Security Unlocked

Most people know the age-old adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” I can still see my grandmother wagging her finger at me when I was younger as she said it. But what if it's not the book cover we’re judging, but the title? And what if it’s not a book we’re analyzing, but instead a security bug? The times have changed, and age-old adages don’t always translate well in the digital landscape. In...

Prior to the pandemic, workdays used to look a whole lot different. If you had a break, you could take a walk to stretch your legs, shake the hands of your co-workers, or get some 1-on-1 face time with the boss. Ahh... those were the days. That close contact we once had is now something that many of us yearn for as we’ve had to abruptly lift and shift from living in our office to working from our...

Close your eyes, and imagine a world where booting up your computer wasn’t a susceptibility point for attacks. Imagine a Root of Trust that’s integrated into the CPU. Imagine all of your devices being protected against advanced attacks. Now, what if I told you there’s a cutting-edge processor that’s battle-tested for hardware penetrations, easy to update, and protects credentials, encryption keys,...

CCI: Cyber Crime Investigation. Another day, another email attack - something smells “phishy” in the network. *Slowly puts on sunglasses and flips up trench coat collar* Time to go to work.  Just how easy is it for someone to steal your credentials? Because once they’re stolen, and sold for pocket change, it’s open season. Homoglyphs, drop accounts, email forwarding… is it any wonder billions of d...

Special Edition!  We’ve been told for years how important passwords are, taught how to make them stronger and longer and better, and we frantically tear up our home or office when we can’t find that sticky note where we wrote them down. Life feels like it comes to a screeching halt when we’ve lost our passwords, but… what would life be like if we didn’t need them? Can your passwords truly become a...

How do we ensure firmware integrity and  security ? Join hosts  Nic Fillingham and  Natalia Godyla  and guest  Nazmus Sakib , a Principal Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, to dive deeper and assess the complexities and challenges that come along with securing firmware - bootstraps and all!   Megamind  Bhavna Soman , a Senior Security Research Lead, joins us later in the show and we learn about he...

Watchdogs in tow, hosts  Nic Fillingham  and  Natalia Godyla  are joined by guest Randy Treit , Principal Security Leader at Microsoft, to examine the process of identifying the source of a threat and stopping the spread by protecting “patient zero.” Randy has a few key tricks up his sleeve as a defender, but you can decide if they’re more impressive than the antics he and his identical twin have...

Yeehaw! “Data Cowboy” is in the building. Join us as Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla sit down with Ram Shankar Siva Kumar , aka “Data Cowboy” at Microsoft, for an exciting conversation about the release of a new adversarial ML threat matrix created for security analysts. Have no fear, we made sure to find out how Ram acquired the name, “Data Cowboy”, so saddle up and get ready for the ride! Stic...

The last thing we all need this year is an identity crisis. Fear not, hosts  Nic Fillingham  and  Natalia Godyla  are here with  Maria Puertas Calvo , Data Science Lead of Microsoft’s Identity Security and Protection Team, to learn how AI is being used to protect our personal identities. Maria also reveals previously undisclosed information – her favorite food and her famous top-secret recipe, so...

How ready is your corporate security team to handle AI and ML threats? Many simply don’t have the bandwidth or don’t see it as a priority. That’s where security engineers like Microsoft’s  Andrew Marshall  step in. In this episode, hosts  Nic Fillingham  and  Natalia Godyla  speak with Andrew about just what his team is doing to teach security professionals and policy makers about the dangers of A...

Ever wonder why it's so difficult to really secure a network, systems or data? Cyber criminals are stepping up their game, even as security gets stronger and stronger, and they’re using all sorts of new techniques to break through enterprise walls. In this episode, hosts  Nic Fillingham  and  Natalia Godyla  speak with  Donal Keating , Director of Innovation and Research for the Microsoft Digital...

In this episode, hosts  Nic Fillingham  and  Natalia Godyla  speak with  Sharon Xia , a principal program manager for cloud and AI at Microsoft, about the role machine learning plays in security. They discuss four major themes, outlined in the  Microsoft Digital Defense Report , including how to prepare your industry for attacks on machine learning systems, preventing attack fatigue, democratizing...

In this episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla speak with Mike Flowers and Cole Sodja of the Microsoft Protection Team, and Justin Carroll of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Global Engagement and Response team, about how they’re using machine learning to identify and model lateral movement attacks. Then they speak to Dr. Anna Bertiger, Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft, on how she’...

In this episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla speak with Hardik Suri of the Microsoft Defender ATP Research Team about using behavior-based detection and machine learning to block attacks against Exchange servers, and why it’s so critical to patch and enable security capabilities.   Then they speak to Dr. Karen Lavi , a Senior Data Science Lead in the Microsoft Defender Research Team, o...

There are all kinds of powerful features baked into the Windows operating system. One of them is the Antimalware Scan Interface or AMSI. In this episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla speak with Ankit Garg and Geoff McDonald of the Microsoft Defender ATP Research Team to learn how AMSI operates, and how they’re utilizing ML to stop attacks.  Then they speak with Dr. Josh Neil , a Princip...

In this episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla speak with Arie Agranonik , a Senior Data Scientist in the Microsoft Defender ATP Research team, about building models using deep learning to protect against malicious attacks. It’s complicated work, requiring huge computing power and even larger amounts of data, and it could be the future of threat protection .  They also speak with Holly S...

Security Unlocked explores the technology and people powering Microsoft's Security solutions. In each episode, Microsoft Security evangelists Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla take a closer look at the latest innovations in threat intelligence, security research, and data science, with a special focus on demystifying artificial intelligence and machine learning. Be sure to listen in and subscribe!...