Browse Security News (260)

Tomoko Tanaka shows how her team turned event marketing runbooks into “ops as code” using GitHub Issues, GitHub Actions, and GitHub Copilot. The post breaks down the repo patterns (issue forms, labels, skills in Markdown, and a DRY_RUN switch) that automate setup, daily screening, and post-event reporting with guardrails.

Allison announces a public preview that adds GitHub REST API endpoints for enabling and managing GitHub code scanning’s AI Scan for pull requests at both the organization and repository level, making it easier to roll out AI-powered security detections across selected repos without manual UI configuration.

Allison announces GitHub Actions cache-mode, a generally available workflow/job setting that lets teams apply least-privilege access to the Actions cache and reduce cache poisoning risk by controlling whether jobs can restore and/or save caches.

Microsoft Security Research breaks down a large-scale business email compromise campaign that used AI-assisted executive impersonation and fake invoices to push finance teams into fraudulent ACH payments, and maps practical mitigations using Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Defender XDR, and Security Copilot.

Steve Sweetman explains how to govern AI agent spend in Microsoft Foundry by combining request-path token limits, observability (traces, monitoring, evaluations), and finance-grade budgets, then tying those signals to ROI so teams can decide what to optimize, scale, or retire.

Rob Lefferts explains how threat actors are using AI brands (like ChatGPT, Copilot, DeepSeek, and Claude) as social-engineering bait, and how Microsoft Defender helps detect and disrupt these campaigns across email, identity, endpoints, and SaaS signals.

Maria Bledsoe outlines how Azure IaaS resiliency is shifting from one-time DR planning to continuous design-and-operations practices, highlighting new and updated Azure capabilities for assessing resiliency posture, reducing blast radius during failures, and validating recovery readiness.

Allison announces a new npm security protection: after signing in with a recovery code, any npm account is placed under a 72-hour security hold that blocks publishing and other sensitive write actions while still allowing sign-in and package installs.

Allison announces CodeQL 2.27.0, highlighting native Linux ARM64 support, improvements to GitHub code scanning default setup, and multiple query and framework-modeling updates that improve vulnerability detection across C#, Java/Kotlin, C/C++, and Rust projects.

Microsoft Security Research and Lior Leizerovich introduce the Cloud Web Applications Threat Matrix, a MITRE ATT&CK-aligned framework for understanding and prioritizing threats against cloud-hosted web apps and serverless platforms, with practical examples spanning identities, deployment pipelines, managed runtimes, and connected cloud resources.

Allison announces generally available enterprise managed permissions for GitHub Copilot agent operations, letting admins centrally decide which actions are blocked, require human approval, or run without prompting across supported Copilot clients.

Microsoft Security Research and co-authors document an intrusion pattern where passkey-themed helpdesk lures lead to identity compromise, MFA persistence, Microsoft Graph reconnaissance, and large-scale data collection from SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange Online, with practical hunting queries and mitigation guidance for defenders.

Allison announces expanded self-serve trial eligibility for GitHub Advanced Security on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, allowing more enterprises to evaluate GitHub Code Security and GitHub Secret Protection before purchasing.

Allison announces a new GitHub repository ruleset option that can block pull requests from merging when they introduce unresolved secret scanning alerts, adding an extra enforcement layer beyond push protection.

nschachter announces a Microsoft Fabric preview that adds table-level discovery to OneLake Catalog search, including Global Search and the OneLake Catalog Search API. The post explains how permission trimming works, what object-level security excludes, and which tenant setting admins should review before the late-September rollout.

Allison announces agentic autofix for GitHub Code Quality, letting teams select up to 25 findings and assign them to GitHub Copilot in one action. Copilot applies fixes on a branch, validates the changes, and opens a pull request for review, with usage governed by existing enterprise policy and AI credits.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot for JetBrains, including enterprise-managed sandbox policies, cross-file cursor jumps for next edit suggestions, global project context in chat, and enterprise policy diagnostics. The release also adds a preview integration that connects Copilot CLI terminal sessions to IDE context and improves reliability across MCP and agent sessions.

Allison announces GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.22 general availability, highlighting updates for enterprise administration and collaboration, including Copilot CLI support for disconnected environments, enterprise teams, improvements to repository rulesets and required reviewers, and UI enhancements for issues and pull requests.

sbaynes announces codename MDASH, Microsoft’s multi-model agentic code-scanning system now deployed in Azure Government, aimed at finding and validating exploitable vulnerabilities across software supply chains with fewer false positives and more actionable results for security teams.

Rahul Bhandari and Tara Overfield recap the September 2026 servicing releases for .NET and .NET Framework, highlighting security and non-security fixes, the list of addressed CVEs, and where to find release notes, installers, container images, Linux packages, and known issues for supported versions.

davidwright walks through a practical, staged path for turning an Azure-hosted SaaS app into a transactable Azure Marketplace offer, using Git-Ape “skills” to generate version-controlled decision records for offer selection, multi-tenancy, landing zones, fulfillment/metering, security evidence, deployment blueprints, and Partner Center onboarding.

