According to him Microsoft Cyber Signals quarterly cybersecurity report, the company’s cybersecurity solutions They blocked a thousand malicious emails in every second of 2021. This is the first of these reports, which the company intends to make and make public every three months, and data from the Microsoft Defender antivirus, as well as from Azure Active Directory, have been used in its preparation. Also of the approximately 24 billion security signals that the company obtains per day from the cloud, the extremes and the intelligent edge.
With this data, the authors of the report have had the information necessary to understand the current threat landscape, as well as the point at which malicious and harmful activities such as brute force attacks, phishing and distribution of malware are. malware, among other attacks and cybercrimes.
From all this data, the report concludes that Microsoft Defender for Office 365 blocked more than 35.7 billion phishing emails and other harmful attack attempts, targeting both consumers and businesses, throughout 2021. In addition, Defender for Endpoint blocked more than 9.6 billion malware attacks, and Azure Active Directory detected and blocked more than 25.6 billion attempts to hijack enterprise customer accounts through brute force.
The report suggests that many of these attacks come from attackers promoted and supported by governments from different countries. In fact, attacks from these types of groups are on the rise. They usually use simple but effective tactics. These include social engineering attacks, spear phishing attacks, and large-scale account password testing.
This is due to the fact that there are still companies and consumers that continue to manage their credentials poorly, and that, for example, do not activate two or more factor authentication. As long as they do not take precautions like this, these types of groups will not need to change their modus operandi, and will continue to have facilities to attack.
That’s why there’s a need for businesses and consumers to embrace two-factor authentication (MFA), which can help protect accounts and services from identity-centric attacks. However, it is not the only access management measure that companies should use. For Microsoft, they should also use antivirus solutions, zero-trust network access systems and firewalls.
