Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection
At the beginning of the year, Microsoft revealed that over 200 million devices were running Windows 10, including 22 million in the enterprise and education sectors. The new operating system won a big vote of confidence last month from the US Department of Defense, which has committed to upgrading 4 million of its machines to Windows 10 within the next year, and as more large organizations put their trust in the OS, Microsoft is keen to ensure that it remains its “most secure platform ever”.
As Microsoft explained today, organizations are continuing to face significant threats from cyberattacks:
Even with the best defense, sophisticated attackers are using social engineering and zero-day vulnerabilities to break-in to corporate networks. Thousands of such attacks were reported in 2015 alone. We’ve found it currently takes an enterprise more than 200 days to detect a security breach and 80 days to contain it. During this time, attackers can wreak havoc on a corporate network, stealing data, breaching privacy, and destroying the trust of customers. These attacks are incredibly expensive, costing organizations an average of $12 million per incident with broader impact to a company’s reputation.
With this in mind, Microsoft has announced Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), a new service which it says “will help detect threats that have made it past other defenses, provide enterprises with information to investigate the breach across endpoints, and offer response recommendations.”
Currently, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is live in a limited deployment, protecting 500,000 endpoints “with early adopter customers that span across geographies and industries, and the entire Microsoft network”. Microsoft says that it will be “available more broadly this year”.
