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Got a Microsoft Teams invite? Storm-2372 gang exploit device codes in global phishing attacks

Security experts have warned that a cybercriminal group has been running a malicious and inventive phishing campaign since August 2024 to break into organizations across Europe, North America, Africa, and the Middle East. Read more in my article on the Tripwire State of Security blog.

Threat researchers spot ‘device code’ phishing attacks targeting Microsoft accounts

Microsoft threat researchers discovered a series of what they are calling “device code” phishing attacks that allowed a suspected Russia-aligned threat group to gain access to and steal data from critical infrastructure organizations, the company said in research released Thursday. The group, which Microsoft tracks as Storm-2372, has targeted governments, IT services and organizations operating…

Microsoft Security Update Notification in February of High-Risk Vulnerabilities in Multiple Products

Overview On February 12, NSFOCUS CERT detected that Microsoft released a security update patch for February, which fixed 63 security issues involving widely used products such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Azure, Apps, and Microsoft Visual Studio, including high-risk vulnerabilities such as privilege escalation and remote code execution. Among the vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft’s monthly update…

Russian state threat group shifts focus to US, UK targets

A subgroup of Seashell Blizzard has shifted its focus to targets in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. within the past year, expanding the scope of its malicious activity, Microsoft’s threat intelligence team said in a report released Wednesday. The initial-access operation, which Microsoft tracks as the “BadPilot campaign,” has allowed the Russian state…

SGNL snags $30M for a new take on ID security based on zero-standing privileges

Security experts often describe identity as the “new perimeter” in the world of security: in the world of cloud services where network assets and apps can range far and wide, the biggest vulnerabilities are often leaked and spoofed log-in credentials.  A startup called SGNL has built a new approach that it believes is better at…

Microsoft fixes 63 vulnerabilities, including 2 zero-days

Microsoft patched 63 vulnerabilities affecting some of its underlying systems and core products, the company said in its latest security update Tuesday, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Windows CoreMessaging and Windows Storage. More than two-thirds of the vulnerabilities covered in the update are high-severity flaws on the CVSS scale. Vulnerabilities with high-severity base scores run…

Microsoft powers AI ambitions with 400 MW solar purchase

Microsoft has added another 389 megawatts of renewable power to its portfolio as the tech giant scrambles to meet the power demands required to match its AI ambitions.  The additional renewable power spans three solar projects developed by EDP Renewables North America — two in southern Illinois and one outside Austin, Texas. Microsoft is buying…

GitHub Copilot brings mockups to life by generating code from images

GitHub has announced a slew of updates for Copilot, while also giving a glimpse into a more agentic future for its AI-powered pair programmer. Among the notable updates includes a feature called Vision for Copilot, which allows users to attach a screenshot, photo, or diagram to a chat, with Copilot generating the interface, code, and…

Microsoft is forming a new unit to study AI’s impacts

Microsoft says that it’s creating a new unit, the Advanced Planning Unit (APU), within its Microsoft AI business division that will help the company understand the societal, health, and work implications of AI the company hopes to build. Microsoft AI, which encompasses Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, is becoming core to Microsoft’s growth strategy…

Microsoft’s Copilot-focused Surface Pro and Laptop PCs ship with Snapdragon and Intel options

At an event in New York City on Thursday, Microsoft unveiled two additions to the Surface line of PCs. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop both arrive with Copilot+ PC certification. Announced in May 2024, the program aims to identify business-focused devices that are designed specifically for the company’s AI platform, Copilot. It’s a…

SoftBank in talks to invest as much as $25B in OpenAI, report says

SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $40 billion on AI initiatives with the Microsoft-backed startup, according to Financial Times. The potential investment would make SoftBank OpenAI’s largest single backer, the report said, surpassing Microsoft…

LinkedIn passes $2B in premium revenues in 12 months, with overall revenues up 9% on the year

LinkedIn, the social platform where people look for and talk about work, may be less visible in Microsoft’s earnings compared to the years when it was an independent company. But around earnings time, LinkedIn often reveals some figures that point to how it continues to grow.  On Wednesday, as Microsoft reported its Q2 numbers, the…

Microsoft brings a DeepSeek model to its cloud

Microsoft’s close partner and collaborator, OpenAI, might be suggesting that DeepSeek stole its IP and violated its terms of service. But Microsoft still wants DeepSeek’s shiny new models on its cloud platform. Microsoft today announced that R1, DeepSeek’s so-called reasoning model, is available on Azure AI Foundry service, Microsoft’s platform that brings together a number…

DeepSeek Chatbot Beats OpenAI on App Store Leaderboard

The Chinese firm said training the model cost just $5.6 million. Alibaba Cloud followed with a new generative AI model, while Microsoft alleges DeepSeek ‘distilled’ OpenAI’s work.

