete a ransomware attack dropped from 2 months down to less than 4 days. "The shift towards detection and response has allowed defenders to disrupt adversaries earlier in the attack chain - tempering ransomware's progression in the short term," said Charles Henderson, Head of IBM Security X-Force.

Relief may not come soon, if research firm Gartner's predictions hold true that fully a quarter of security leaders will depart the cybersecurity field entirely by 2025 due to work pressures. In a new report, the firm predicts that nearly half of cybersecurity leaders will change jobs, and that by 2025, lack of talent or human failure will be responsible for over half of significant cyber incidents.

Organizations using Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint will now be able to isolate Linux devices from their networks to stop miscreants from remotely connecting to them. Users can get to the device page of the Linux systems through the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, where they will see an "Isolate Device" tab in the upper right among other response actions.

Microsoft announced today that it added device isolation support to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on onboarded Linux devices. Enterprise admins can manually isolate Linux machines enrolled as part of a public preview using the Microsoft 365 Defender portal or via API requests.

IoT hardware is at the heart of much modern operational technology, the systems that support businesses, the systems that mix modern IoT hardware with legacy control and data collection devices. So how can we protect our devices, networks and businesses, especially when we already have a large estate of deployed hardware? Microsoft's Defender for IoT is one option, adding network sensors and firmware analysis tools to help spot compromised and at-risk hardware and working in conjunction with Microsoft Sentinel to use machine learning to identify threats early.

Microsoft released advanced hunting queries and a PowerShell script to find and recover some of the Windows application shortcuts deleted Friday morning by a buggy Microsoft Defender ASR rule. Early morning on January 13th, Microsoft released a new Microsoft Defender signature update that included a change to the Attack Surface Reduction rule known as "Block Win32 API calls from Office macro" in Configuration Manager and "Win32 imports from Office macro code" in Intune.

Microsoft has addressed a false positive triggered by a buggy Microsoft Defender ASR rule that would delete application shortcuts from the desktop, the Start menu, and the taskbar and, in some cases, render existing shortcuts unusable as they couldn't be used to launch the linked apps. The issue affected app shortcuts across onboarded devices after the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint attack surface reduction rule was triggered erroneously.