All news with #microsoft tag

🔔 Microsoft released the optional KB5101684 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, delivering 42 bug fixes and incremental feature rollouts. This non-security monthly preview updates systems to builds 26100.8973 and 26200.8973 and is installable via Settings > Windows Update or the Microsoft Update Catalog. Notable changes include File Explorer improvements, Voice Isolation for Voice Access, enhanced Windows Hello ESS support for external fingerprint readers, and fixes for File History and MDM enrollment issues. The update is optional and currently has no known issues.

🔒 Microsoft’s Secure Boot contained a persistent weakness for most of its lifespan, researchers found. ESET analysts discovered 11 signed firmware images, including at least one from 2013, that were defective yet remained publicly signed. These images, known as shims, were intended to extend Secure Boot to Linux and utility software but can be abused to bypass protections via UEFI. The flaw arose because Microsoft failed to revoke the vulnerable shims after the defects were identified.

🔒 Best Buy eliminated service account key hassles by adopting Google Cloud's Workforce Identity Federation to let developers use their existing Microsoft Entra ID credentials for secure access to BigQuery and other cloud services. This syncless approach removes the need to synchronize user records into Cloud Identity, reduces credential management and attack surface, and delivers auditable, user-level access. The change is largely invisible to developers while simplifying operations for security and platform teams.

🛡️ Microsoft revealed Project Perception, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and several AI security initiatives during a July 27 Security launch preview. Project Perception uses coordinated red, blue and green agents to identify, triage and remediate threats, and will enter Preview on August 3. The company also introduced the MAI-Cyber-1-Flash model integrated into MDASH, plus the FORGE Lab and the External Red Team Alliance to accelerate offensive research and broaden AI safety efforts.

🛡️ NVIDIA has convened nearly 40 technology firms to form the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition aimed at building open source security tools for AI, announced on July 27. Members include Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, CloudStrike, SpaceX, SAP and the Linux Foundation, while notable frontier model developers such as Google, Anthropic and OpenAI are absent. The alliance will focus on finding, fixing and disclosing vulnerabilities, and aims to create an open defense stack for agents, covering identity, isolation, secure model formats and secure coding workflows.

🛡️ Microsoft introduced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside its MDASH multi-model vulnerability harness, claiming a 95.95% CyberGym score when paired with GPT-5.4 and a 50% cost reduction versus its previous MDASH mix. The new model is limited to MDASH private preview through Azure AI Foundry and is not available as a standalone API. Microsoft says MAI-Cyber-1-Flash handles up to 90% of tasks while GPT-5.4 addresses the hardest 10%, but the headline score applies to the MDASH configuration rather than the model alone.

🔐 Microsoft announced Project Perception, an AI-driven service entering public preview on Aug. 3 that uses multiple AI agents to continuously evaluate and update enterprise security posture. The multi-model harness selects the best model for each task to balance quality and cost, and Microsoft also introduced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a specialist model trained to find vulnerabilities. Integrated agents perform red-, blue- and green-team playbooks to detect, triage, and remediate threats automatically.

🔒 NVIDIA and 36 organizations have launched the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop and share open technologies, techniques, and tools for securing software and AI agents. The group spans cloud, security, enterprise software, and AI companies including Microsoft, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, IBM, and the Linux Foundation. The alliance’s scope covers identity, permissions, isolation, guardrails, logs, model formats, scanning, and secure coding workflows. Its first technical contribution is NVIDIA-labs OO Agents (NOOA), an Apache 2.0 research framework to test, trace, audit, and govern agent behavior.

🛡️ Microsoft introduces Project Perception, an agentic security system designed for AI-era threats. It combines signals, context, models and specialized agents to continuously perceive, reason and act at machine speed while keeping humans in control. The system uses a multi-model architecture to optimize for quality and cost, beginning with software vulnerability management using MAI-Cyber-1-Flash in MDASH. Project Perception enters public preview on August 3.

🛡️ Microsoft announces the External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA) to broaden AI safety testing by funding and coordinating external academic and operational expertise across six continents. The initiative provides unrestricted gifts to 18 university labs and builds a distributed network of specialists to address multilingual, domain-specific, and regional AI risks. EXTRA aims to advance evaluation methodologies and strengthen collaboration between academia, practitioners, and industry to better identify and mitigate emerging threats in frontier AI systems.

