Major Coolness: Microsoft Security Intelligence Report #20 highlights #AzureAD Identity Protection!

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

First published on CloudBlogs on May, 05 2016
Howdy folks, Today Microsoft published the 20 ^th edition of our Semi-Annual Security Intelligence report. Like the previous 10 years of reports, it shares a huge wealth of information on the trends in cybercrime, malware, password attacks and more.

For any of you who work in cyber security or identity, I would highly recommend taking the time to read it . (Warning: it's about 180 pages long, so grab a chair!) I'm especially excited about this year's report because it highlights some of the leading edge work we're doing here in Microsoft's Identity Division using machine learning to automatically detect and mitigate attempts to hack accounts in Azure AD and the Microsoft Account service. Some highlights:

• We are now automatically detecting and mitigating more than 10 million attacks a day
• We've prevented 4 Billion attacks in the past 12 months
• Attacks come from all over the world:
  • 49% in Asia
  • 20% in South America
  • 14% in Europe
  • 13% in North America
  • 4% in Africa

There are also some great recommendations for creating and managing more secure passwords based on the latest studies done by Microsoft Research. (I'll be blogging about this in greater depth in the next few weeks.) We take the security of you cloud identities in Azure AD and the Microsoft Account Service very seriously. We're really excited to be able to share some of the details of what we're doing with you in this report! Best Regards, Alex