In today’s release of Cyber Signals, Microsoft lays out the latest research and data on various current cyber threats. Cyber Signals is the new online cybersecurity magazine scheduled to be published quarterly.
In its announcement blog post, Microsoft highlights that the solutions the company provides have prevented billions of dollars in losses from cybersecurity threats.
In the magazine, Microsoft said it blocked nearly 71 billion cyberattacks in 2021 using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD). The details are as follows:
Endpoint threats:
Between January and December 2021, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint blocked more than 9.6 billion malware threats targeting enterprise and consumer customer devices.
Email threats:
Between January and December 2021, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 blocked more than 35.7 billion phishing and other malicious emails targeting business and consumer customers.
Identity Threats
Between January and December 2021, Microsoft (Azure Active Directory) detected and blocked more than 25.6 billion attempts to hijack corporate customer accounts by brute-forcing stolen passwords.
However, Microsoft also expressed concern about the current state of network security. The company wrote:
While threats have been rising rapidly over the past two years, the adoption of strong authentication such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and passwordless solutions has been low. For example, our research shows that across industries, as of December 2021, only 22% of customers using Microsoft’s Cloud Identity Solution, Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), have implemented strong authentication protection.