🟦 Customer feedback and PeerSpot recognitions highlight five priorities for Microsoft Databases: reliability, scalability, operational simplicity, developer productivity, and AI readiness. Reviews from SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL users emphasize uptime, ease of migration, performance, and integration with Azure services. These insights guide Microsoft’s investments to help customers modernize and build AI-powered applications while maintaining security and governance.

🛡️ Researchers disclosed "Certighost," a vulnerability in Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) that lets a low‑privilege domain user trick the CA into issuing certificates impersonating a Domain Controller. The issue abuses a directory-object resolution fallback called a "chase," where attacker-controlled identity data supplied via attributes like cdc can be used by the CA during issuance. Microsoft patched the flaw in its July 2026 updates and researchers provided a temporary policy-based mitigation for environments that cannot immediately install the patch.

🔧 Microsoft attributed the large July 23 outage to a bug in its automated network maintenance request system that removed IP routes from more devices than intended, disrupting Azure and Microsoft 365 services, especially for customers routed through the West US region. The incident began at 10:44 AM ET and was resolved after a rollback completed at 2:26 PM ET, with full recovery of all services by 3:41 PM ET. Microsoft is conducting a full internal review and will publish a final post-incident report.

🤝 AT&T partnered with Microsoft Foundry and AMD to build OTel2.0, a telecom-focused AI stack that processes massive token volumes while controlling cost and complexity. Using Foundry Managed Compute and a mix of open models such as Phi-4, OSS-120B, and Gemma-4, AT&T scaled across heterogeneous GPUs (including AMD MI300X) to run experiments, data preparation, and training—processing about 1T tokens and leveraging ~530 GPUs. The effort prioritized rapid deployment, model choice, and economic efficiency.

🔔 Microsoft Teams and several Microsoft 365 services experienced an outage on July 23, with users reporting access problems for Teams, SharePoint, Excel, and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Downdetector recorded 2,403 reports at 11:11 a.m. ET, well above the normal baseline. SharePoint drove most complaints (78%), followed by Excel (11%) and the Admin Center (6%). Microsoft acknowledged the disruption, citing incident MO1437424 and stating it is investigating.

📊 Microsoft reports that Q2 2026 saw a sharp decline in phishing tied to the Tycoon2FA PhaaS disruption, while threat actors shifted tactics into Teams-based social engineering and vishing. Credential phishing remained the dominant payload objective, and notable campaigns demonstrated large-scale automation and multi-stage delivery chains. The post reviews QR code and CAPTCHA-gated phishing trends, BEC anomalies, and mitigation recommendations.

📊 Microsoft remained the most impersonated brand in Q2 2026, appearing in 23% of all brand phishing attempts. The top five—Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google, Apple, and Amazon—accounted for over half of observed attacks, while ChatGPT entered the top ten for the first time. Technology, social networks, and banking were the most targeted industries, and common tells included distorted logos, dead buttons, and mismatched links.

🛡️ Microsoft advises Windows administrators to apply security patches within three days, arguing that AI has accelerated vulnerability discovery and exploitation. Many enterprise teams, however, say the blanket three-day window is unrealistic given heavy testing, change control, and compatibility constraints. Experts recommend focusing rapid remediation on vulnerabilities with verified exploitation or credible proof-of-concept while using compensating controls and automation to manage broader exposure.

🔒 Microsoft and AXA XL have partnered to provide AXA XL policyholders direct access to Microsoft Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response, aligning technical, legal, and insurance workflows during incidents. The collaboration emphasizes pre-established coordination, proactive planning, and first‑party threat intelligence to accelerate containment and recovery. Together they aim to reduce friction and delays in high‑stakes cyber events.

📢 Microsoft confirmed it will stop shipping security updates for Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 under the Extended Security Update (ESU) program in October 2026. The announcement follows a six-month extension granted in April 2026 and reiterates there will be no further extensions. Administrators are urged to upgrade to Exchange Server Subscription Edition or migrate to Exchange Online.