Microsoft has revealed plans to keep businesses across the world safe from cyberattacks with the general launch of its Copilot for Security platform.
Unsurprisingly powered by AI, the new offering will be embedded across Microsoft's protection portfolio, helping security pros maintain protection and defenses against even the latest threats.
Microsoft says its launch follows the discovery that many security pros don't enjoy writing lengthy reports and analysis on alerts and attacks, with Copilot now set to do a lot of the heavy lifting thanks to skills that human responders sometimes simply don't have.
Microsoft Copilot for Security
"Security has emerged as the most serious use case for AI right now," Andrew Conway, VP of Security Marketing, Microsoft - Copilot for Security, told TechRadar Pro on a briefing call, "organizations have traditionally faced a disadvantage against threat actors, but can now use AI to gain the upper hand and gain an advantage."
"Copilot is allowing defenders to respond to attacks much more quickly and reduce the risks their organization is facing, and drive better security outcomes."
Microsoft says Copilot is informed by a huge amount of data and threat intelligence, including more than 78 trillion security signals processed by the company each day. This, paired with large language models, is now able to help deliver tailored insights and guide next steps across a wide array of threats and attacks.
Copilot will be integrated across the entire end-to-end Microsoft security infrastructure, not just in Defender, but across Entra, Purview and Intune (in preview), helping security pros get a unified experience across their platforms.
The company recently carried out research that found experienced security analysts were 22% faster when using Copilot, and nearly all (97%) said they wanted to keep using the platform for the same tasks going forward.
Conway showed off several demos of how Copilot for Security will work when embedded in Microsoft Defender XDR, including triaging an attack, including the specific kind of attack or threat, and generating an incident summary allowing for a much speedier response.
He notes that this hugely simplifies security processes as well, such as users filing a ticket through internal business systems - which could take a large amount of time, possibly disastorous when responding to an attack.
Conway also notes there are a huge number of vacancies across the security industry right now, with Copilot able to bring skills and upskill more junior workers, giving them the advantage to learn on the job and become better prepared at tasks such as analysing obfuscated script.
Microsoft Copilot for Security will be available for purchase April 1, 2024.
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