Microsoft successfully prevented nearly 71 billion cyber attacks in 2021

Microsoft today officially launched Cyber ​​Signals, a new online cybersecurity magazine that publishes Microsoft's latest research and analysis data and statistics related to various threats today. available in cyberspace. Cyber ​​Signals magazine will be published quarterly, and in its blog post, Microsoft has also revealed something very interesting. That is, the company's security team successfully prevented nearly 71 billion cyberattacks in 2021 alone, using security solutions developed and implemented in-house.

According to internal Microsoft statistics, in 2021, the company has successfully prevented and neutralized nearly 71 billion cyberattacks using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Microsoft Azure services. Active Directory (AD). The list of main threats is listed as follows:

Endpoint threats:

1. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detected and prevented more than 9.6 billion malware threats targeting enterprise customers' devices and individual users, between January and May. 12 year 2021.

Email threats:

1. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 neutralized more than 35.7 billion different malicious and phishing emails targeting business customers and individual users, between January and December 2021.

Identity threats:

1. Microsoft (Azure Active Directory) detected and blocked more than 25.6 billion attempts to take over enterprise customer accounts by brute-force stolen passwords, between January and December 2021.

The above achievement is very remarkable. However, Microsoft also expressed concern that there are still a very large number of customers, both business users and individuals, who are still extremely negligent in applying additional forms of security, like multi-factor authentication and passwordless logins.

'Although threats have been increasing rapidly over the past two years, the adoption of powerful forms of identity authentication, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and non-secure login solutions exports are still quite low. For example, our research shows that only 22% of customers use Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft's Cloud Identity Solution'.

Enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a simple security measure, but can make it much more difficult for a hacker to perform an attack and take control of your account. 'Your account is 99.9% less likely to be compromised if you use MFA,' says Alex Weinert, Microsoft's Director of Identity Security.

In fact, it is easy for threat actors to gain access to systems and accounts that are not protected by MFA because passwords can be stolen or guessed using a variety of techniques, including phishing, keylog, network sniffing, social engineering, malware, brute-force attacks and even login credentials.

Kareem Winters

Update 04 February 2022