Author: jay f

Limited resources can make it difficult to prioritize solutions that help dispersed teams work and collaborate effectively. But streamlining your organization’s digital landscape with fewer, more efficient applications helps make a successful hybrid workplace possible—improving productivity, collaboration, security, and IT management. In this e-book, discover what leaders are saying about the challenges of hybrid work and get tangible ways to overcome them. Learn why: ·        Cloud applications are helping teams boost efficiency—and why too many apps may have a negative impact on productivity. ·        Relationship building from a digital-first perspective helps foster a culture of collaboration. ·        Adopting a Zero Trust strategy establishes a strong foundation for security while reducing overall costs. ·        The right digital tools help simplify IT management and optimize your team’s time and resources. To get the book go here

 

Adding IPv6 support to Azure Active
Directory

 

We’re excited to bring IPv6 support
to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to support customers with increased
mobility and help reduce spending on fast-depleting expensive IPv4 addresses.
The meeting is targeted to all IT Professionals.

 Agenda:

• Why
  are we introducing IPv6?
• Rollout
  plan
• What
  is the impact?
• Steps
  to take before the enablement.

 Speakers:

Kunal Ghosh, Senior Product Manager, Identity
CxP

Lisa Huang-North, Senior Product Manager, Identity
CxP

Gautam Anand, Senior Product Manager, Identity
CxP

 

Go here to register 

 

As organizations
strengthen their defenses and take a more proactive approach to
protection, attackers are adapting their techniques
and increasing the sophistication of their operations. Cybercrime continues to
rise with the industrialization of the cybercrime economy providing
cybercriminals with greater access to tools and infrastructure.

In the first half of
2022, the cyberthreat landscape was focused around the war in Ukraine and the
rise of nation state attacks and hacktivism across the world. In February,
Ukraine was hit with the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever
in the country’s history, impacting government websites and banking web
services. As the conflict continued, there was a ripple effect to western
countries, including the UK, US, and Germany. UK financial services firms
experienced a significant increase in DDoS attacks as
they were heavily targeted by nation state attackers and hacktivists looking to
disrupt Ukraine’s allies.

Hacktivism continued
to be rampant throughout the year, including Taiwanese websites experiencing outages
in August 2022 due to DDoS attacks ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s arrival
in Taiwan. Beyond attacks with political motives, DDoS attacks also impacted a
wide range of industries. In particular, the gaming industry continued to be
highly targeted. In March 2022, a DDoS attack brought down the game servers
of Among Us, preventing players from accessing the popular multiplayer game for
a few days. A new version of RapperBot (heavily
inspired by the Mirai botnet) was used in the second half of 2022 to target
game servers running Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

In this blog, we
share trends and insights into DDoS attacks we observed and mitigated
throughout 2022.

2022 DDoS attack
trends

Large volume of
attacks during the holiday season

In 2022, Microsoft
mitigated an average of 1,435 attacks per day. The maximum number of attacks in
a day recorded was 2,215 attacks on September 22, 2022. The minimum number of
attacks in a day was 680 on August 22, 2022. In total, we mitigated upwards of
520,000 unique attacks against our global infrastructure during 2022.

Figure 1. Attack
volume

This year, we saw a
lower volume of attacks in June through August and a high volume of attacks
during the holiday season until the last week of December. This is in line with
attacks trends we have seen in the last few years, except for 2021 where there
were fewer attacks during the holiday season. In
May, we mitigated a 3.25 terabits per second (TBps) attack in Azure, the
largest attack in 2022.

DDoS protection tip: Make sure to
avoid having a single virtual machine backend so it is less likely to get
overwhelmed. Azure DDoS Protection covers
scaled out costs incurred for all resources during an attack, so configure
autoscaling to absorb the initial burst of attack traffic while mitigation
kicks in.

TCP attacks remain
the most common attack vector

TCP attacks were the
most frequent form of DDoS attack encountered in 2022, comprising 63% of all
attack traffic, which includes all TCP attack vectors: TCP SYN, TCP ACK, TCP
floods, etc. Since TCP remains the most common networking protocol, we expect
TCP-based attacks to continue to make up most DDoS attacks. UDP attacks were
significant as well with 22% of all attacks (combined for UDP flood and UDP
amplification attacks), while Packet anomaly attacks made up 15% of attacks.

Figure 2. Attack type

Out of UDP flood
attacks, spoofed floods consumed most of the attack volume with 53%. The
remaining attack vectors were reflected amplification attacks, with the main
types being CLDAP, NTP, and DNS.

We observed TCP reflected amplification attacks becoming
more prevalent, with attacks on Azure resources using diverse types of
reflectors and attack vectors. This new attack vector is taking advantage of
improper TCK stack implementation in middleboxes, such as firewalls and deep
packet inspection devices, to elicit amplified responses that can reach
infinite amplification in some cases. As an example, in April 2022, we
monitored a reflected amplified SYN+ACK attack on an Azure resource in Asia.
The attack reached 30 million packets per second (pps) and lasted 15 seconds.
Attack throughput was not very high, however there were 900 reflectors
involved, each with retransmissions, resulting in high pps rate that can bring
down the host and other network infrastructure.

DDoS protection
tip: To
protect against UDP and TCP attacks, we recommend using Azure DDoS Protection.
For gaming customers, consider using A10 virtual appliances and Azure
Gateway Load Balancers to help with volume-based attacks.

