So, Jennifer, why is Active Directory security so important?
So Active Directory and Azure Active Directory is at the core of any organization's security. It's how customers, employees, partners, servers, devices authenticate to a network and receive their rights to access resources on that network. And cyber criminals are targeting Active Directory credentials because they want access to those resources.
Now, historically, network and physical infrastructure has received all of the security attention and Active Directory security has lagged. Here's a really great example. Recently, we heard that the healthcare.gov site was breached. The back end system for the US government health insurance website was compromised using stolen credentials of agents who help people find the right insurance plans. 75,000 individuals had their files compromised.
I joke in my 2019 predictions that humans will still be a thing in the coming year because users are both our first line and our last line of defense. Our users are becoming a lot more security-conscious. Nobody is falling for that spoofed email from your bank with lots of grammatical errors. But just as we're becoming more security-savvy, so are cyber criminals, and they're weaponizing artificial intelligence to bypass security defenses and using stolen personal information to target and spearfish their victims, all with the intent of stealing Active Directory credentials.
And let's not forget the insiders, either malicious or the accident-prone insiders who can wreak just as much damage with their access to network resources. We just saw recently that Uber finally settled with Waymo to the tune of $245 million because of stolen confidential schematics at the hands of an employee.
So in 2019, we're going to see organizations start to treat Active Directory not as legacy, but as an important part of their infrastructure that needs to be secured beyond the default.
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