Toolkits to wage phishing campaigns are a now-venerable instrument for cybercriminals, but researchers recently turned up details on something like a full-fledged “business email compromise-as-a-service” platform.
Cisco Talos said Wednesday that it had found an operator panel dubbed ARToken, which shares infrastructure and other things in common with, and as an affiliate to, the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service operation built to bypass multi-factor authentication and compromise Microsoft 365 accounts. EvilTokens has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in its phishing attacks — by 1,380% early this year compared to the same period last year — with an assist from artificial intelligence integration.
ARToken is notable, though, for the capabilities that go beyond what’s been made public about EvilTokens so far by companies like Sekoia and Microsoft itself, such as inbox rule manipulation and shared access links.
“These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit — it is a complete BEC operations environment,” wrote Michael Kelley, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, in a blog post, referring to business email compromise scams that involve sending fake emails to solicit fraudulent payments.
Kelley told CyberScoop that “we’ve seen some offerings that touch on this capability, but this definitely seems more fleshed out and polished than previous instances.”
ARToken is also notable for its evasive capabilities, with a seven-layer anti-analysis system, the post states.
The research provides further details on what ARToken’s actual phishing lures look like in practice. They are targeted, rather than scattershot and opportunistic, as one lure the firm examined shows.
“The messages spoof an accounts-payable contact at a legitimate Wisconsin contractor, addressed to an accounts-payable recipient at a U.S. life sciences company — abusing a real vendor relationship rather than inventing a sender,” Kelley wrote. “The lure theme is an outstanding-invoice inquiry (‘the following invoices appear to still be outstanding… advise when this will be processed’), the kind of message accounts-payable staff are conditioned to act on.”
Kelley told CyberScoop that Cisco Talos doesn’t yet have a full sense of the breadth of the activity, nor who is making use of the capability.
“We’ve seen the public sector targeted but it’s unlikely to be the only one,” he said.
The post This phishing kit looks more like BEC-as-a-service appeared first on CyberScoop.
AI is reshaping how work gets done—and how risks emerge across cloud, data, identity, and more. Many organizations want AI-powered productivity, but their security foundations aren’t yet built for it. As organizations move toward AI-powered operating models, security becomes the critical enabler to allow innovation to scale responsibly. In this new era of agentic AI,1 protections can’t be layered on after the fact; they must be built into the fabric of how AI systems are developed, governed, and used—grounded in strong cloud security posture, clear data governance, and Zero Trust principles that assume breach and verify continuously. We’re sharing two customer spotlights that explore how global organizations are putting that approach into practice.
These customer stories highlight how security is no longer a supporting function—it’s a strategic enabler of growth, speed, and trust. As AI accelerates decision-making and reshapes how work gets done, leaders must modernize without increasing risk or slowing the business. The experiences of these forward-looking organizations reflect the realities many companies face: gaining consistent visibility across complex environments, moving faster while maintaining trust, meeting governance and compliance expectations that expand with AI adoption, and driving operational efficiency through automation. These examples will show how the right security foundation allows organizations to scale AI with confidence—turning protection into a competitive advantage, not a constraint.
First, we’ll take a closer look at St. Luke’s University Health Network.
St. Luke’s identified a critical gap in unified, real-time visibility across its security tools, limiting its ability to detect and stop threats early. The organization needed a way to see across their entire landscape and respond to threats as they emerge. To modernize and unify security operations, St. Luke’s turned to Microsoft Security Copilot to supercharge analyst productivity and help its Security Operations Center (SOC) teams operate at scale.
By connecting Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, St. Luke’s gains a single, AI-powered view across endpoints, identity, email, and cloud workloads—helping analysts move faster, correlate cyberthreats more effectively, and shift from reactive response to proactive, predictive defense. With AI embedded directly into daily workflows, teams can identify risks in real time, uncover gaps in visibility, and make more informed decisions with greater precision.
At the same time, Security Copilot agents are transforming how the SOC operates by automating time-consuming tasks like alert triage and vulnerability remediation. This reduces noise, accelerates investigations, and frees analysts to focus on real threats and strategic work. The result is a more efficient, collaborative, and resilient security operation built for today’s increasingly complex threat landscape. With Microsoft Security Copilot, St. Luke’s has:
St. Luke’s sees its investment in Security Copilot as the foundation for a self-improving security ecosystem. AI-powered security means the team stays ahead of both technological and business changes, ensuring that St. Luke’s remains resilient in the face of evolving threats. To learn more about how St. Luke’s is modernizing and unifying security operations with Microsoft Security Copilot, watch the customer video or read the full St. Luke’s customer story.
ManpowerGroup is modernizing toward a unified, cloud-based security platform to protect a highly distributed workforce, addressing identity-centric risk and complex compliance requirements as AI becomes embedded in everyday work. Their experiences show how organizations can use Microsoft Security to secure the foundation of AI transformation, end to end.
As ManpowerGroup scaled globally, its longstanding mix of security tools became more difficult to manage, driving complexity, inconsistent controls, and slower response as cyberthreats and regulatory demands increased.
To reduce tool sprawl, ManpowerGroup deployed Microsoft 365 E5 for the real-time identity, endpoint, email, and cloud prevention, detection, and response capabilities of Microsoft Defender, plus the cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) performance of Microsoft Sentinel.
By deploying Microsoft 365 E5, ManpowerGroup reduced security complexity, cut integration timelines from weeks or months to hours or days, unified global security operations, and built an AI-ready security foundation. To see how this platform approach is supporting secure, agile operations worldwide, watch the customer video read the full ManpowerGroup story.
While these customers operate in very different environments, their paths to securing their organization and adopting (or preparing to adopt) AI followed the same core pattern—one that other organizations can adopt as they modernize. Both started by anchoring security decisions in business risk, then unified signals across cloud, data, identity, and operations, and finally automated guardrails so protection could scale alongside AI-powered work. These experiences point to a clear, repeatable approach for security and adopting AI without slowing business:
This approach helped both organizations move faster with confidence—and offers a practical blueprint for others looking to secure the foundation of AI transformation.
These stories point to a broader pattern emerging among leading organizations. “Frontier firms” refers to organizations that lead in the AI era by pairing speed with trust. They move quickly—but not recklessly—because security is treated as a foundational capability, not an afterthought. For these organizations, protection is built into how work gets done: governance that scales as AI adoption grows, posture that remains resilient as environments change, and controls that operate continuously in the background. Security becomes the primitive that allows AI to be deployed with confidence, not constraint.
These customers exemplify what this looks like in practice. And through their stories, we gain a playbook that other organizations can deploy with confidence. By modernizing security as a platform—connecting visibility, governance, posture management, and automation—organizations can enable AI-powered work while strengthening trust across data, identities, cloud environments, and more. These customer stories show that in the AI era, organizations that treat security as a strategic foundation will be best positioned to lead, adapt, and compete in an AI-powered world. Learn more about how Microsoft Security helps organizations secure AI-powered work at scale.
Are you a regular user of Microsoft Defender for Cloud? Share your insights and experiences on Gartner Peer Insights.™
Learn more about Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Purview, and Zero Trust.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
1Secure agentic AI for your Frontier Transformation, Microsoft Security blog. March 9, 2026.
The post Microsoft Security success stories: How St. Luke’s and ManpowerGroup are securing AI foundations appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
At Microsoft, security innovations are purpose-built to help every organization protect end-to-end with the speed and scale of AI. Our vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. As organizations accelerate AI adoption, security teams are navigating new blind spots created by the broad distribution of agents, data, and identities across different tools and platforms. Microsoft Security’s latest updates extend visibility, control, and protection across your expanding ecosystem, from third-party apps like Claude to your cloud environments and multi-cloud infrastructure. Together, these updates help your team secure what matters most—agents, data, and identities—without slowing your own innovation. Here’s what’s new:
Security and compliance teams can now detect and investigate Claude usage alongside other cloud applications in their broader AI ecosystem. The new Claude Compliance API for Microsoft Purview delivers centralized visibility and oversight for Claude Enterprise activity enabling Microsoft Purview to provide insights on Claude interactions and audit log signals. This integration will provide visibility across Claude Enterprise, extending the Microsoft Purview experience and helping your teams protect sensitive data across your AI estate.
The new Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) experience is now generally available. This solution unifies and streamlines DSPM across scenarios, from discovery to protection, all the way to remediation, allowing teams to investigate risks and take actions on the same workflow. The new experience delivers goal-oriented flows, deeper remediation, expanded reporting, and third-party visibility. Your teams can efficiently discover sensitive data, assess risk, and take action at scale.
Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations now includes optical character recognition (OCR) and custom examination capabilities to extend investigative depth. OCR extracts text from images, bringing previously inaccessible visual content into scope for AI-powered deep content analysis. In addition to existing examination types that identify credentials, risk, and personally identifiable data, and help inform mitigation, investigators can define their own analysis with custom examination, enabling more tailored and flexible investigations based on their unique needs.
Microsoft Entra ID Account recovery is an advanced authentication recovery mechanism that enables users to regain access to their organizational accounts when they’ve lost access to all registered authentication methods. Unlike traditional password reset capabilities, Account recovery focuses on identity verification and trust re-establishment prior to replacement of authentication methods rather than simple credential recovery.
Windows 365 for Agents, now expanding in public preview, and Microsoft Agent 365 work together to provide a consistent, secure environment to run and govern agents. Agent 365 determines the work an agent is authorized to do, using shared organizational policies and identity to govern agent behavior and access. Windows 365 for Agents defines where an agent executes the work, providing Cloud PCs that enable agents to operate their own desktops and applications within a fully managed and auditable environment. Read our blog for more details.
Microsoft Security continually ships meaningful innovations across our portfolio and research-driven insights and reports for the security community. In the Loop posts are your reliable source of what’s new across Microsoft Security and what it means for your security strategy. Check back for the next drop and connect with us at Microsoft Build, June 2-3, 2026, in San Francisco, to hear directly from Microsoft Security experts and learn more about today’s releases.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
The post What’s new in Microsoft Security: May 2026 appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
The FBI is warning organizations and defenders about Kali365, a growing phishing-as-a-service platform that retrieves Microsoft 365 access tokens, issuing a public service announcement Thursday.
The toolkit bypasses multi-factor authentication and abuses OAuth device code authorizations via phishing lures impersonating common enterprise services. This technique grants cybercriminal-controlled applications access to Microsoft 365 accounts, opening victims up to a host of follow-on malicious activity, including data theft, fraud, extortion and ransomware attacks.
Kali365 is one of many rapidly emerging device-code phishing tools, which are gaining popularity as a more effective means for cybercriminals to circumvent security controls while abusing legitimate Microsoft device authorization pages, according to researchers.
Instead of gaining access to accounts via phishing kits that steal credentials and second-factor authentication codes, device-code phishing platforms connect a malicious app to a legitimate account with a single code. The process requires fewer steps and less interaction with the user, but victims do have to copy-and-paste a code generated by the Kali365 platform to grant access.
“We see quite a bit of this device-code phishing activity, but so much of it looks really similar. They’re all using the same types of lures, the same types of content, the same branding,” Selena Larson, senior threat researcher at Proofpoint, told CyberScoop. “It is very much AI generated, AI driven, and the threat actors, I think, are finding it pretty effective because we’re seeing this shift happen kind of all at once.”
Proofpoint researchers observed seven device-code phishing tools that looked nearly identical during a 10-day period last month.
Device-code phishing isn’t new, but platforms like Kali365 have integrated new techniques that differ from MFA phishing, and might be more effective as a result. “It’s something that people might not be used to. It’s a little bit sleeker,” Larson said.
This also partly explains why these cybercriminal tools are growing so quickly. Larson said Proofpoint observed an explosion in device-code phishing activity starting in February.
By April, Kali365 was up and running and primarily distributed on Telegram, according to the FBI. “Kali365 lowers the barrier of entry, providing less-technical attackers access to AI-generated phishing lures, automated campaign templates, real-time targeted individual/entity tracking dashboards, and OAuth token capture capabilities,” the agency said in the public warning.
Researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs, which has also been tracking large-scale campaigns linked to Kali365, said the platform charges affiliates $250 for 30 days of service or $2,000 for a full year.
Kali365 stores the OAuth access and refresh tokens it captures, and makes those available to affiliates on its platform. Those tokens can also be shared and reused by other cybercriminals who didn’t participate in the initial phishing lure, Arctic Wolf researchers added.
The FBI also noted that these Microsoft 365 tokens provide persistent access, allowing attackers to wade through multiple Microsoft services without a password or additional MFA requests.
“Identity can be very, very powerful once you’re in an organization,” Larson said, adding that attackers can abuse that access to impersonate people, access and steal data for extortion, commit fraud and deploy malware.
The post FBI warns about fast-growing phishing kit targeting Microsoft 365 users appeared first on CyberScoop.
AI is reshaping how work gets done—and how risks emerge across cloud, data, identity, and more. Many organizations want AI-powered productivity, but their security foundations aren’t yet built for it. As organizations move toward AI-powered operating models, security becomes the critical enabler to allow innovation to scale responsibly. In this new era of agentic AI,1 protections can’t be layered on after the fact; they must be built into the fabric of how AI systems are developed, governed, and used—grounded in strong cloud security posture, clear data governance, and Zero Trust principles that assume breach and verify continuously. We’re sharing two customer spotlights that explore how global organizations are putting that approach into practice.
These customer stories highlight how security is no longer a supporting function—it’s a strategic enabler of growth, speed, and trust. As AI accelerates decision-making and reshapes how work gets done, leaders must modernize without increasing risk or slowing the business. The experiences of these forward-looking organizations reflect the realities many companies face: gaining consistent visibility across complex environments, moving faster while maintaining trust, meeting governance and compliance expectations that expand with AI adoption, and driving operational efficiency through automation. These examples will show how the right security foundation allows organizations to scale AI with confidence—turning protection into a competitive advantage, not a constraint.
First, we’ll take a closer look at St. Luke’s University Health Network.
St. Luke’s identified a critical gap in unified, real-time visibility across its security tools, limiting its ability to detect and stop threats early. The organization needed a way to see across their entire landscape and respond to threats as they emerge. To modernize and unify security operations, St. Luke’s turned to Microsoft Security Copilot to supercharge analyst productivity and help its Security Operations Center (SOC) teams operate at scale.
By connecting Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, St. Luke’s gains a single, AI-powered view across endpoints, identity, email, and cloud workloads—helping analysts move faster, correlate cyberthreats more effectively, and shift from reactive response to proactive, predictive defense. With AI embedded directly into daily workflows, teams can identify risks in real time, uncover gaps in visibility, and make more informed decisions with greater precision.
At the same time, Security Copilot agents are transforming how the SOC operates by automating time-consuming tasks like alert triage and vulnerability remediation. This reduces noise, accelerates investigations, and frees analysts to focus on real threats and strategic work. The result is a more efficient, collaborative, and resilient security operation built for today’s increasingly complex threat landscape. With Microsoft Security Copilot, St. Luke’s has:
St. Luke’s sees its investment in Security Copilot as the foundation for a self-improving security ecosystem. AI-powered security means the team stays ahead of both technological and business changes, ensuring that St. Luke’s remains resilient in the face of evolving threats. To learn more about how St. Luke’s is modernizing and unifying security operations with Microsoft Security Copilot, watch the customer video or read the full St. Luke’s customer story.
ManpowerGroup is modernizing toward a unified, cloud-based security platform to protect a highly distributed workforce, addressing identity-centric risk and complex compliance requirements as AI becomes embedded in everyday work. Their experiences show how organizations can use Microsoft Security to secure the foundation of AI transformation, end to end.
As ManpowerGroup scaled globally, its longstanding mix of security tools became more difficult to manage, driving complexity, inconsistent controls, and slower response as cyberthreats and regulatory demands increased.
To reduce tool sprawl, ManpowerGroup deployed Microsoft 365 E5 for the real-time identity, endpoint, email, and cloud prevention, detection, and response capabilities of Microsoft Defender, plus the cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) performance of Microsoft Sentinel.
By deploying Microsoft 365 E5, ManpowerGroup reduced security complexity, cut integration timelines from weeks or months to hours or days, unified global security operations, and built an AI-ready security foundation. To see how this platform approach is supporting secure, agile operations worldwide, watch the customer video read the full ManpowerGroup story.
While these customers operate in very different environments, their paths to securing their organization and adopting (or preparing to adopt) AI followed the same core pattern—one that other organizations can adopt as they modernize. Both started by anchoring security decisions in business risk, then unified signals across cloud, data, identity, and operations, and finally automated guardrails so protection could scale alongside AI-powered work. These experiences point to a clear, repeatable approach for security and adopting AI without slowing business:
This approach helped both organizations move faster with confidence—and offers a practical blueprint for others looking to secure the foundation of AI transformation.
These stories point to a broader pattern emerging among leading organizations. “Frontier firms” refers to organizations that lead in the AI era by pairing speed with trust. They move quickly—but not recklessly—because security is treated as a foundational capability, not an afterthought. For these organizations, protection is built into how work gets done: governance that scales as AI adoption grows, posture that remains resilient as environments change, and controls that operate continuously in the background. Security becomes the primitive that allows AI to be deployed with confidence, not constraint.
These customers exemplify what this looks like in practice. And through their stories, we gain a playbook that other organizations can deploy with confidence. By modernizing security as a platform—connecting visibility, governance, posture management, and automation—organizations can enable AI-powered work while strengthening trust across data, identities, cloud environments, and more. These customer stories show that in the AI era, organizations that treat security as a strategic foundation will be best positioned to lead, adapt, and compete in an AI-powered world. Learn more about how Microsoft Security helps organizations secure AI-powered work at scale.
Are you a regular user of Microsoft Defender for Cloud? Share your insights and experiences on Gartner Peer Insights.™
Learn more about Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Purview, and Zero Trust.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
1Secure agentic AI for your Frontier Transformation, Microsoft Security blog. March 9, 2026.
The post Microsoft Security success stories: How St. Luke’s and ManpowerGroup are securing AI foundations appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
At Microsoft, security innovations are purpose-built to help every organization protect end-to-end with the speed and scale of AI. Our vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. As organizations accelerate AI adoption, security teams are navigating new blind spots created by the broad distribution of agents, data, and identities across different tools and platforms. Microsoft Security’s latest updates extend visibility, control, and protection across your expanding ecosystem, from third-party apps like Claude to your cloud environments and multi-cloud infrastructure. Together, these updates help your team secure what matters most—agents, data, and identities—without slowing your own innovation. Here’s what’s new:
Security and compliance teams can now detect and investigate Claude usage alongside other cloud applications in their broader AI ecosystem. The new Claude Compliance API for Microsoft Purview delivers centralized visibility and oversight for Claude Enterprise activity enabling Microsoft Purview to provide insights on Claude interactions and audit log signals. This integration will provide visibility across Claude Enterprise, extending the Microsoft Purview experience and helping your teams protect sensitive data across your AI estate.
The new Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) experience is now generally available. This solution unifies and streamlines DSPM across scenarios, from discovery to protection, all the way to remediation, allowing teams to investigate risks and take actions on the same workflow. The new experience delivers goal-oriented flows, deeper remediation, expanded reporting, and third-party visibility. Your teams can efficiently discover sensitive data, assess risk, and take action at scale.
Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations now includes optical character recognition (OCR) and custom examination capabilities to extend investigative depth. OCR extracts text from images, bringing previously inaccessible visual content into scope for AI-powered deep content analysis. In addition to existing examination types that identify credentials, risk, and personally identifiable data, and help inform mitigation, investigators can define their own analysis with custom examination, enabling more tailored and flexible investigations based on their unique needs.
Microsoft Entra ID Account recovery is an advanced authentication recovery mechanism that enables users to regain access to their organizational accounts when they’ve lost access to all registered authentication methods. Unlike traditional password reset capabilities, Account recovery focuses on identity verification and trust re-establishment prior to replacement of authentication methods rather than simple credential recovery.
Windows 365 for Agents, now expanding in public preview, and Microsoft Agent 365 work together to provide a consistent, secure environment to run and govern agents. Agent 365 determines the work an agent is authorized to do, using shared organizational policies and identity to govern agent behavior and access. Windows 365 for Agents defines where an agent executes the work, providing Cloud PCs that enable agents to operate their own desktops and applications within a fully managed and auditable environment. Read our blog for more details.
Microsoft Security continually ships meaningful innovations across our portfolio and research-driven insights and reports for the security community. In the Loop posts are your reliable source of what’s new across Microsoft Security and what it means for your security strategy. Check back for the next drop and connect with us at Microsoft Build, June 2-3, 2026, in San Francisco, to hear directly from Microsoft Security experts and learn more about today’s releases.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
The post What’s new in Microsoft Security: May 2026 appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
AI is rapidly reshaping how work gets done in companies and organizations. In celebrating National Small Business Month, we want to acknowledge the unique challenges that growing business leaders face as AI creates both opportunity and risk. They face constant tradeoffs between moving fast, managing risk, and keeping operations stable under pressure. At the same time, cybercriminals are moving faster, their attacks are becoming more targeted, and AI is helping increase efficacy of the threats. In fact, AI-automated phishing is 4.5 times more effective than traditional cyberattacks. It takes only one convincing phishing email, and one stray click to enable a breach.1
The key question is: How can we maximize the benefits of AI while staying protected in a rapidly evolving threat landscape?
Today’s cybersecurity landscape is defined by speed, scale, and automation—trends that disproportionately affect growing businesses. According to the 2025 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, Microsoft now processes more than 100 trillion security signals every day and blocks 4.5 million new malware files daily, underscoring just how industrialized cybercrime has become. Increasingly, cyberattackers are using AI to automate phishing, generate highly convincing scams, and rapidly adapt malware, making cyberattacks more frequent and harder to detect.
For businesses that often lack dedicated security teams or round-the-clock monitoring, this shift has real business consequences: disrupted operations, financial loss from ransomware or fraud, and lasting damage to customer trust. The report also notes that most modern cyberattacks now target identities, like user accounts and access—a challenge for organizations relying on cloud services and remote work without strong protections in place for accounts and access. As AI continues to amplify both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue for businesses—it’s a core business risk that can directly affect resilience and growth.
In this new reality, security becomes the foundation of trust—helping growing businesses protect their operations, preserve customer trust, and move forward with confidence. For business owners, cybersecurity isn’t just about stopping cyberattacks; it’s about keeping the business running day to day. When systems go down, orders can’t be processed, employees can’t do their work, and customers are left waiting or wondering whether their data is safe. Even short disruptions can have outsized consequences for growing businesses, from lost revenue and stalled growth to reputational damage that’s hard to repair. By making security a core part of how the business operates—not an afterthought—even the smallest businesses put themselves in a stronger position to withstand disruptions, maintain credibility with customers, and create a stable foundation for long-term growth.
Effective security must be simple, approachable, and fit the realities of running a business with limited time and resources. Many growing businesses don’t have dedicated security teams or the time and resources to manage complex tools, yet they still need protection that keeps pace with modern threats. Microsoft Security is built with this in mind, offering integrated, easy‑to‑manage protections that help safeguard devices, identities, email, and cloud apps without adding unnecessary complexity. Microsoft 365 Business Premium combines productivity and built-in security in one streamlined solution, with centralized visibility and automation that reduces manual effort. It helps protect your users, devices, and data across your business, so you can stay focused on customers and day-to-day operations. By providing security that works quietly in the background—and scales as the business grows—Microsoft helps businesses of all sizes protect what matters most without slowing them down.
Allowing people to operate devices and applications without conditional access increases risks. Getting that done was a huge success for us.“
—Theo Mouchteros, Head of IT Operations, Acumen
To discover the right security plan for growing business, read our small and medium business plans and pricing options or contact Microsoft Sales for more support.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
1Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025.
3The Devastating Impact of Ransomware Attacks on Small Businesses.
The post How to better protect your growing business in an AI-powered world appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
AI is rapidly reshaping how work gets done in companies and organizations. In celebrating National Small Business Month, we want to acknowledge the unique challenges that growing business leaders face as AI creates both opportunity and risk. They face constant tradeoffs between moving fast, managing risk, and keeping operations stable under pressure. At the same time, cybercriminals are moving faster, their attacks are becoming more targeted, and AI is helping increase efficacy of the threats. In fact, AI-automated phishing is 4.5 times more effective than traditional cyberattacks. It takes only one convincing phishing email, and one stray click to enable a breach.1
The key question is: How can we maximize the benefits of AI while staying protected in a rapidly evolving threat landscape?
Today’s cybersecurity landscape is defined by speed, scale, and automation—trends that disproportionately affect growing businesses. According to the 2025 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, Microsoft now processes more than 100 trillion security signals every day and blocks 4.5 million new malware files daily, underscoring just how industrialized cybercrime has become. Increasingly, cyberattackers are using AI to automate phishing, generate highly convincing scams, and rapidly adapt malware, making cyberattacks more frequent and harder to detect.
For businesses that often lack dedicated security teams or round-the-clock monitoring, this shift has real business consequences: disrupted operations, financial loss from ransomware or fraud, and lasting damage to customer trust. The report also notes that most modern cyberattacks now target identities, like user accounts and access—a challenge for organizations relying on cloud services and remote work without strong protections in place for accounts and access. As AI continues to amplify both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue for businesses—it’s a core business risk that can directly affect resilience and growth.
In this new reality, security becomes the foundation of trust—helping growing businesses protect their operations, preserve customer trust, and move forward with confidence. For business owners, cybersecurity isn’t just about stopping cyberattacks; it’s about keeping the business running day to day. When systems go down, orders can’t be processed, employees can’t do their work, and customers are left waiting or wondering whether their data is safe. Even short disruptions can have outsized consequences for growing businesses, from lost revenue and stalled growth to reputational damage that’s hard to repair. By making security a core part of how the business operates—not an afterthought—even the smallest businesses put themselves in a stronger position to withstand disruptions, maintain credibility with customers, and create a stable foundation for long-term growth.
Effective security must be simple, approachable, and fit the realities of running a business with limited time and resources. Many growing businesses don’t have dedicated security teams or the time and resources to manage complex tools, yet they still need protection that keeps pace with modern threats. Microsoft Security is built with this in mind, offering integrated, easy‑to‑manage protections that help safeguard devices, identities, email, and cloud apps without adding unnecessary complexity. Microsoft 365 Business Premium combines productivity and built-in security in one streamlined solution, with centralized visibility and automation that reduces manual effort. It helps protect your users, devices, and data across your business, so you can stay focused on customers and day-to-day operations. By providing security that works quietly in the background—and scales as the business grows—Microsoft helps businesses of all sizes protect what matters most without slowing them down.
Allowing people to operate devices and applications without conditional access increases risks. Getting that done was a huge success for us.“
—Theo Mouchteros, Head of IT Operations, Acumen
To discover the right security plan for growing business, read our small and medium business plans and pricing options or contact Microsoft Sales for more support.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
1Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025.
3The Devastating Impact of Ransomware Attacks on Small Businesses.
The post How to better protect your growing business in an AI-powered world appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
Now generally available for commercial customers.
Choose an ecosystem partner for agent security and governance
AI agents aren’t coming—they’re already in your environment. They show up in places you expect (like Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365) and even more places as technology evolves (a local autonomous personal AI assistant or a new software as a service (SaaS) agent connected to your sensitive data.)
The problem isn’t that agents exist. It’s that they proliferate fast, span apps, endpoints and cloud, and often operate outside the visibility and control of the teams accountable for risk. When an agent can invoke tools, access data, and interact with other agents, any “helpful” workflow can turn into data oversharing, tool misuse, or over-privileged actions in seconds. And as agents become even easier to create and deploy, your attack surface grows with them.
That’s why end-to-end observability matters: you can’t govern what you can’t see, and you can’t secure what you don’t understand—especially when the number of agents is a moving target.
Microsoft Agent 365 helps you take control of agent sprawl as your control plane to observe, govern, and secure agents and their interactions—including agents built with Microsoft AI and agents from our ecosystem partners—using the admin and security workflows your teams already run.
General availability starts today for Agent 365.
Additionally, we’re announcing the previews of new Agent 365 capabilities and integrations to help you scale agent adoption with the right controls in place.
As organizations move from pilot to adoption, AI agents are being deployed across increasingly diverse use cases. Some act with delegated access, working on behalf of users; others operate with their own credentials and permissions, participating in team workflows or operating behind the scenes.
With Agent 365, you can observe, govern, and secure AI agents whether they act on behalf of users with delegated access—for example, an agent that helps employees organize their inbox—or agents that operate with their own access and scope of work—such as an agent autonomously triaging support tickets.
| Supported by Agent 365 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Agents working on behalf of users (delegated access) Generally available | Agents operating behind the scenes (own access) Generally available | Agents participating in team workflows (own access) Public Preview |
Users are installing agents like OpenClaw and Claude Code on their devices and adopting SaaS agents built by developers on new and emerging platforms. Many of these local and cloud-hosted agents run unmanaged and outside of traditional governance, as they autonomously execute tasks, modify code, or access confidential information, creating a new wave of shadow AI.
To help organizations address accelerating agent sprawl and the rise of unmanaged agents, we’re introducing new capabilities as part of Agent 365, Microsoft Defender, and Intune so you can discover shadow agents, and apply appropriate controls, such as blocking unmanaged agents.
With Microsoft Defender and Intune, organizations will be able to discover and manage local AI agents running on Windows devices, starting with OpenClaw agents and expanding soon to other widely used agents like GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. Customers enrolled in the Frontier program can see if OpenClaw agents are being used in the organization, which devices they are running on, and use Intune policies to block common ways that OpenClaw runs on the new Shadow AI page in Agent 365 in the Microsoft 365 admin center and in the Intune admin center. Through Agent 365 registry, the inventory of local agents will be available in Defender and Intune so IT, endpoint management, and security teams can get a consistent view of discovered local agents in their environment and take appropriate action.
Starting in June 2026, Microsoft Defender will also provide asset context mapping for each agent including the devices they run on, MCP servers configured for those agents, the identities associated with them, and the cloud resources those identities can reach. This will give security teams the context needed to assess exposure and potential blast radius. They can then investigate agent activity, such as file access and network behavior, using familiar endpoint data, and use those insights to identify misconfigurations and even define custom detections.
Beyond monitoring, organizations will be able to apply policy-based controls to set guardrails for what agents are allowed to do—helping protect both agents and organizations from compromise and misuse—with initial support delivered for OpenClaw through Intune. If a managed agent exhibits malicious behavior patterns, such as attempting to access or exfiltrate sensitive data, Defender will be able to block coding agents in runtime and generate alerts with rich incident context to support investigation and response.
Context mapping capabilities, policy-based controls, plus runtime blocking and alerts will be available in Agent 365 through Intune and Defender public preview in June 2026.
As developers are rapidly building agents with Microsoft Foundry, AWS Bedrock, and Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Google Vertex AI) and deploying cloud agents across multicloud and multi-platform environments, the agent sprawl challenge intensifies. To manage potential security risks or vulnerabilities before they become breaches, security and IT teams need visibility to which cloud agents are running, what models these agents are built on, and what resources they’re accessing.
Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Agent 365 registry sync with AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud connections, enabling IT teams to automatically discover, inventory, and, soon, perform basic lifecycle governance—for example, start, stop, delete agents—across these platforms.
Agent 365 works with prebuilt agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio or Microsoft Foundry for your organization, and agents built by software development companies partnered with Microsoft.
Delivering on our promise of control plane for the broad agent ecosystem, we’re excited to announce ecosystem partner agents fully configured to be managed by Agent 365, including Genspark, Zensai, Egnyte, and Zendesk, and agents built on agent factories, including Kasisto, Kore, and n8n. Organizations can observe, govern, and secure these agents in the Agent 365 control plane, with no integration work by IT or security teams.
Enterprises can easily build AI agents today, but scaling them with trust and governance is where most initiatives stall. With Kore.ai deeply integrated into Microsoft Agent 365, identity, security, and governance are built in from the start—empowering enterprises to move from pilots to AI at scale with confidence.
—– Raj Koneru, Chief Executive Officer of Kore.ai
The Agent 365 developer and ecosystem partners play a critical role in extending agents into line-of-business systems, building vertical and scenario-specific integrations, modernizing legacy automation into agent workflows, extending Copilot experiences with custom agents, and helping customers operationalize agent ecosystems at scale. These Agent 365 enabled agents are then observable, governable, and securable in the Agent 365 control plane, accelerating adoption for your organization.
While Agent 365 provides the control plane to observe, govern, and secure agent activity across the enterprise, Windows 365 for Agents—now available in public preview (in the United States only)—provides a secured, managed environment where agents can carry out that work. It introduces a new class of Cloud PCs purpose-built for agentic workloads and managed in Intune, allowing agents to run in policy-controlled environments, interact with applications, and operate with the same identity, security, and management controls already used for employees.
Now, with Agent 365, you can also observe and secure agents running on Windows 365 for Agents in Microsoft 365 admin center, understanding which agents are connected to the cloud-powered compute. Together, they enable organizations to move from visibility and governance of agents to confidently running them in production environments.
AI agents can operate much faster than human users. Without proper guardrails, they can connect to risky web destinations, interact with unsanctioned AI services, handle sensitive files unsafely, or be manipulated through malicious prompt-based attacks. These risks are harder to manage when security teams lack consistent visibility and controls for agent traffic to internet, SaaS, and AI services.
To give security teams a consistent way to inspect agent traffic at the network layer, in general availability today, Agent 365 extends Microsoft Entra network controls to Microsoft Copilot Studio agents and agents running on user endpoint devices, including local agents such as OpenClaw. These controls can help identify unsanctioned AI usage, restrict connections to only approved web destinations, filter risky file movement, and help block malicious prompt-based attacks before they lead to harmful actions.
Agent 365 extends even further beyond Microsoft platforms to discover, observe, govern, and secure local, SaaS, and cloud agents across your agentic AI ecosystem. Each of today’s announcements build upon Agent 365 capabilities we shared in March 2026 as well as detailed feedback of customers using the Frontier program, developers integrating with the platform, and partners testing Agent 365 capabilities.
With Agent 365, we can scale and govern AI agents with confidence, while maintaining enterprise grade security and control. Agent 365 enables organizations to move beyond experimentation, driving tangible business value and innovation through trusted AI adoption. By providing a robust and integrated platform, Agent 365 empowers teams to confidently embrace AI and accelerate transformation across the enterprise.
—Yuji Shono, Head of the Global AI Office, NTT DATA Group Corporation, a global infrastructure, networking, and IT services provider.
As organizations begin to adopt Agent 365 at scale, we’ve collaborated with strategic partners to create targeted services to help customers onboard, tackle governance challenges and realize the platform’s full value.
Partner services offered today include expertise and guidance for:
These valuable services are typically scoped as workshops and assessments (diagnose and roadmap), governance and enablement (stand up the control plane and guardrails), managed services (run and improve continuously), advisory and readiness (operating model and adoption readiness), and security and integration (harden posture and integrate third-party agents.)
Agent 365 is now available in Microsoft 365 E7 or standalone at USD15 per user per month. Each Agent 365 license covers an individual who manages or sponsors agents, or uses agents to do work on their behalf, ensuring all agent activity is consistently governed across the organization in a way that’s predictable for scaled growth.
In addition to the expertise of your Microsoft 365 team and partners, Agent 365 resources to support your experience include:
Plus, on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, a team of Agent 365 experts are hosting a live “Ask Microsoft Anything” to answer your questions about Agent 365—we hope you’ll join for the discussion.
Now generally available for commercial customers.
Choose an ecosystem partner for agent security and governance
The post Microsoft Agent 365, now generally available, expands capabilities and integrations appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
Now generally available for commercial customers.
Choose an ecosystem partner for agent security and governance
AI agents aren’t coming—they’re already in your environment. They show up in places you expect (like Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365) and even more places as technology evolves (a local autonomous personal AI assistant or a new software as a service (SaaS) agent connected to your sensitive data.)
The problem isn’t that agents exist. It’s that they proliferate fast, span apps, endpoints and cloud, and often operate outside the visibility and control of the teams accountable for risk. When an agent can invoke tools, access data, and interact with other agents, any “helpful” workflow can turn into data oversharing, tool misuse, or over-privileged actions in seconds. And as agents become even easier to create and deploy, your attack surface grows with them.
That’s why end-to-end observability matters: you can’t govern what you can’t see, and you can’t secure what you don’t understand—especially when the number of agents is a moving target.
Microsoft Agent 365 helps you take control of agent sprawl as your control plane to observe, govern, and secure agents and their interactions—including agents built with Microsoft AI and agents from our ecosystem partners—using the admin and security workflows your teams already run.
General availability starts today for Agent 365.
Additionally, we’re announcing the previews of new Agent 365 capabilities and integrations to help you scale agent adoption with the right controls in place.
As organizations move from pilot to adoption, AI agents are being deployed across increasingly diverse use cases. Some act with delegated access, working on behalf of users; others operate with their own credentials and permissions, participating in team workflows or operating behind the scenes.
With Agent 365, you can observe, govern, and secure AI agents whether they act on behalf of users with delegated access—for example, an agent that helps employees organize their inbox—or agents that operate with their own access and scope of work—such as an agent autonomously triaging support tickets.
| Supported by Agent 365 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Agents working on behalf of users (delegated access) Generally available | Agents operating behind the scenes (own access) Generally available | Agents participating in team workflows (own access) Public Preview |
Users are installing agents like OpenClaw and Claude Code on their devices and adopting SaaS agents built by developers on new and emerging platforms. Many of these local and cloud-hosted agents run unmanaged and outside of traditional governance, as they autonomously execute tasks, modify code, or access confidential information, creating a new wave of shadow AI.
To help organizations address accelerating agent sprawl and the rise of unmanaged agents, we’re introducing new capabilities as part of Agent 365, Microsoft Defender, and Intune so you can discover shadow agents, and apply appropriate controls, such as blocking unmanaged agents.
With Microsoft Defender and Intune, organizations will be able to discover and manage local AI agents running on Windows devices, starting with OpenClaw agents and expanding soon to other widely used agents like GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. Customers enrolled in the Frontier program can see if OpenClaw agents are being used in the organization, which devices they are running on, and use Intune policies to block common ways that OpenClaw runs on the new Shadow AI page in Agent 365 in the Microsoft 365 admin center and in the Intune admin center. Through Agent 365 registry, the inventory of local agents will be available in Defender and Intune so IT, endpoint management, and security teams can get a consistent view of discovered local agents in their environment and take appropriate action.
Starting in June 2026, Microsoft Defender will also provide asset context mapping for each agent including the devices they run on, MCP servers configured for those agents, the identities associated with them, and the cloud resources those identities can reach. This will give security teams the context needed to assess exposure and potential blast radius. They can then investigate agent activity, such as file access and network behavior, using familiar endpoint data, and use those insights to identify misconfigurations and even define custom detections.
