Microsoft is expanding its enterprise-grade identity and access management protections to all AccountGuard members in 31 democracies at no cost to help protect online accounts of users who are most at risk of attacks from nation-state hackers.
In a blog post, Microsoft identified those groups as political parties, candidates and their staff, health care workers, human rights activists, journalists, and more, who now have access to solutions like multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, conditional access policies, privileged identity management and access governance.
This comes after Microsoft in June 2020 announced the availability of these identity and access management tools to political organizations ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. According to a Microsoft blog, those tools led to an 18% improvement in organizations’ Microsoft Identity Protection Score, an automated assessment of an organization’s ability to withstand a cyber attack.
Due to the success of that move, Microsoft is extending the offering to all eligible AccountGuard customers, including human rights groups, journalists and health care organizations in 31 countries where AccountGuard is available.
Jan Neutze, senior director of digital diplomacy at Microsoft, who wrote the blog, indicated that this is a move to help secure upcoming elections.
“Five of those democracies – the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Estonia and the Czech Republic – have upcoming national elections. Improving the security of political actors – particularly in an election year – is a critical step to help prevent “hack-and-leak” operations where cybercriminals or foreign governments steal a campaign official’s emails and release them online, which in turn can help fuel disinformation campaigns,” Neutze wrote. “These challenges pose an even greater concern 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.”
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According to Microsoft, the company is making a team of deployment engineers available to help provide remote assistance and guidance, and Microsoft partner Patriot Consulting Technology will offer additional onboarding support, integration and trainings – all for free.
In addition to recently announcing the general availability of passwordless authentication solutions for Azure Active Directory, Microsoft announced an expanded partnership with security key maker Yubico to provide 25,000 phishing-resistant security keys to AccountGuard customers.
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