Microsoft Security: ‘Cyber defenders world over facing tremendous operations complexity’

“Just in 2021, we had 579 attacks per second (identity or password related attacks) and that number now is 7,000 attacks per second,” she told ET. “That’s a 10x increase. We’re seeing that human operated ransomware is also on an exponential rise, with a 275% increase in ransomware from 2022 to 2024. And cybercrime as an anti-economy is costing the world $8 trillion every single year.”

Jakkal said that “defenders” the world over are facing tremendous operational complexity as it is a fragmented ecosystem with numerous tools that they must stitch together and figure out the insights. What compounds the challenge is that there is a shortfall of four million cybersecurity experts globally, she said.

“And then, with the constant regulations we’re tracking 250 regulatory updates per day,” she said. “It’s just getting harder and harder for organisations to keep up and to stay ahead. We (Microsoft) believe that security is of utmost importance and probably the number one problem that we need to tackle.”

She said Microsoft was detecting 600 million attacks against its customers every day and that the company’s approach involved threat intelligence, comprehensive protection across categories and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. She emphasised that security is one of the best use cases of generative AI and that the company is seeing tremendous adoption of its GenAI tool, Security Copilot.

“We do believe that with Copilot for security can fundamentally dip the balance in favour of defenders everywhere,” Jakkal said. “Generative AI is probably the tool which is going to tilt the balance in favour of defenders (but) attackers are also going to use AI. This is the reason we’ve got to use AI for defence as well because we won’t be able to keep up if we don’t do that.”

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Microsoft is investing $20 billion in research and development globally over five years and a big part of that will also go towards its India operations, she said.“We are doubling down in India,” Jakkal said. “We see a lot of demand, a lot of need for our customers and then we are also increasing our collaborations. (We’re) not just hiring and expanding, but also (have) partnerships that we are expanding and investing in. Then we are working with the customer security officers across the board to really deepen our community as well.”