Beyond monitoring, organizations will be able to apply policy-based controls to set guardrails for what agents are allowed to do—helping protect both agents and organizations from compromise and misuse—with initial support delivered for OpenClaw through Intune. If a managed agent exhibits malicious behavior patterns, such as attempting to access or exfiltrate sensitive data, Defender will be able to block coding agents in runtime and generate alerts with rich incident context to support investigation and response.
Context mapping capabilities, policy-based controls, plus runtime blocking and alerts will be available in Agent 365 through Intune and Defender public preview in June 2026.
As developers are rapidly building agents with Microsoft Foundry, AWS Bedrock, and Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Google Vertex AI) and deploying cloud agents across multicloud and multi-platform environments, the agent sprawl challenge intensifies. To manage potential security risks or vulnerabilities before they become breaches, security and IT teams need visibility to which cloud agents are running, what models these agents are built on, and what resources they’re accessing.
Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Agent 365 registry sync with AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud connections, enabling IT teams to automatically discover, inventory, and, soon, perform basic lifecycle governance—for example, start, stop, delete agents—across these platforms.
Agent 365 works with prebuilt agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio or Microsoft Foundry for your organization, and agents built by software development companies partnered with Microsoft.
Delivering on our promise of control plane for the broad agent ecosystem, we’re excited to announce ecosystem partner agents fully configured to be managed by Agent 365, including Genspark, Zensai, Egnyte, and Zendesk, and agents built on agent factories, including Kasisto, Kore, and n8n. Organizations can observe, govern, and secure these agents in the Agent 365 control plane, with no integration work by IT or security teams.
Enterprises can easily build AI agents today, but scaling them with trust and governance is where most initiatives stall. With Kore.ai deeply integrated into Microsoft Agent 365, identity, security, and governance are built in from the start—empowering enterprises to move from pilots to AI at scale with confidence.
—– Raj Koneru, Chief Executive Officer of Kore.ai
The Agent 365 developer and ecosystem partners play a critical role in extending agents into line-of-business systems, building vertical and scenario-specific integrations, modernizing legacy automation into agent workflows, extending Copilot experiences with custom agents, and helping customers operationalize agent ecosystems at scale. These Agent 365 enabled agents are then observable, governable, and securable in the Agent 365 control plane, accelerating adoption for your organization.
While Agent 365 provides the control plane to observe, govern, and secure agent activity across the enterprise, Windows 365 for Agents—now available in public preview (in the United States only)—provides a secured, managed environment where agents can carry out that work. It introduces a new class of Cloud PCs purpose-built for agentic workloads and managed in Intune, allowing agents to run in policy-controlled environments, interact with applications, and operate with the same identity, security, and management controls already used for employees.
Now, with Agent 365, you can also observe and secure agents running on Windows 365 for Agents in Microsoft 365 admin center, understanding which agents are connected to the cloud-powered compute. Together, they enable organizations to move from visibility and governance of agents to confidently running them in production environments.
AI agents can operate much faster than human users. Without proper guardrails, they can connect to risky web destinations, interact with unsanctioned AI services, handle sensitive files unsafely, or be manipulated through malicious prompt-based attacks. These risks are harder to manage when security teams lack consistent visibility and controls for agent traffic to internet, SaaS, and AI services.
To give security teams a consistent way to inspect agent traffic at the network layer, in general availability today, Agent 365 extends Microsoft Entra network controls to Microsoft Copilot Studio agents and agents running on user endpoint devices, including local agents such as OpenClaw. These controls can help identify unsanctioned AI usage, restrict connections to only approved web destinations, filter risky file movement, and help block malicious prompt-based attacks before they lead to harmful actions.
Agent 365 extends even further beyond Microsoft platforms to discover, observe, govern, and secure local, SaaS, and cloud agents across your agentic AI ecosystem. Each of today’s announcements build upon Agent 365 capabilities we shared in March 2026 as well as detailed feedback of customers using the Frontier program, developers integrating with the platform, and partners testing Agent 365 capabilities.
With Agent 365, we can scale and govern AI agents with confidence, while maintaining enterprise grade security and control. Agent 365 enables organizations to move beyond experimentation, driving tangible business value and innovation through trusted AI adoption. By providing a robust and integrated platform, Agent 365 empowers teams to confidently embrace AI and accelerate transformation across the enterprise.
—Yuji Shono, Head of the Global AI Office, NTT DATA Group Corporation, a global infrastructure, networking, and IT services provider.
As organizations begin to adopt Agent 365 at scale, we’ve collaborated with strategic partners to create targeted services to help customers onboard, tackle governance challenges and realize the platform’s full value.
Partner services offered today include expertise and guidance for:
These valuable services are typically scoped as workshops and assessments (diagnose and roadmap), governance and enablement (stand up the control plane and guardrails), managed services (run and improve continuously), advisory and readiness (operating model and adoption readiness), and security and integration (harden posture and integrate third-party agents.)
Agent 365 is now available in Microsoft 365 E7 or standalone at USD15 per user per month. Each Agent 365 license covers an individual who manages or sponsors agents, or uses agents to do work on their behalf, ensuring all agent activity is consistently governed across the organization in a way that’s predictable for scaled growth.
In addition to the expertise of your Microsoft 365 team and partners, Agent 365 resources to support your experience include:
Plus, on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, a team of Agent 365 experts are hosting a live “Ask Microsoft Anything” to answer your questions about Agent 365—we hope you’ll join for the discussion.
Now generally available for commercial customers.
Choose an ecosystem partner for agent security and governance
The post Microsoft Agent 365, now generally available, expands capabilities and integrations appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
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