Meet Alex Weinert, Microsoft Identity Security Director, at TEC 2022

The Experts Conference has the in-depth, face-to-face Microsoft 365 and Hybrid Active Directory training you've been craving the last two years. And I'm thrilled that we're going to be in person in Atlanta, Georgia, September 20 and 21. And our day two keynote is with Alex Weinert, the Director of Identity Security at Microsoft. Welcome, Alex, and tell us about your keynote in September. Hey, thanks, Jennifer. I'm super excited to be back at TEC. And in person is exciting, and Atlanta is exciting, so that's all super cool. I'm going to be talking about kind of the way that we're seeing attacks evolving in the identity space. And as we've seen this consolidation towards Identity as the control plane and as the perimeter of security for most organizations, we've also seen a turn of attackers becoming more innovative in how they attack Identity both at an account and at an infrastructure level. So I'll be talking about some of the new attacks we're seeing, the importance of an integrated perimeter, and how identity plays a key role there. Well, tell me more about the integrated perimeter. What does that mean? Yeah, I think increasingly, what we're seeing is that attackers are using-- we tend to-- in some sense, we think, OK, we're identity people or we're network people or we're device endpoint people. But attackers don't see the world that way. They see the world as a canvas, and the scenes between these elements are how they execute their attacks. So an effective defense also means integrating those elements. So we're going to bring together the intelligence and the controls that we have from all of the different aspects of our environment to help defend against those more advanced attackers. So attackers think in [? graphs ?] is what I hear you say. At a 30,000 foot level, what are those evolving threats that we should be watching out for? Yeah, so I'm wearing my like-- I don't know if it shows up on the camera, but I'm wearing my enable MFA shirt. It's still super important. We're up to a whopping roughly 24% of users are protected by MFA on average. The-- but that's a huge gap, and so attackers can still attack these very, very simple sort of password guessings, password [? spray, ?] that sort of thing. But what we see is that where organizations are more sophisticated and they're using strong authentication, they're using device controls the attackers, still have these vectors, again, going back to the integration problem. By using, for example, malware to lift the tokens off the device and replay the tokens elsewhere, that's one example. A lot of organizations have service accounts where they're not-- there's no human behind the account. So they can't use multifactor auth there. So the attackers go after the service accounts as a way to get it to the account. So we see things like perturbing either the token itself, getting underneath the token issuance rule set, doing things like attacking application infrastructure. We see vendor accounts being attacked, supply chain, those sorts of things that are just kind of moving the game a little bit lower in the stack. And so that's what we talk about when we talk about these advanced attacks, and we'll talk a little bit about how to counter those as well. Well, thank you, Alex. I'm just so excited that you'll be joining us in September in Atlanta at TEC. For those who are watching, please consider registering for The Experts Conference so you can meet and learn from Alex and our other Hybrid Active Directory experts like Paula Januszkiewicz and Sean Metcalf, Andy Robbins. Register today, and we'll see you in Atlanta. Awesome. Thanks so much.