How Microsoft AccountGuard is helping secure countries ahead of five national elections

Microsoft is expanding its enterprise-grade identify and access management protections to all AccountGuard members in 31 countries. The company announced the expansion recently and outlines how it will help protect people at risk of cyberattacks. Here'due south a total listing of the countries that will benefit from the expansion.

Specifically, the expansion includes multi-factor authentication, unmarried sign-on, conditional access policies, privileged identity management, and access governance.

Microsoft'southward AccountGuard is a programme for organizations and individuals in the political space. It's designed to aid those that are likely to exist targets of cybersecurity threats. Here's a quick list of what the service provides, equally explained by Microsoft:

Best practices and security guidance specific to those in the political space.

Access to cybersecurity webinars and workshops.

Notification in the effect of a verifiable threat or compromise by a known nation-land actor against the participant'southward Part 365 business relationship.

Notification to both the organisation and, where possible, the impacted individual if a registered Hotmail.com or Outlook.com account associated with the organization is verifiably threatened or compromised by a known nation-state actor.

Recommendations to the participating system for remediation if a compromise is confirmed.

Enhanced identity protection features including Azure Active Directory P2 trial licenses and Yubico security keys.

A straight line to Microsoft'due south Defending Republic Plan team.

With the recent attack on Microsoft Exchange servers, and the SolarWinds attacks, it's clear that nation-state actors are targetting people and organizations.

"The improver of new features to AccountGuard provides new ways to protect online accounts for political parties, candidates and their staff, health intendance workers, human being rights defenders, journalists and certain other customers who are at greatest run a risk from nation-state hackers," says Microsoft in its blog post.

The expansion comes merely every bit five democracies are leading upward to elections. The Netherlands, Republic of finland, Germany, Estonia, and the Czech Republic all have national elections coming up, and then people and organizations should do good from the expanded protections.

Microsoft explains in its blog post:

Improving the security of political actors – especially in an election year – is a disquisitional step to help foreclose "hack-and-leak" operations where cybercriminals or foreign governments steal a campaign official'due south emails and release them online, which in turn can help fuel disinformation campaigns. These challenges pose an fifty-fifty greater business organization in an environment where much of the campaign coordination and even the campaigning itself is taking place online in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to expanding provided protections for AccountGuard members, Microsoft is expanding its partnership with Yubico. Upwards to 25,000 YubiKeys will be provided past Yubico to loftier-contour and high-risk organizations free of toll.

"Yubico is a valued partner for Microsoft AccountGuard and the YubiKey is our recommended hardware-based multi-factor authentication solution," says Tom Burt, corporate vice President, customer security & trust, Microsoft. "We're working with individuals whose security is at take chances by sophisticated attackers. Knowing that we tin can give AccountGuard customers the most advanced course of phishing protection, at no cost, is a tremendous win across the board."

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