Shayak Lahiri explains why Edge AI shifts security responsibility into customer-owned infrastructure, and outlines practical patterns for protecting model weights, credentials, and data. The post focuses on gating sensitive asset release using runtime attestation and artifact provenance, plus deterministic mediation to constrain what models can do.

sbaynes announces GPT-6 Astra rolling out via the Microsoft Foundry Limited Access Program, focusing on agentic, multi-step work (planning, tool use, and computer use across apps) and the enterprise controls needed to run it safely in production, including identity, networking, governance, and monitoring.

Allison announces generally available updates to npm trusted publishing, including multiple OIDC configurations per package, staged approvals that wait for malware scanning to finish, and improved version history visibility for maintainers on npmjs.com.

Allison summarizes three GitHub Actions improvements: a new REST API to track runner version deprecation timelines, a least-privilege `vulnerability-alerts` permission for `GITHUB_TOKEN` to read Dependabot alerts, and new `job` context properties that help reusable workflows identify their source at runtime.

Andre Terceros and Bodhisatva Gautam announce a preview of Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) in Microsoft Fabric for Operations Agent and Fabric Maps, explaining how workspace admins can enforce a default-deny model for outbound connections, allow only approved endpoints, and get clearer visibility into blocked actions.

Allison announces a required PGP signing key update for the GitHub CLI (gh) Linux APT and RPM repositories ahead of the September 5, 2026 key expiration, with guidance on who needs to update their setup and which installation methods are unaffected.

Jeremy Winter argues that getting enterprise AI into production is less about picking a single model and more about running an end-to-end system on Azure—spanning infrastructure, data, governance, security, and operations. The post highlights Microsoft AI Foundry, Fabric, Purview, and Azure databases, plus modernization workflows that include GitHub Copilot.

Steve Sweetman and Naomi Moneypenny announce general availability of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra in Microsoft Foundry, focusing on agentic, cross-application “computer use” and enterprise readiness. The post highlights deployment options (Standard vs Provisioned Throughput), Global vs US Data Zone availability, token-based pricing, and the security/governance controls used to run these workflows in production.

ryanjadams introduces Microsoft Fabric Connection Recency (preview) and the related REST APIs for auditing and governing connections at enterprise scale, including how to identify stale and duplicate connections and reduce ownership risk using role assignments and Entra group ownership.

Microsoft Security Research (Noam Kochavi and Sarah Wolstencroft) explains how “ASCII smuggling” with invisible Unicode tag characters moved from AI prompt-injection research into real-world phishing evasion, and shares practical detection and mitigation guidance for email defense pipelines.

Brent Halazon explains how Microsoft’s Physical Security Engineering Team used Azure Arc and Azure Virtual Desktop to standardize and scale hybrid operations across a global datacenter footprint, improving governance, observability, patching, and the operator experience without moving workloads fully into Azure.

Allison summarizes what’s new in CodeQL 2.26.4 for GitHub code scanning, including language support updates and query accuracy improvements that affect security detections across C#, Java/Kotlin, and GitHub Actions workflows.

Microsoft Security Research, Sagar Patil, Arlette Umuhire Sangwa, Jesse Birch and Ravikant Tiwari break down a hands-on-keyboard intrusion that starts with Microsoft Teams helpdesk impersonation, escalates through remote-control sessions and a malicious MSI, and ends with Node.js-based persistence and WinRM lateral movement, with concrete mitigations and Defender XDR hunting queries.

ryanjadams explains how to keep Fabric Data Factory pipelines and Copy Jobs fully private when moving data to or from Snowflake, using Workspace-level Private Link, a private Azure Storage staging account, and Snowflake’s Azure Private Link storage integration.

Allison announces general availability of content exclusion support in the GitHub Copilot app and Copilot CLI, so enterprise, organization, and repository admins can prevent Copilot from using specified files as context and better protect sensitive code during agentic workflows.

Jeff Hollan explains how “context engineering” in Microsoft Foundry can reduce enterprise AI agent costs without sacrificing quality, by tightening what goes into the context window each turn. The post breaks down practical levers—knowledge retrieval, tool selection, reusable procedures, and memory—plus governance controls like Entra ID and Purview.

Microsoft Security Research, Microsoft Defender Experts and Parth Jomadkar document a malware campaign that uses look-alike software download sites and regenerated installer archives to compromise Windows systems. The post breaks down the attack chain, provides Defender XDR detections and KQL hunting queries, and lists practical mitigations and IOCs defenders can apply.

Michaela Isaacs explains the GA transition in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric from embedded ODBC drivers to Apache Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) drivers, why it improves large-result performance and security posture, and how to validate the change ahead of the tenant-wide cutover.

bgautam announces general availability of the Microsoft Fabric Admin API for listing workspace networking communication policies tenant-wide, aimed at improving security auditing, compliance monitoring, and governance reporting across Fabric workspaces.