Today marks an exciting milestone in Microsoft’s AI journey. This morning, at an event in Recent York City, we made several major announcements to empower people across work and life—you possibly can read more about Microsoft Bing and Edge with Copilot, what’s recent from Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise for work, Microsoft Designer and Copilot in Microsoft 365, Windows 11, and recent Surface devices in Yusuf Medhi’s blog.

These innovations will redefine how we live and work with AI, and it’s so exciting to see the progress we’re making to place AI and other capabilities into the hands of our customers across every aspect of their whole lives.

As we rapidly iterate and improve technology, it’s imperative that we achieve this with a security-first mindset. This implies each constructing products which might be secure by default and ensuring that we’re adopting and deploying recent technologies, like AI, in a secure and responsible way.

Designing Windows security for the brand new era

Today, we shared the upcoming Windows 11 update that can be available on September 26, 2023. That update includes several vital security measures and updates that help make this probably the most personal and intelligent Windows experience yet. I would like to take a moment to focus on a few of the key security measures you’ll hear more about next week:

Constructing the passwordless future

We’ve talked for years in regards to the passwordless future that we envision here at Microsoft. We all know that passwords are some of the common entry points for attacks—in reality, there are greater than 4,000 password attacks every second—an almost three-fold increase since last yr.¹ That’s why it’s more vital than ever for organizations and individuals to make use of passwordless options every time possible. Within the Windows 11 update, we’re excited to introduce:

• Much more passwordless: IT teams will now find a way to remove the choice to enter a password on day one for all Windows 11 devices with Windows Hello for Business, prompting employees to make use of safer login options.
• More with passkeys: For the past several years now we have been committed to working with our industry partners and the FIDO Alliance to further the passwordless future with passkeys. Passkeys are the cross-platform, cross-ecosystem way forward for accessing web sites and applications. Today we’re pleased to share that Windows 11 users can higher make the most of passkeys. After making a passkey with Windows Hello, you possibly can access an internet site or application using your face, fingerprint, or device PIN. You possibly can manage passkeys stored in your Windows PC and sign up using passkeys saved in your cell phone for added convenience. You should utilize passkeys on a wide range of services reminiscent of GitHub.com, DocuSign.com, and more.  

Empowering IT with recent security tools

The most recent Windows 11 can even include powerful recent tools that empower IT teams to maintain their organizations and employees safer, including:

• Custom App Control for Business policies with Microsoft Intune: Applications are the lifeblood of our digital experiences, but they can even grow to be entry points for threats. With application control, apps must earn trust to run, ensuring only approved, secure, and trusted apps are allowed onto devices. By stopping unwanted or malicious code from running, application control is a critical a part of a comprehensive security strategy. Application control is usually cited as some of the effective technique of defending against malware. Customers can now use App Control for Business (formerly called Windows Defender Application Control) and its next-generation capabilities to guard their digital estate from malicious code. With App Control for Business, IT teams can configure what runs in a business environment through Microsoft Intune or other MDMs within the admin console, including organising Intune as a managed installer.
• Config Refresh: We frequently uncover threat actors launching attacks designed to evade security measures by changing settings and system configurations. Config Refresh enables settings within the Policy Configuration Service Provider (CSP) on a Windows 11 device to be reset every 90 minutes by default, or every half-hour if desired. This protects against configuration settings being unexpectedly modified through either malicious software or registry edits and ensures that your settings are retained in the best way IT configured them.

We are going to share more details about these and other recent Windows 11 features next week.

Recent advanced security for Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Basic subscribers

As an organization, we’re also enthusiastic about how we equip individuals with tools and data to higher protect themselves at home. Today, we’re excited to announce recent advanced security advantages for Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Basic subscribers.

Microsoft Defender for people introduces credit monitoring and privacy protection in america

Today, we shared two recent additions to Microsoft Defender for people that may help individuals and families protect their personal data online:

• Credit monitoring: The Defender identity theft monitoring capabilities will now be expanded with recent credit monitoring functionality. Users will get an alert any time there may be activity related to their credit that is perhaps malicious, enabling them to act quickly and help stop activity while it’s occurring.
• Privacy protection: Privacy protection shields sensitive data from threats when users are connected to open and public Wi-Fi networks. It reduces online tracking and protects against bad actors on unsecured network and enables users to cover their IP address and site from web sites, apps, and advertisers which will try to track online activity to gather personal data. Privacy protection also encrypts traffic and data through a VPN.

Learn more about Microsoft Defender for people.

OneDrive advanced security in Microsoft 365 Basic

Earlier this yr, we launched our most reasonably priced subscription plan, Microsoft 365 Basic. As promised, we’re now adding the OneDrive advanced security measures in our Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans to the Microsoft 365 Basic plan at no extra cost. Starting October 12, 2023, Microsoft 365 Basic subscribers could have access to OneDrive advanced security measures like unlimited files in your Personal Vault, expiring sharing links, password-protected sharing links, files restore, and ransomware detection and recovery. Microsoft 365 Basic continues to supply 100 GB of cloud storage and incredible peace of mind advantages at an incredible price.

Using AI securely and responsibly

As we have fun our advancements across AI, it’s vital to reiterate our commitment to deploying these technologies securely and responsibly. I even have been lucky enough to have had a front-row seat as we built, tested, and iterated on these amazing AI technologies. But as we’ve watched this evolve, we recognize that, as Spider-Man would say, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” That’s the reason we’re committed to constructing and deploying AI responsibly and ethically. You possibly can read more about our commitments on the Empowering Responsible AI practices hub.

We’ve heard from customers and seen firsthand that employees are desirous to use AI within the workplace. But many leaders have concerns in regards to the use of AI of their organizations. They worry that it may well introduce unnecessary risk. That’s why we’re taking a secure and secure approach for purchasers, empowering them to feel confident in using AI at work. For instance, Bing Chat Enterprise helps employees tap into the facility of AI while ensuring prompts and responses aren’t logged or used to coach the underlying model. Our commitments to enterprise-grade security, privacy, identity, compliance, and responsible AI in Microsoft 365 Copilot remain unchanged. And lastly we’ll proceed to make use of AI to drive a paradigm shift in security with Microsoft Security Copilot. We empathize with security and IT leaders attempting to navigate a difficult landscape and can proceed to construct security into our products to assist them harness the facility of AI confidently.

As a part of our time in Recent York today, I’m pleased to be an element of a panel discussion on this topic. Thanks for being a part of our journey and making security forefront in your lives.

Stay tuned for more exciting details from Windows next week as we have fun the provision of the brand new Windows 11 on September 26, 2023. 

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to maintain up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the most recent news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Microsoft internal data.