The flaw allows attackers to access the SAM database, extract NTLM hashes, and gain System privileges.
The post Recent Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Exploited as Zero-Day appeared first on SecurityWeek.
We are living through a moment that will be defined not only by advanced technology and AI, but by the real-world infrastructure that makes it possible. And that infrastructure will be built the way critical infrastructure has always been built—by electricians, ironworkers, pipefitters, operating engineers, laborers, and the many other skilled professionals who turn plans into places and progress.
In a world that can feel increasingly virtual, there are millions of skilled trade professionals who remind us of a simple truth: what happens next still depends on uniquely human skills and what we can create, build, wire, weld, install, and maintain.
At Microsoft, we are honored to partner with North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) to invest in the people who build with us. Today we are announcing an expanded partnership to support a strong, skilled workforce pipeline and help workers across North America build the skills needed to succeed in an AI-powered economy.
We believe that the North American skilled trades workforce is one of the most talented workforce systems. This week, thousands of these talented workers from across North America gather in Washington, DC for their annual Legislative Conference, an annual convening that reflects both the enduring strength of the trades and the country’s need for what they do.
As part of our Community-First approach to AI infrastructure we committed to investing in the places where we build, in the people who build with us, and in the long-term capacity of local economies. AI is a tool we will use, and I believe it will help in ways we plan and manage work, but it will not replace the experience, judgment, and craft that define the trades. Instead, it can amplify those human skills: helping people work more safely, learning more quickly, and delivering higher-quality outcomes on increasingly complex job sites.
Our collaboration with NABTU is built on a simple but powerful idea: the people building the future should also be equipped to thrive in it.
Over the past year, we have worked together to bring AI literacy directly into the apprenticeship and training infrastructure that NABTU operates across all 50 states and Canada. More than 1,500 instructors in hands-on training centers nationwide have already participated. That early momentum confirmed that when you meet workers where they are, with content designed for how they actually work, the true benefit of AI can be felt.
Today, we are expanding that effort significantly. Beginning now, no-cost AI literacy courses tailored specifically for the skilled trades are available on LinkedIn Learning, open to instructors, apprentices, and journey-level workers across North America. One course is designed for faculty and staff in apprenticeship training environments. The other is built for apprentices and journey-level professionals who are on job sites every day. Upon completion, participants earn an industry-recognized AI literacy credential—a tangible marker of readiness that travels with them throughout their careers.
We are also extending our partnership to TradesFutures, NABTU’s affiliated nonprofit that recruits, prepares, and connects people to union construction apprenticeship programs across 34 states. Through TradesFutures, we will expand awareness of careers in data center construction alongside AI literacy and link opportunity with infrastructure being built today with the skills that will define tomorrow. The training will be available to all TradesFutures Apprenticeship Readiness Programs, which operate in community-based workforce development settings, high schools, correctional facilities, and labor organizations.
There is a question at the center of every conversation about AI and work: who gets to participate?
For too long, the answer has defaulted to those already inside the technology sector or sitting behind desks. But the reality of the AI economy is far broader than any single industry.
At Microsoft, we believe that AI literacy should be as foundational as safety training on a job site. It is not about turning electricians into software engineers. It is about ensuring that an apprentice learning to install electrical systems in a data center also understands the technology those systems support and can use AI tools to work more safely, more efficiently, and with greater confidence.
That philosophy aligns directly with how we think about jobs and skills at Microsoft Elevate—not as a one-time event but as an ongoing investment in human potential that increases the opportunity for all.
This work with NABTU is part of a broader pattern of partnership between Microsoft and the labor community. In December 2023, Microsoft and the AFL-CIO announced a first-of-its-kind partnership between a technology company and a national labor organization focused on AI. That agreement established a framework for sharing AI insights with labor leaders, incorporating worker perspectives into technology development, and shaping public policy that supports frontline workers.
Since then, through our Microsoft Elevate initiative, we have continued to deepen our engagement with workforce organizations, educators, and community institutions. From partnerships with the American Federation of Teachers on the National Academy for AI Instruction to the National Education Association and National Association of Workforce Boards, our work with community colleges across the country, the thread that connects all of this work is a commitment to meeting people where they are—and making sure they have the skills and credentials to move forward.
Technology only fulfills its promise when it lifts people up, and the opportunity here is enormous. For this sector, for every industry that depends on it, for organizations of every size, and for individual workers and entrepreneurs. But it will only be realized if AI is designed and deployed around the realities of the work. In the trades, that means tools that are practical, trusted, and tailored so that AI can help more people stay in the field doing what they love, while opening doors to new kinds of growth.
Think about what that can mean for a contractor who’s running a small shop after a full day on the job: AI that helps draft and send invoices faster, reconcile receipts, and keep paperwork from piling up late at night. Or AI that can sift through public records—permits, zoning updates, capital plans, and procurement notices—to spot building trends in a community and flag where demand is headed next. Or tools that help identify bid opportunities and assemble first-draft scopes and materials lists based on prior jobs. On the job site itself, we believe AI can support safer work, such as summarizing daily plans, translating instructions, and surfacing the right checklist or standard, so people can focus on the work that requires human judgment.
There remain big questions about the impact of AI, and while we do not yet have all the answers, we do know that the future will not be built by technology alone. It will be built by the people who show up every day with skill and purpose to construct the world we all want to live in. If we continue to work together, AI can help expand opportunities: stronger businesses, safer job sites, better projects, and more people able to earn a great living in the communities they call home.
The post Putting AI to work with the building trades appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.
At AWS, we’ve spent decades developing processes and tools that enable us to defend millions of customers simultaneously, wherever they operate around the world. AI has been an extremely helpful addition to the automation our security and threat intelligence teams do every day, and we’re still early in this journey. Our AI-powered log analysis system has reduced the time SecOps engineers spend analyzing security logs from an average of six hours to just seven minutes, a 50x productivity increase that lets us detect and respond to threats faster than ever. Across AWS, we analyze over 400 trillion network flows per day to detect patterns that signal emerging threats. In 2025 alone, we blocked over 300 million attempts to maliciously encrypt customer files hosted on Amazon S3. At this scale, every improvement in our operations helps protect all customers. AI is already helping us make our defenses stronger for everyone, and I’m excited to see that improvement continue.
Today, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative designed to secure the world’s most critical software and advance the cybersecurity practices the industry will need as AI grows more capable. Organizations that build or maintain critical digital infrastructure are getting early access to Claude Mythos Preview, a new class of AI model, to find and patch vulnerabilities in the systems the world depends on. Given our role in securing some of the world’s most essential infrastructure, AWS is playing an integral part in advancing this work.
As part of Project Glasswing, we’ve already applied Claude Mythos Preview to critical AWS codebases that undergo continuous AI-powered security reviews, and even in those well-tested environments, it’s helped us identify additional opportunities to strengthen our code. In our internal testing, Claude Mythos Preview has proven more productive than previous models at surfacing security findings, requiring less manual guidance from our engineers to deliver actionable results. We’ve also given early access to a select group of AWS customers, who are deploying Claude Mythos Preview in their own security workflows and helping shape how the model evolves.
As AI tools grow more powerful in their ability to identify security issues, so must our ability to use them defensively. To that end, we’ve been working closely with Anthropic to help ensure Claude Mythos Preview is ready for enterprise use. AWS is Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, safety research, and foundation model development. More broadly, AWS provides the foundational infrastructure that the world’s leading AI companies rely on to build, train, and deploy their most advanced models. We’re bringing decades of security experience to this partnership, helping to ensure Claude Mythos Preview is ready for even more organizations to build upon and operate securely at scale.
Claude Mythos Preview signals an upcoming wave of models that can find vulnerabilities and build working exploits at a scale and speed we haven’t seen before. Anthropic and AWS are taking a deliberately cautious approach to release. Access begins with a small number of organizations, prioritizing internet-critical companies and open-source maintainers whose software and digital services impact hundreds of millions of users. The goal: find and fix vulnerabilities in the world’s most critical software. Claude Mythos Preview is available in gated research preview through Amazon Bedrock with enterprise-grade security controls, including customer-managed encryption, VPC isolation, and detailed logging, so your team can explore Claude Mythos Preview’s capabilities without exposing production assets to unnecessary risk.
Our work with Project Glasswing is grounded in a philosophy we’ve developed over two decades of securing mission-critical workloads: you can’t wait for threats to materialize before building your defenses. You have to look around corners, adopt new technologies, build protections first, deploy them in your own operations at scale, and refine them based on what you learn.
That’s exactly what we’ve done at AWS with AI and security. Our approach spans the full spectrum: proactive defense through threat hunting and vulnerability research, dynamic response to active campaigns, and third-party certifications that verify our security practices meet the highest industry standards. This operational experience has taught us where AI accelerates security work and where human judgment remains essential. And it’s reinforced that security innovation must be pragmatic: proven in production before we ask you to rely on it.
That’s also why we help define what secure AI looks like. We became the first major cloud provider to achieve ISO 42001 certification for AI services. We’re active participants in OWASP, the Coalition for Secure AI, and the Frontier Model Forum. And we co-founded the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to enable better threat intelligence sharing across the ecosystem. The AWS Nitro System provides mathematically proven isolation for workloads. Systems and services like KMS, Nitro, EKS, and Lambda are designed with zero-operator access architectures, meaning AWS personnel can’t access your data. These aren’t aspirational goals. They’re how we operate today, at scale, every day.
Amazon Bedrock is where these principles come to life for AI. Bedrock provides policy-enforced access controls, built-in evaluation tools to measure how effectively models identify and validate vulnerabilities, and the ability to run workloads inside your own virtual private cloud. AWS is also the first cloud provider to achieve FedRAMP High and Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 4 and 5 authorizations for generally available Claude foundation models. Amazon Bedrock is already where the most security-sensitive organizations trust Anthropic’s technology, and it makes perfect sense for Claude Mythos Preview.
The same principles that guide our work at AWS scale apply regardless of which AI tools you’re using: comprehensive observability, defense in depth, automation where it adds value, and human judgment where it’s essential. Here’s how to put them into practice.
Prepare for the next generation of AI security. Claude Mythos Preview signals an upcoming wave of AI models that will transform cybersecurity. Start strengthening your security posture now so your organization is ready as these capabilities become more broadly available. Claude Mythos Preview is available in gated preview through Amazon Bedrock, and access is limited to an initial allow-list of organizations. If your organization has been allow-listed, your AWS account team will reach out directly.
Run on-demand penetration testing with AWS Security Agent. Now generally available, AWS Security Agent delivers autonomous penetration testing that operates 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of manual penetration tests. It transforms penetration testing from a periodic bottleneck into an on-demand capability that scales with your development velocity across AWS, Azure, GCP, other cloud providers, and on-premises. AWS Security Agent represents a new class of frontier agents: autonomous systems that work independently to achieve goals, scale to tackle concurrent tasks, and run persistently without constant human oversight. It deploys specialized AI agents to discover, validate, and report security vulnerabilities through sophisticated multi-step scenarios. Unlike traditional scanners that generate findings without validation, AWS Security Agent identifies potential vulnerabilities, then attempts to exploit them with targeted payloads and attack chains to confirm they are legitimate security risks. Each finding includes CVSS risk scores, application-specific severity ratings, detailed reproduction steps, and remediation suggestions. The result: penetration testing that once took weeks now completes in hours, scales across your entire application portfolio, and helps you get started with remediation instead of leaving you with a report. New customers can explore AWS Security Agent with a 2-month free trial.
Build AI applications you can trust with Amazon Bedrock. For teams building with generative AI, the challenge isn’t just making AI work, it’s making AI work safely. Amazon Bedrock provides the security and safety controls you need to deploy AI responsibly. Its Automated Reasoning capability is the first and only AI safeguard to use formal logic to help prevent factual errors from hallucinations, providing verifiable explanations with 99% accuracy, a capability we’ve refined over more than a decade of applying formal methods across AWS storage, identity, and networking. Amazon Bedrock also provides customizable guardrails that block harmful content and enforce your content policies, along with comprehensive observability to track AI behavior and detect anomalies across your workloads.
The threat landscape isn’t waiting for us to catch up. Nation-state actors, ransomware operators, and supply chain attackers are already using AI to scale their operations. Our job is to stay ahead by building defenses first, deploying them at scale, and sharing what we learn so the entire community benefits.
That’s what we do every day at AWS. We build in security from the start, ensuring it works and scales before we ask customers to rely on it. We set standards rather than follow them. And we look around corners to address tomorrow’s challenges today.
As AI capabilities continue to evolve, this approach won’t change. We’ll keep building defenses first, refining them at scale, and working with partners like Anthropic to ensure the next generation of AI security tools meets the real-world needs of enterprises defending at this scale.
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For more than 40 years, Microsoft has supported and scaled Canadian innovation. Now, with more than 5,300 employees and 11 offices across Canada, Microsoft Canada’s technology ecosystem is a trusted partner and key driver of economic opportunity across the country, with $60 billion contributed to Canada’s GDP each year through our cloud customers and partner network and more than 426,000 jobs supported—over 2% of Canada’s workforce.
As we look ahead, we are proud to be building the critical infrastructure Canada needs to power its digital future.
In December 2025, Microsoft announced the largest investment in our history in Canada, a $19 billion commitment between 2023 and 2027 to expand cloud and AI infrastructure, strengthen digital sovereignty, advance cybersecurity, and support skills and jobs for Canadians.
Today, as we move from investment to implementation, we want to share how we are putting those commitments into practice through a Community-First approach to AI infrastructure, one that is globally consistent in principle and delivered in ways that reflect Canada’s communities, institutions, and priorities.
AI infrastructure brings enormous opportunity. But we know Canadians also have real questions about affordability, energy and water use, jobs, and the impact large-scale infrastructure has on local communities.
Those questions matter. Technological progress only works when communities see themselves in the benefits.
At Microsoft, we believe communities should share in the benefits of AI infrastructure, and they should not bear the costs. That belief is reflected in five Community–First principles that guide how we build and operate datacentres around the world—and how we partner locally in Canada:
Together, these principles shape how we build and operate our datacentres across Ontario and Québec and how we partner with governments, utilities, educators, community organizations, labour groups, and local nonprofits.
Below, we outline what each principle means in practice and the concrete steps we are taking to put these commitments into action here in Canada.
As Canada expands AI and cloud capacity, electricity systems are under pressure. Microsoft is committed to ensuring that our datacentres do not increase electricity prices for Canadians. In practical terms, this means that our infrastructure growth must be matched by responsible planning, full cost recovery, and investments that support long-term system reliability.
While electricity systems are provincially governed and solutions vary by region, our commitment is consistent across the country: AI infrastructure growth must support grid resilience and affordability for communities.
To deliver on this principle, Microsoft will:
In Ontario and Québec, we are working closely with provincial governments, utilities, system operators, and regulators to align datacentre growth with planned investments in generation and transmission.
We pay the full cost of the electricity we use. We also continue to design and operate next-generation datacentres that are significantly more energy efficient, reducing the amount of energy required for each unit of computing while scaling to meet growing demand.
To date, we have also paid for substations and fully dedicated the substations and land to provincial utilities. By paying our full share and planning ahead, we aim to support Canada’s economic growth without overstressing the electric grid or shifting costs onto households or small businesses.
Canada’s cooler climate is a real advantage when it comes to water stewardship. In Ontario and Québec, our datacentres are designed with a reduction-first approach, relying primarily on outside air and using water for cooling less than 5% of the year. When water is used, it is cycled efficiently through the system multiple times and managed in compliance with local regulations. This results in relatively low projected water withdrawals that reflect both local conditions and responsible designs.
Microsoft’s approach to water in Canada prioritizes:
Where communities identify opportunities to strengthen local water systems, we believe infrastructure investment should contribute to broader watershed health, not compete with it.
To bring this principle to life, Microsoft is taking locally grounded steps to strengthen water systems in the Canadian communities where we operate.
In Ontario and Québec, we will partner on region–specific water projects that improve infrastructure resilience, restore watersheds, and support long-term stewardship. These projects, developed with local governments, conservation partners, and research institutions, include:
Together, these efforts reflect a reduction first approach: minimizing reliance on potable water in our datacentres while investing in the resilience of shared water systems communities depend on every day.
In Canada, Microsoft’s datacentre construction is delivered through unionized skilled trades labour, supporting high quality jobs, strong safety standards, and apprenticeship pathways. Beyond construction, our focus is on building durable pathways into long–term careers connected to AI infrastructure and the digital economy. Through partnerships with educators, workforce organizations, and labour groups, Microsoft is working to ensure that Canadians can access the jobs created by this investment.
We are advancing this principle through several concrete steps:
Datacentres are long–term investments. They contribute directly to municipal tax bases, helping fund essential public services, without asking for special tax treatment.
The arrival of a corporate citizen like Microsoft is a real benefit to our community in L’Ancienne-Lorette, particularly through significant contribution to municipal tax revenues. It also points to a positive impact on community engagement, with discussions already underway.”
- Gaétan Pageau, Mayor, City of L’Ancienne-Lorette
Strong communities are essential to sustainable growth. That is why Microsoft invests not only in infrastructure, but also in the social and economic foundations that support it.
Across Ontario and Québec, we are continuing to expand partnerships that support:
These investments help ensure that AI infrastructure contributes to the vitality of the communities where it is built.
Infrastructure alone is not enough. The real opportunity comes when its benefits are widely shared. It is the foundation upon which others build: startups launching new ideas, researchers advancing discovery, educators preparing the next generation, and governments and communities solving real challenges.
To fully realize the promise of AI, Canadians must have access to the skills, tools, and opportunities to participate in, and shape the AI economy. That means ensuring AI doesn’t remain concentrated in a few places or organizations, but instead diffuses across our economy and communities, empowering people in every sector to innovate, build, and lead.
Microsoft is announcing several new Canada specific actions to expand access to AI and digital skills:
AI infrastructure is most powerful when it is built with trust, transparency, and partnership. That is why our approach starts and ends with communities. We are committed to building AI infrastructure in Canada in a way that earns trust, supports local priorities, and strengthens long –term prosperity. As this work continues, we will keep listening, learning, and engaging, because building the future of AI means building it with communities, not just in them.
The post Building AI infrastructure the Community-First way in Canada appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.
Today we are sharing news about important changes we are making in our cloud services offerings in the United Kingdom. These changes address issues the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has raised and reviewed as part of its Cloud Market Investigation Report, announced in July 2025.
In conjunction with the CMA’s extensive review, today’s changes will apply to UK customers using Microsoft Azure. The changes address the CMA’s commitment to ensuring that UK customers can continue to move, deploy, and operate their workloads in the clouds of their choice with confidence, flexibility, and ever-reduced friction. The changes are focused on data egress, switching, and interoperability, and are described in a more detailed fact sheet accompanying this statement. We will implement all these changes promptly. We will also proactively share information about these changes with other regulators around the world.
We recognize that the CMA will continue to review and assess additional issues relating to our products and services, including in the business software market. We are committed to working quickly and constructively to address these issues, including by providing all the information the CMA needs to move forward with its reviews.
The cloud and AI markets continue to change at an unprecedented pace. The cloud market itself remains intensely competitive, with large investments by Amazon, Google, Oracle, and new neo-cloud entrants and, ironically, with Google, a complainant in this review, growing faster in the last quarter of 2025 than Amazon or Microsoft.
Especially in times of such dynamic change, a thorough regulatory review requires rapid access to real-world market data and customer input. This is the only way regulators can act in a targeted and agile manner that brings faster changes to the market while fostering continued innovation and investment. This type of work always requires dialogue on both sides. We appreciate the opportunity we have had for direct and constructive conversations with the CMA and its staff and look forward to an ongoing dialogue in relation to relevant cloud issues in the future.
Microsoft has long been committed to addressing the competition and antitrust issues raised by regulators and enforcement agencies through constructive engagement, transparency, and a willingness to address concerns promptly and in practical ways. We believe this has served our shareholders and customers well, avoiding protracted litigation, legal defeats, and large fines.
The post Working constructively with the UK CMA to support customer choice and cloud competition appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.
As we welcome more than 1,500 nonprofit leaders from around the world to Microsoft’s Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit, we are reminded of the extraordinary work nonprofit organizations do every day to strengthen communities and expand opportunity. Today’s gathering comes at a pivotal moment, as nonprofits confront a new set of questions: How can AI help them serve their communities more effectively? And how do they build the skills and capacity to lead this change from within?
Major technological transitions rarely unfold evenly. As AI diffuses across economies and sectors, it creates new opportunities, but it also introduces significant disruption for workers, families, and communities. Nonprofits are uniquely positioned to drive meaningful change in today’s world. They are the organizations people turn to first to support people as they develop new skills, find new pathways to employment, and stay connected to the systems that sustain them.
To help them maximize their impact with greater scale and efficiency, today we are announcing Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers, a new initiative that provides nonprofit leaders with essential AI credentials, access to a strong peer community, and role-based capacity-building resources. This program is designed to empower those at the forefront of social challenges to confidently lead AI adoption in ways that reflect their missions and the communities they serve.
This new program is part of our broader Microsoft Elevate commitment to ensure people can thrive in the AI economy and reflects Microsoft’s 50-year legacy of supporting nonprofits. As an organization, we are proud to partner with nearly one million nonprofits and education systems globally, and in the next year alone we will deliver more than $5 billion in discounts, donations, and grants to help nonprofit organizations address community needs.
Backed by Microsoft’s pledge to ensure everyone has opportunity in the AI era, Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers helps ensure that those working closest to community challenges remain at the leading edge of AI-powered solutions.
The new Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers program includes:
Those ready to make a difference with AI can register their interest today at Aka.ms/MicrosoftElevateforChangemakers.
At its best, AI should expand human agency rather than replace it. The real opportunity is to give people more capacity to solve problems, build new ideas, and strengthen the communities around them.
Across the nonprofit sector, this is already taking shape in practical ways:
These real stories of AI empowering mission-driven organizations are made possible by dedicated individuals within nonprofits who are stepping forward to lead transformative change, often without formal recognition or an official mandate. It is their willingness to embrace new technology, learn new skills, and champion responsible AI adoption that is propelling the sector forward.
The millions of global changemakers, volunteers, and leaders across the nonprofit sector are redefining what is possible, ensuring that AI serves as a tool to amplify human capacity and purpose, rather than replace it. Their commitment and leadership are the driving force behind a future where nonprofits harness AI to deliver greater impact, deepen relationships, and strengthen communities.
The path forward will be shaped by the strength and leadership of the nonprofit sector. Every day, these organizations demonstrate what it means to stay close to communities, respond in moments of change, and help people navigate uncertainty with trust and consistency.
That is what makes this moment different. As AI becomes more widely adopted, the organizations best positioned to ensure its benefits are broadly shared are the ones already doing this work.
At Microsoft, we are building on a tradition of support for this sector that began five decades ago with our founder and continues today. Ours is a long-term commitment. Not just as a technology partner, but as part of a broader effort to help ensure the benefits of AI reach the communities nonprofits serve. We will continue investing in the capacity, tools, and partnerships that support this work and look forward to building what comes next together.
The post Empowering the nonprofit sector to meet tomorrow’s challenges appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.
At RSA Conference 2026, Flashpoint introduces new capabilities that enable security teams to move from visibility to defensible action by connecting adversary activity to business priorities, assets, and investigations.
Table Of Contents
Most organizations are not lacking visibility, but they are drowning in large volumes of information that are difficult to prioritize and even harder to tie back to clear action. In practice, this creates a familiar problem.
They can see what vulnerabilities exist.
They can track threat activity.
They can monitor alerts across their environment.
But the questions they struggle to answer are more important:
Which of these exposures actually matter?
What do we fix first — and why?
How does this activity translate to risk for the business?
As a result, teams fall back on patching cycles, compliance requirements, or best-effort prioritization and are left making decisions based on incomplete context.
This gap between data and decision-making has become one of the most persistent challenges in modern security operations.
At RSA Conference 2026, Flashpoint is sharing how we are addressing this gap directly — connecting adversary activity to assets, investigations, and defined business priorities so teams can make more consistent, defensible decisions.
“The industry has reached a tipping point where security teams are drowning in data that fails to align with their most important business requirements and decisions. Visibility alone is no longer a victory; it’s a baseline. By connecting underground adversary activity to an organization’s specific attack surface and strategic requirements, Flashpoint is raising the bar beyond passive observation. We are enabling defenders to stop asking ‘what do we own’ and start answering ‘what do we fix first, and why,’ turning raw data into an engine for risk reduction at speed.”
Josh Lefkowitz
Flashpoint is introducing a set of capabilities designed to connect threat intelligence directly to business risk, assets, and investigations:
Together, these capabilities enable organizations to move beyond passive monitoring and toward intelligence-driven action.
Most organizations maintain an inventory of their external assets, but prioritizing them is a persistent challenge. Traditional EASM tools identify what you own but often fail to answer the critical “so what?”. Without contextual risk, prioritization is often driven by static severity scores, patch cycles, or compliance requirements rather than real-world attacker behavior. As a result, teams are left managing stale data through manual CSV uploads and struggling to determine which exposures actually matter.
Flashpoint’s EASM module transforms this stream of exposure data into a prioritized action plan. It continuously discovers a customer’s external attack surface, including domains, subdomains, and IP addresses, and automatically maps this live inventory directly to Flashpoint’s industry-leading vulnerability intelligence.
This allows security teams to:
By layering deep vulnerability intelligence onto live asset discovery, Flashpoint enables defenders to move from reactive analysis to proactive, intelligence-driven risk reduction.
Many intelligence teams operate without a formal structure that defines what their work is intended to support.
In day-to-day operations, this results in:
Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) are designed to address this, but in many organizations, they are not integrated into operational workflows.
In May, Flashpoint is introducing in-platform Intelligence Requirements to formalize this structure and embed it directly into the way teams work.
Alerts, investigations, and reporting can be tied to defined requirements, allowing teams to:
This creates a more structured intelligence program. Instead of producing outputs based on what is observed, teams can align their work to defined objectives and decision-making needs.
Accessing adversary-controlled environments such as forums, marketplaces, and encrypted platforms is a core part of many intelligence workflows.
However, doing so safely requires careful setup. Analysts typically need to:
This creates operational overhead and can slow down or limit investigation.
The new anonymous browser capability within Flashpoint Managed Attribution is designed to address this by providing a non-persistent, isolated environment for research and immediate triage. This removes setup friction and allows analysts to move immediately from detection, to investigation, to deeper analysis in the same environment.
Analysts can:
Without exposing their identity or internal infrastructure.
By removing the need for manual setup, this allows analysts to move directly into investigation while maintaining operational security.
Security teams are being asked to do more than identify threats. They are expected to prioritize, act decisively, and justify those decisions.
That becomes difficult when the inputs — vulnerabilities, alerts, threat reporting — are not clearly connected to each other or to the business.
Intelligence needs to be tied to assets, aligned to defined priorities, and usable in day-to-day workflows. That’s the focus of Flashpoint’s updates this year.
At RSA Conference 2026, we’ll be walking through how this works in practice—how teams are connecting adversary activity to what they own, what matters, and what they do next. Flashpoint will be sharing more on these new innovations, including threat-informed EASM, in-platform Intelligence Requirements, and the Managed Attribution browser.If you’re attending, stop by Booth S-3341 to see how teams are moving from visibility to action. For a personalized demo, schedule a meeting with us.
Flashpoint is showcasing how its primary-source threat data connects directly to business assets and priorities. At the booth, attendees can get a sneak peek of the upcoming in-platform Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs), which formalize how security teams tie investigations to business risk. Flashpoint will also be discussing the upcoming general availability of threat-informed EASM for asset discovery and risk prioritization, alongside the Flashpoint Managed Attribution browser, designed for secure underground research.