Shorter attacks
continue to be popular.

Figure 3. Attack duration

Shorter duration
attacks were more commonly observed this past year, with 89% of attacks lasting
less than one hour. Attacks spanning one to two minutes made up 26% of the
attacks seen this year. This is not a new trend as attacks that are shorter
require less resources and are more challenging to mitigate for legacy DDoS
defenses. Attackers often use multiple short attacks over the span of multiple
hours to make the most impact while using the fewest number of resources.

Short attacks take
advantage of the time it takes systems to detect the attack and for mitigation
to kick in. While time to mitigation may only take one or two minutes, the
information from those short attacks can make it into the backend of services,
impacting legitimate usage. If a short attack can cause a reboot of the
systems, this can then trigger multiple internal attacks as every legitimate
user tries to reconnect at the same time.

To read the full article go here

 

 Have you completed your Azure AD migration journey and not sure what’s left to do with AD FS, then view our short new Decommissioning video hosted by Mark Morowczynski and Ramiro Calderon. Learn how to complete your AD FS to Azure AD migration.

Free click here

 

Microsoft Entra Identity Governance – Streamline Identity Lifecycle & Entitlements  Please join us for this event, Microsoft and Invoke would like to partner on a customer-facing webinar on the topic of Identity Governance.  Description: Join Invoke and the Microsoft Entra product group for an overview of Identity Governance and how this Microsoft Cloud solution can help solve business challenges by streamlining processes, reducing costs, and improving compliance. In this session, we will align real-world use cases to specific Identity Governance features including Lifecycle workflows, Entitlement management, Access reviews, and Privileged identity management. Whether you’re a decision maker or a technical influencer, this webinar is a must-attend event for anyone looking to improve their organization’s security and compliance posture.   March 8, 2023 9:00 -10:00 PST       REGISTER HERE

Increase your cyber resiliency by acting on new threat intelligence insights from a diverse team of Microsoft security researchers.

As a company with billions of customers around the world, Microsoft has a unique vantage point to understand the scope and scale of digital threats around the globe.

The 2022 Microsoft Digital Defense Report is the culmination of threat intelligence data and insights gathered by a diverse group of Microsoft security professionals over the past year. Download the latest report to:

• Learn about the state of cybercrime and the evolving threat landscape.

• Explore the latest intel on hacking trends and attack methods that are growing in popularity.

• Get data-backed advice on how to improve cyber resiliency and bolster your organization’s security posture.

Download
the 2022 Microsoft Digital Defense Report

 

 NIST is hosting a new webinar series to gain critical input on Draft NIST
Special Publication 800-63 Revision 4, Digital
Identity Guidelines. During these three separate virtual
events, NIST moderators will explore different aspects of the guidance with
expert panelists and seek additional input from the public via a moderated
Slack discussion and extended Q&A.

Webinar #1: Digital Identity Risk Management and Assurance Level
Selection

Details: Thursday,
March 02, 2023 1:30–3:00pm
ET

This webinar will feature a discussion about digital identity
risks. Panelists will explore the various lenses through which digital identity
can be viewed, the variety and breadth of associated risks, and how those risks
might be considered in organizational, societal, and individual contexts.

Register

Webinar #2: Innovating Identity Proofing

Details: Thursday,
March 09, 2023 1:30–3:00pm
ET

This webinar will focus on the changes NIST has made to identity
proofing guidance and illicit inputs on how the government and industry can
continue to innovate on identity proofing technology and services. Panelists
will discuss leading practices in commercial and public sector use cases,
emerging trends, areas of continued improvement, and techniques that may
provide additional optionality and choice for end users.

Register

Webinar #3: The Future of Authentication

Details: Thursday,
March 16, 2023 1:30–3:00pm
ET

This webinar will focus on the evolving nature of authentication
technology and how organizations and NIST are addressing new innovations in the
space. Panelists will explore phishing resistant authentication, trends in
multifactor authentication, and the challenges with moving on from SMS
authentication.

Register

Learn
More

 NIST is requesting public comments on the initial public draft of
Special Publication (SP) 800-223, High-Performance
Computing (HPC) Security: Architecture, Threat Analysis, and Security Posture.

Executive Order 13702 established the National Strategic Computing
Initiative (NSCI) to maximize the benefits of high-performance computing (HPC)
for economic competitiveness and scientific discovery. Securing HPC systems is
challenging due to their size; performance requirements; diverse and complex
hardware, software, and applications; varying security requirements; the nature
of shared resources; and the continuing evolution of HPC systems.

Draft SP 800-223 provides guidance on standardizing and
facilitating the sharing of HPC security postures by introducing a zone-based
HPC system reference model that captures common features of HPC systems and
serves as a foundation for a system lexicon. The draft also discusses HPC
system threat analysis, security postures, challenges, and recommendations.

The public comment period for this
initial public draft is open through April 7, 2022. See
the publication
details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting
comments. Additional information can be found at the NIST HPC Security
Working Group website. A 3^rd High-Performance Computing
Workshop will be held March 15-16, 2023; see the event page
for more details and a registration link.

NOTE:
A call for patent claims is included on page ii of this document. For
additional information, see the Information
Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy–Inclusion of Patents in ITL
Publications.

Read
More