This year kicked off with a lot of good news for security & compliance that are relevant for today’s enterprises.  Make sure to check out the links in italics as they have been of the most interest.  If you would like to received a version of this newsletter on a weekly basis, you can sign-up here.

General News

• Changing the monolith—Part 1: Building alliances for a secure culture
• Changing the Monolith—Part 3: What’s your process?
• Cyber threats are on the rise; here’s how companies can ensure their safeguards are primed and ready
• 10 recommendations for cloud privacy and security with Ponemon research
• Afternoon Cyber Tea—The State of Cybersecurity: How did we get here? What does it mean?
• Rethinking cyber scenarios—learning (and training) as you defend
• Data privacy is about more than compliance—it’s about being a good world citizen
• How companies can prepare for a heightened threat environment
• Need a SOC Reference Architecture? Check out this one we put together to show how Microsoft technology integrates into a SOC.

Azure Security & Compliance News

• Ingesting Alien Vault OTX Threat Indicators into Azure Sentinel
• Implementing Lookups in Azure Sentinel part #1: reference files
• Azure is now certified for the ISO/IEC 27701 privacy standard
• New Azure blueprint for CIS Benchmark
• Upcoming Azure Sentinel training webinars
• Gain visibility for CVE-2020–0601 with Azure security center recommendation across your tenant
• Extending Azure Sentinel: APIs, Integration and management automation
• Azure Secure Score simplified
• Deploying and Managing Azure Sentinel as Code
• Azure security benchmarks documentation

Microsoft 365 Security (All Up News)

• Security Baseline recommendations now available in Office Cloud Policy Service
• Security baseline (FINAL) for Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, version 79
• Microsoft 365 helps governments adopt a Zero Trust security model

M365 Identity & Data Protection (Azure AD, Intune, AIP, MCAS)

• Introducing security defaults
• Empower Firstline Workers from Day One with enhanced identity and access management capabilities
• Azure ATP investigation of brute force and account enumeration attacks made over the NTLM protocol
• Block Access to Unsanctioned Apps with Microsoft Defender ATP & Cloud App Security
• What’s New with Apps in Azure AD | Jan 2020
• 5 identity priorities for 2020—preparing for what’s next
• Threat hunting in Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

M365 Threat Protection (Office ATP, Windows Defender ATP, Azure ATP/ATA)

• Enforcement of TLS 1.2 for connections to Microsoft Defender ATP
• Extending Microsoft Defender ATP network of partners
• Web content filtering with Microsoft Defender ATP now in public preview

M365 Compliance & Governance

• Protecting your information and staying compliant with Microsoft Teams
• Announcing the public preview of Insider Risk Management
• Microsoft 365 compliance center: Unified compliance administration for all customers
• eDiscovery and Native Mode for Yammer now available!
• New privacy assessments now included in Microsoft Compliance Score