In a recent blog post, Microsoft has announced that it will share its knowledge of coronavirus-related cyberthreats in a bid to help security teams identify and address new threats. Processing trillions of signals each day across identities, endpoint, cloud, applications, and email, Microsoft gains a greater visibility into a broad range of COVID-19-themed attacks – and sharing this will allow the wider security community to detect, protect, and respond to these threats. This will be made available through the Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP), Azure Sentinel GitHub and the Microsoft Graph Security API.
This is an excellent move by Microsoft. In a time when cyber-attacks are more common every day, working collaboratively is the best way to protect each other, and making information open source is critical. This is not an individual war on specific targets from unique attackers. This is a global, multidirectional attack that we can only defend against by working together.
This new initiative will also better protect smaller businesses, who often lack the necessary security resources to defend against more sophisticated attacks. COVID-19 acts as tremendous bait in the latest wave of cyber-attacks, and those targeted are in desperate need of support from larger-scale organisations around the world.