Microsoft probing whether DeepSeek improperly used OpenAI APIs

Just a few hours after David Sacks claimed DeepSeek used OpenAI’s models to train its own models, Bloomberg Law reports that Microsoft is investigating DeepSeek’s use of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API). According to security researchers working for Microsoft, the Chinese company behind the R1 reasoning model may have exfiltrated a large amount of data…

Trump says Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok

President Donald Trump told reporters that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations, Bloomberg reports. Although Trump didn’t elaborate, he stated that “there’s great interest in TikTok” and that there will be “a lot of people bidding on it.” Microsoft and Oracle were in the running to acquire the ByteDance-owned app back in…

Helion raises $425M to help build a fusion reactor for Microsoft

Helion’s unorthodox approach to fusion power and relative secrecy has earned it plenty of fans — and critics. But don’t count its investors among the naysayers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft tests ‘scareware blocker’ for Edge that uses computer vision to detect scams

Microsoft is rolling out a new tool dubbed “scareware blocker,” which uses machine learning and computer vision to identify a very pervasive type of online scam. “Scareware” has blighted the web almost since its inception, often in the form of fake antivirus software that claims to have detected a non-existent threat on a user’s machine.…

The EU wants to talk to US tech companies ahead of Germany’s upcoming election

The European Union will give tech and social media companies a “stress test” to see how they handle misinformation ahead of Germany’s election next month. European Commission officials have invited tech companies, including: X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, to a meeting on January 31, according to multiple news outlets. During this meeting,…

This Week in AI: OpenAI gains an invaluable infrastructure advantage

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. OpenAI is making gains at the expense of its chief rivals. On Tuesday, the company announced the Stargate Project, a new joint venture involving Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, Oracle, and others to build AI infrastructure for OpenAI in…

Microsoft is no longer OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider

Microsoft was once the exclusive provider of data center infrastructure for OpenAI to train and run its AI models. No longer. As part of Stargate, OpenAI’s massive new AI infrastructure deal with SoftBank, Oracle, and others, Microsoft says it has signed a new agreement with OpenAI that gives it “right of first refusal” on new…

Ransomware groups pose as fake tech support over Teams

Researchers at cybersecurity firm Sophos are tracking multiple clusters of hacking activity leveraging Microsoft 365 instances, Microsoft Teams and email bombing tactics to deliver ransomware. In new research released Tuesday, the company said it had identified at least two distinct clusters of hacking activity using the tactics to infect targets between November and December 2024.…

‘Sneaky Log’ Microsoft Spoofing Scheme Sidesteps Two-Factor Security

The phishing-as-a-service kit from Sneaky Log creates fake authentication pages to farm account information, including two-factor security codes.

FTC says partnerships like Microsoft-OpenAI raise antitrust concerns

The Federal Trade Commission said in a staff report issued Friday that there are potential competitive issues in partnerships between big tech companies and generative AI developers — specifically, Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI and Amazon and Alphabet/Google’s partnerships with Anthropic. “The FTC’s report sheds light on how partnerships by big tech firms can create lock-in,…

Microsoft catches Russian state-sponsored hackers shifting tactics to WhatsApp

The cat-and-mouse game between state-sponsored Russian hackers and one of the world’s biggest technology companies has continued into 2025.  Microsoft’s threat intelligence team published research Thursday examining how a state-sponsored Russian threat actor group, known as Star Blizzard, has altered its longstanding attack strategies to target WhatsApp accounts. This attack vector is a significant change…

A CISA secure-by-design guru makes the case for the future of the initiative

One of the chief architects of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency campaign to get software developers to design their products with security in mind said he believes it could be one of the best tools the Trump administration has to counter China. Jack Cable, who is departing his role as senior technical adviser Thursday,…

Microsoft’s newest Copilot plan for business is pay-as-you-go

Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for corporate customers that bundles together several, but not all, of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365. The new plan, Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — is underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model and lets…

Microsoft fixes 159 vulnerabilities in first Patch Tuesday of 2025

In its latest security update, Microsoft has addressed a total of 159 vulnerabilities, covering a broad spectrum of the tech giant’s products, including .NET, Visual Studio, Microsoft Excel, Windows components, and Azure services.  The update covers several critical and high-severity flaws across various systems, impacting Windows Telephony Services, Active Directory Domain Services, Microsoft Excel and…

Microsoft forms new internal dev-focused AI org

Microsoft has created a new engineering org aimed at accelerating AI infrastructure and software development within the company. According to Bloomberg, Jay Parikh, previously VP and global head of engineering at Meta, will lead the new division. He’ll report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and oversee groups including the company’s AI platform and developer teams.…

Microsoft accuses group of developing tool to abuse its AI service in new lawsuit

Microsoft has taken legal action against a group the company claims intentionally developed and used tools to bypass the safety guardrails of its cloud AI products. According to a complaint filed by the company in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a group of unnamed 10 defendants allegedly used…

Microsoft moves to disrupt hacking-as-a-service scheme that’s  bypassing AI safety measures

Microsoft is petitioning a Virginia court to seize software and shut down internet infrastructure that they allege is being used by a group of foreign cybercriminals to bypass safety guidelines for generative AI systems. In a filing with the Eastern District Court of Virginia, Microsoft brought a lawsuit against ten individuals for using stolen credentials…

Microsoft rolls back its Bing Image Creator model after users complain of degraded quality

Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it was upgrading the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company’s Bing search engine. Microsoft promised that the new model — the latest version of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, code-named “PR16” — would allow users to create images “twice as fast…

Microsoft backs its $3B AI push in India with public and private sector deals

Microsoft announced a sweeping series of artificial intelligence partnerships across India’s core sectors on Wednesday, a day after pledging to invest $3 billion in the country over the next two years as it intensifies competition with rivals Google and Amazon. The tech giant’s chief executive Satya Nadella (pictured above) unveiled agreements with five major organizations…

Microsoft to pump $3 billion into cloud and AI push in India

Microsoft plans to invest an additional $3 billion to expand capacity for its artificial intelligence and cloud Azure services in India, the software giant’s chief executive said Tuesday. The software giant, among the top cloud and AI providers in India, is already seeing many of its clients in the South Asian market use its newest…

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