600 million daily cyberattacks target Microsoft users, DDoS attacks up 4x year-over-year

Microsoft has just launched its annual Digital Defense Report, saying that there’s a big increase in cyber threats. At least over 600 million daily cyberattacks occurred, targeting Microsoft customers, especially in the year of election from bad actors in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China.

The Redmond company says that some of these nation-state actors in cyber espionage even collaborated with cybercriminals and use cyber operations as tools in geopolitical conflicts, whether it’s for financial gain, influencing elections, or targeting nations in conflict.

“This challenge will not be accomplished solely by executing a checklist of cyber hygiene measures but only through a focus on and commitment to the foundations of cyber defense from the individual user to the corporate executive and to government leaders,” says Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate VP for customer security & trust.

Microsoft and its users have been affected by countless cyberattacks. The Redmond tech giant was a victim of the SolarWinds attack, one of the most technical & biggest of its kind, that happened years ago. Not to mention the major cloud attacks that affected around 25 organizations last year, and more.

Enough is enough, says Microsoft, and so that’s where the Secure Future Initiative effort began to make the internet safer.

A lot of efforts have been made to implement the SFI—even for something as trivial as what kind of smartphone a Microsoft employee uses or the new Publish API to tighten Edge’s security. Automated threat detection, AI and machine learning, and automatic patching & updates all play key roles in this initiative.

In the report, Microsoft also said that it’s taken care of 1.25 million Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, just like the Internet Archive’s outage this month, in the second half of the year. That’s at least four times more than last year’s number.