Dive Brief:
- Microsoft CVP and CISO Bret Arsenault said cloud is a key component of cybersecurity defense amid a climate of increasing identity-based attacks, speaking Wednesday during a Washington Post Live event.
- Microsoft analysis shows a 60% increase in password-based attacks, Arsenault said. Password attacks went from 600 per second last year to 920 in 2022, according to Arsenault.
- "You want to be able to have a signal that helps you see, predict and protect you from those kinds of situations," said Arsenault. "That honestly can really only be done at cloud scale."
Dive Insight:
Consider the threat landscape an organization must grapple with today. From insider threats to remote ransomware attacks or supply chain software compromises, the watchword is: trust no one.
No organization is immune to attacks, especially as sophisticated actors target the authentication process. A recent text-message phishing campaign dubbed Oktapus or Scatter Swine compromised almost 10,000 user credentials across 136 organizations.
The pervasiveness of identity-based attacks led Microsoft to begin a journey toward a passwordless environment that is years in the making.
"Instead of saying 2FA everywhere, which meant having a smart card or some other component, we said: what if we could just get rid of passwords? And that became a design change principle for the way we did things," said Arsenault.
Having the power of the cloud to detect, track and respond to threats has been a key component to cyber defense at Microsoft, he said.
"The ability to have signal and then to act on that signal, and I see it repeatedly in our environment, is really changing the game for us," said Arsenault.
Arsenault depicted a "brilliant basics" model to fending off attackers:
- Make sure you have multifactor authentication
- Only allow access from certifiably healthy devices
- Ensure you're collecting the telemetry that lets you look for and/or detect anomalies as they happen at cloud-scale.
Organizations thinking through their security posture see the cloud as both an enabler and a risk factor, research shows.
Three in five companies believe cloud leads to faster and more flexible threat response, but the same proportion says cyber concerns constitute an obstacle to, and a reason, for cloud adoption, according to a report from Presidio.
Cloud implementations are an attractive target for malicious actors.
More than 4 in 5 companies report they've had a cloud-related security incident in the last 12 months, Venafi data shows. Nearly half of companies say they've had at least four incidents over the same period.
