10 million cyber attacks occur on Microsoft infrastructure per day



    Microsoft, in its 198-page report, Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, shared the performance statistics of its two user identification systems, Microsoft Account and Azure Active Directory (AAD). According to the report, every day, automatic protection systems recognize and prevent an average of 10 million attempts at hacking into user accounts. In 2015, the number of reflected attacks exceeded 4 billion.

    The Microsoft Account, the former Windows Live ID, is used by users to sign in to various Microsoft services — Bing, Outlook.com, OneDrive, Windows Phone, Skype, Xbox LIVE, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and so on. Some of the services may contain sensitive and personal information of the user - photos, videos, documents and other files.

    The second account management service, Azure Active Directory (formerly Access Control Service), is used by organizations. With it, you can provide single sign-on, enhanced security, and simple interaction with applications already deployed in Active Directory, as well as integrate with other authentication providers (Live ID, Google, Facebook, etc.).

    Windows Azure Active Directory allows you to solve single user authorization tasks for multiple services (Single Sign On), maintain a single user directory, synchronize directory data with the Active Directory in an enterprise, etc.

    The report states that 90% of the 2000 largest companies in the world use Active Directory, in which more than 8 million companies and more than 550 million users are registered.

    Altogether, Microsoft's identification systems account for up to 13 billion authorizations per day (of which AAD accounts for 1.3 billion), of which 10 million are attempts at unauthorized access to accounts. Hackers confront several protection systems.

    One of them allows you to exclude attempts to hack accounts using the brute force method, and also prevents attempts to log into your account from ip-addresses associated with a different geographic location from the standard. In addition, Azure Active Directory administrators may require additional information from users to strengthen the authentication system.

    The large amount of data collected allows Microsoft to continually improve security systems — in particular, machine learning is used for this. The report indicates that each day intelligent security systems process 10 terabytes of data collected. It is automation of protection systems and machine learning that allow to prevent such a large number of unauthorized access attempts, moreover, in automatic mode.

    Also popular now: