Identity Threats, Tokens, and Tacos

Every day there are literally billions of authentications across Microsoft – whether it’s someone checking their email, logging onto their Xbox, or hopping into a Teams call – and while there are tools like Multi-Factor Authentication in place to ensure the person behind the keyboard is the actual owner of the account, cyber-criminals can still manipulate systems. Catching one of these instances should be like catching the smallest needle in the largest haystack, but with the algorithms put into place by the Identity Security team at Microsoft, that haystack becomes much smaller, and that needle, much larger.On today’s episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla invite back Maria Puertos Calvo, the Lead Data Scientist in Identity Security and Protection at Microsoft, to talk with us about how her team monitors such a massive scale of authentications on any given day. They also look deeper into Maria’s background and find out what got her into the field of security analytics and A.I. in the first place, and how her past in academia helped that trajectory.  In this Episode You Will Learn:How the Identity Security team uses AI to authenticate billions of logins across MicrosoftWhy Fingerprints are fallible security toolsHow machine learning infrastructure has changed over the past couple of decades at MicrosoftSome Questions that We Ask:Is the sheer scale of authentications throughout Microsoft a dream come true or a nightmare for a data analyst?Do today’s threat-detection models share common threads with the threat-detection of previous decades?How does someone become Microsoft’s Lead Data Scientist for Identity Security and Protection?Resources:#IdentityJobs at MicrosoftMaria’s First Appearance on Security Unlocked, Tackling Identity Threats with A.I.Maria’s LinkedinMicrosoft Security BlogNic’s LinkedInNatalia’s LinkedInRelated:Listen to: Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann JohnsonListen to: Security Unlocked: CISO Series with Bret Arsenault Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcastsSecurity Unlocked is produced by Microsoft and distributed as part of The CyberWire Network.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.