1 day Ago By Varun Godinho
With Microsoft having suffered a massive hit to its reputation with the damaging Crowdstrike outage earlier this year, it used its annual Ignite conference for developers and IT professionals this week to tout its new security measures. The company announced that it was creating its own Black Hat-like hacking event wherein it would invite security experts to its HQ to attempt to discover and remedy cloud and AI flaws. Microsoft says that the hacking event, known as Zero Day Quest, will be the largest of its kind.
It will offer $4 million (A$6.15 million) in potential awards for “research into high-impact areas, specifically cloud and AI.” The company has already begun accepting submissions from potential researchers who would like to be a part of the in-person event which is scheduled to take place in 2025.
“Zero Day Quest will provide new opportunities for the security community to work hand in hand with Microsoft engineers and security researchers — bringing together the best minds in security to share, learn, and build community as we work to keep everyone safe,” said Tom Gallagher, VP of engineering at Microsoft’s security response centre. The company will offer security researchers direct access to Microsoft AI engineers and the company’s AI Red Team — its group of experts that investigate Microsoft’s AI systems for failures. Apart from the hacking event, Microsoft also confirmed at Ignite that it had a new Windows Resiliency Initiative designed to improve Windows security and reliability.
The Windows Resiliency Initiative includes changes to Windows that will make it easier for Microsoft’s customers to recover Windows-based machines if there’s ever another CrowdStrike-like incident. “In a future event, hopefully that never happens, we could push out [an update] from Windows Update to this Recovery Environment that says delete this file for everyone,” David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft told The Verge. The company has developed a new Quick Machine Recovery feature that will enable IT admins to target fixes at machines remotely even when they’re unable to boot properly – as was the case during the Crowdstrike outage.
Alongside the resiliency improvements, Windows 11 will also get administrator protection soon. That new feature lets users have the security of a standard user, but will allow them to make system changes and even install apps when needed. Administrator protection temporarily grants admin rights for a specific task once a user is authenticated using Windows Hello, and then removes them straight after a system change is made or an app installed.
Microsoft Teams To Get Interpreter Function Apart from the security measures unveiled at Ignite 2024, Microsoft also said that its Teams software would get a new interpreter feature that lets each participant speak or listen in the language of their choosing. Interpreter in Teams uses real-time AI-powered speech-to-speech translation to simulate your speaking voice during meetings. A preview will be available in early 2025 that will include up to nine languages – English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish – and the ability for the interpreter feature to simulate a speaker’s personal voice in a different language.
Early next year, Microsoft will also preview the ability for Teams to understand and recap any visual content shared onscreen from PowerPoint or the web during Teams meetings, alongside transcript and chat summaries. Copilot will even be able to perform a quick summary of any files that have been shared in the chat interface in Teams, saving you the hassle of having to open the entire file. While Microsoft also unveiled a new app icon for its 365 service at Ignite, a far more significant announcement came by way of its Link 365 cloud PC device which you can read more about here .
.