Flashpoint External Attack Surface Management (EASM) goes beyond simple asset discovery by automatically mapping your external footprint to our industry-leading vulnerability intelligence. This allows teams to prioritize remediation by identifying which software versions are actually running on key assets, flagging critical risks often missed by public databases.
Flashpoint PIRs provide a formal in-platform structure that ties security alerts and investigations to specific business risks. This helps teams move away from reactive “activity-based” work and toward “decision-based” intelligence that is defensible to executive stakeholders.
The Flashpoint Managed Attribution browser allows threat analysts to safely research the web using a disposable, anonymous environment. This prevents the analyst’s identity from being exposed and protects the corporate network from malware while conducting underground research.
Flashpoint facilitates the CTEM lifecycle by providing the primary source data necessary to move beyond traditional point-in-time scanning. EASM enables organizations to start focusing on the specific vulnerable software and high-risk exposures that threat actors are actively targeting.
The post Connecting Threat Intelligence to Decision-Making: How Flashpoint Is Operationalizing Intelligence in 2026 appeared first on Flashpoint.
Cyber threats to water systems are no longer hypothetical. When attacks succeed, communities can face loss of trust, safety concerns, or service disruptions.
Today, Microsoft, in collaboration with the Cyber Readiness Institute (CRI) and the Center on Cyber Technology and Innovation (CCTI), is releasing a report that examines both the urgency of this challenge and what it will take to close the cyber readiness gap in the water sector. The report draws on a pilot program that provided water and wastewater utilities with practical cybersecurity training paired with hands‑on coaching, testing whether real-world support can meaningfully improve cyber readiness.
The findings point to a clear conclusion: improving cyber resilience in the water sector is achievable when training is paired with hands-on support and delivered through trusted sector partners. Because of the success of this pilot, the program is now a permanent offering, giving water utilities continued access to practical training and support to strengthen cyber resilience and better protect their communities from evolving threats.
Water and wastewater utilities underpin public health, economic activity, and community resilience across all critical infrastructure. Yet recent assessments from the U.S. intelligence community and public reporting on cyber incidents underscore how exposed many systems remain. Even larger, well-resourced utilities have experienced cyber incidents, highlighting vulnerabilities that are far more pronounced among smaller operators serving rural and underserved communities.
Awareness of cyber risk is growing, but awareness is not preparedness. The challenge is how to move from growing awareness to sustained, operational readiness, especially for utilities with limited time, funding, and technical capacity.
The CRI pilot was designed to answer a practical question facing the water sector: can accessible, behavior‑focused cybersecurity training paired with hands‑on support meaningfully improve cyber readiness?
Participating utilities used CRI’s free Cyber Readiness Program, which focuses on core cybersecurity practices such as strong authentication, software updates, phishing awareness, and secure data handling. Utilities also had access to CRI Certified Cyber Coaches, who worked directly with designated “Cyber Leaders” inside utilities to help translate training into policies, playbooks, and incident response planning. This model paired accessible training with personalized support to help utilities make meaningful progress despite resource constraints. The pilot revealed three clear findings about what helps and what limits cyber readiness in the water sector.
The findings point to a central takeaway for policymakers and the ecosystem: improving cybersecurity outcomes requires moving beyond sharing information to providing hands-on support that helps utilities implement and sustain change.
The lesson from this pilot is clear: cyber readiness improves when training is paired with hands‑on support and facilitated through trusted partners. But the findings also underscore a broader reality: lasting progress will require moving beyond information sharing toward approaches that build real, sustained capacity building on the ground.
At Microsoft, this work reflects a practical commitment to supporting cyber resilience across critical infrastructure, helping to move from awareness to action. Addressing the challenges identified in this report will require continued collaboration among policymakers, sector associations, nonprofits, and the private sector.
This work also complements Microsoft’s broader commitment to be water positive, including minimizing our water use and replenishing more water than we consume[1][2], by helping strengthen the resilience of the water systems and utilities that serve communities. Supporting practical cyber readiness is one way we can contribute to more resilient water systems for the future.
[1] Sustainability | Microsoft
[2] Building Community-First AI Infrastructure – Microsoft On the Issues
The post New findings show how hands-on support can improve water sector cybersecurity appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.
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