If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that a proactive, no-compromises approach to security is essential for 2025 and beyond.
Nation-states and advanced cybercriminals are making significant investments in infrastructure and automation to intensify familiar cyberattack patterns; password attacks, for example, escalated from 579 incidents per second in 20211 to 7,000 in 2024.2 These groups are also adopting emerging technologies such as AI to create deepfakes and personalized spear-phishing campaigns that manipulate people into granting unauthorized access.
Adopting proactive defensive measures is the only way to get ahead of such determined efforts to compromise identities and gain access to your environment.
Microsoft is strengthening our own defenses through the Secure Future Initiative (SFI), a multiyear commitment to advance the way we design, build, test, and operate Microsoft technology to ensure it meets the highest possible standards for security. One of our first steps was to conduct a full inventory of our environment and do a thorough “spring cleaning,” deleting 730,000 outdated and non-compliant apps and removing 1.7 million unused or outdated Microsoft…
