Our experience in detecting and blocking threats on millions of endpoints tells us that attackers will stop at nothing to circumvent protections. Even one gap in security can be disastrous to an organization. At Microsoft, we don’t stop finding new ... continue reading

We’ve discussed the challenges that fileless threats pose in security, and how Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Microsoft Defender ATP) employs advanced strategies to defeat these sophisticated threats. Part of the slyness of fileless malware is their use of living-off-the-land ... continue reading

Scientific and technological advancements in deep learning, a category of algorithms within the larger framework of machine learning, provide new opportunities for development of state-of-the art protection technologies. Deep learning methods are impressively outperforming traditional methods on such tasks as ... continue reading

The prevailing perception about fileless threats, among the security industry’s biggest areas of concern today, is that security solutions are helpless against these supposedly invincible threats. Because fileless attacks run the payload directly in memory or leverage legitimate system tools ... continue reading

While Windows Defender Antivirus makes catching 5 billion threats on devices every month look easy, multiple advanced detection and prevention technologies work under the hood to make this happen. Windows Defender Antivirus is the next-generation protection component of Microsoft Defender ... continue reading

In early March, we discovered a cyberattack that used an exploit for CVE-2018-20250, an old WinRar vulnerability disclosed just several weeks prior, and targeted organizations in the satellite and communications industry. A complex attack chain incorporating multiple code execution techniques ... continue reading

In MITREs evaluation of endpoint detection and response solutions, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection demonstrated industry-leading optics and detection capabilities. The breadth of telemetry, the strength of threat intelligence, and the advanced, automatic detection through machine learning, heuristics, and behavior ... continue reading

Several weeks ago, the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) team uncovered a new cyberattack that targeted several high-profile organizations in the energy and food and beverage sectors in Asia. Given the target region and verticals, the attack ... continue reading

Windows Defender Antivirus has hit a new milestone: the built-in antivirus capabilities on Windows can now run within a sandbox. With this new development, Windows Defender Antivirus becomes the first complete antivirus solution to have this capability and continues to ... continue reading

Consider this scenario: Two never-before-seen, heavily obfuscated scripts manage to slip past file-based detection and dynamically load an info-stealing payload into memory. The scripts are part of a social engineering campaign that tricks potential victims into running the scripts, which ... continue reading