Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Microsoft’s platform, Azure AI, offers Azure OpenAI, which uses OpenAI’s LLMs but goes beyond the public ChatGPT offering by promising greater data security and custom AI apps.

This is suited for enterprises who want to secure their proprietary data when leveraging the benefits of generative AI since ChatGPT’s terms of use state that they can store & use content (both input & output) to improve their services.

Source: https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/

How good is your recovery plan for ransomware/extortion or a destructive attack?

This slide directly describes real world experiences from organizations that are probably similar to yours.  

https://aka.ms/backup has Microsoft public guidance on what to backup, what steps to take before an attack & more.

Slide is from https://lnkd.in/en2TdNN3 (PDF) & backup/patching section is included in Security Architecture Design Session (Security ADS) Module 1 of the https://aka.ms/SAF

Microsoft Entra Domain Services is a cloud-based solution that provides a classic Active Directory domain in the cloud without the hassle of maintaining your own infrastructure. Using Domain Services, you can easily integrate your cloud and on-premises resources using trust relationships.

We’re now adding two-way trust relationships to Domain Services and we’d like to invite you to get an early look.

✅ 2-way: Allows users in both managed domain & on-premises domain to access resources in either domain.
✅ 1-way outgoing: Allows users in on-premises domain to access resources in managed domain.
✅ 1-way incoming: Allows users in managed domain to access resources in on-premises domain.

Introducing trust direction options for Microsoft Entra Domain Services
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/identity/trust-domain-options/

#Azure #Microsoft #Entra #DomainServices

Did you know that 25% of all data breaches are caused by trusted insiders? This case study, based on a true story of corporate espionage, shows how you can reduce insider risk with #Microsoft #Purview.

• Reduce Insider Risk | Microsoft Purview
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-thankyou-data-protection-with-purview-how-it-detects-and-responds.html?LCID=EN-US

#InsiderRisk #MicrosoftPurview

We are thrilled to announce that GPT-4 Turbo with Vision on Azure OpenAI service is coming soon to public preview.

GPT-4 Turbo with Vision is a large multimodal model (LMM) developed by OpenAI that can analyze images and provide textual responses to questions about them.

It incorporates both natural language processing and visual understanding. This integration allows Azure users to benefit from Azure’s reliable cloud infrastructure and OpenAI’s advanced AI research.

• GPT-4 Turbo with Vision on Azure OpenAI Service https://aka.ms/gpt-4v/

#Microsoft #gpt4vision #gpt4turbo #azure #openai #ai

Just released—get our downloadable, interactive guide from the Microsoft Incident Response team to learn how to improve your organization’s ability to respond effectively and limit impact during a security breach:

“New Microsoft Incident Response team guide shares best practices for security teams and leaders” | Microsoft Security Blog
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/12/11/new-microsoft-incident-response-team-guide-shares-best-practices-for-security-teams-and-leaders/

#IncidentResponse #MSFTSecurityExperts #Security #Cybersecurity #Microsoft #msftadvocate

From our Security Global BlackBelt, Andrea Fisher:

For years, we’ve been hearing how much people rely on GPOs – so much so that they were effectively “blocked” from getting to Intune for management of their Windows PCs.

But did you know that you import existing GPOs to Intune? The GPO’s settings are auto-evaluated for comparable MDM settings. You can then click “Import” to generate an Intune policy based on that GPO.

Read more here:

• Use Microsoft Intune to import and analyze group policies | Microsoft Learn
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/configuration/group-policy-analytics

Generative AI is poised to transform cybersecurity, empowering defenders to respond to incidents in minutes instead of hours or days. Learn how to supercharge threat detection and begin preparing your organization for AI security tools with unified extended detection and response (XDR) and security information and event management (SIEM).

Get the e-book, The Path to AI: Pave the way for powerful cybersecurity AI with integrated XDR and SIEM, to explore how to:

• Get started on your path by deploying end-to-end visibility to gain an edge over attackers.
• Layer on cost savings by simplifying the number of tools defenders use to protect your organization.
• Accumulate the high-quality threat signals necessary to use generative AI tools like Microsoft Security Copilot effectively.

Download the eBook here:

• Pave Your Path to Cybersecurity AI | Microsoft Security
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-the-path-to-ai.html?LCID=EN

The Microsoft Incident Response team has observed common misconfigurations for Microsoft Entra ID across various industry verticals.

In their recent post, they present details on the common misconfigurations observed in their engagements and provide guidance on how to properly configure Microsoft Entra ID to remove risks and harden environments against cyberattacks.

For example:

• Accounts that are used to administer Microsoft Entra ID should be native to Microsoft Entra ID and not synced from on-premises Active Directory
• Any account that holds privilege in on-premises Active Directory, such as Domain Administrators and the respective groups such as Domain Admins, should be completely excluded from being synced to Microsoft Entra ID
• To remove the attack vector of direct phishing attempts, users that hold privilege in Microsoft Entra ID should not have a mailbox assigned

For over 100+ recommendations on how to best configure your Entra ID, visit:

• Microsoft Incident Response lessons on preventing cloud identity compromise | Microsoft Security Blog
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/12/05/microsoft-incident-response-lessons-on-preventing-cloud-identity-compromise/

In the context of enterprise applications, the question we hear most often is “how do I build something like ChatGPT that uses my own data as the basis for its responses?”

The combination of Azure Cognitive Search and Azure OpenAI Service yields an effective solution for this scenario. It integrates the enterprise-grade characteristics of Azure, the ability of Cognitive Search to index, understand and retrieve the right pieces of your own data across large knowledge bases, and ChatGPT’s impressive capability for interacting in natural language to answer questions or take turns in a conversation.

Read the post below to learn more on how to leverage these services for your own ChatGPT bot for your Enterprise data.

• Revolutionize your Enterprise Data with ChatGPT: Next-gen Apps w/ Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Search
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-azure-ai-services-blog/revolutionize-your-enterprise-data-with-chatgpt-next-gen-apps-w/ba-p/3762087/page/3