Every day there are literally billions of authentications across Microsoft – whether it’s someone checking their email, logging onto their Xbox, or hopping into a Teams call – and while there are tools like Multi-Factor Authentication in place to ensure the person behind the keyboard is the actual owner of the account, cyber-criminals can still manipulate systems. Catching one of these instances should be like catching the smallest needle in the largest haystack, but with the algorithms put into place by the Identity Security team at Microsoft, that haystack becomes much smaller, and that needle, much larger. On today’s episode we invite back Maria Puertos Calvo, the Lead Data Scientist in Identity Security and Protection at Microsoft, to talk with us about how her team monitors such a massive scale of authentications on any given day. We also look deeper into Maria’s background and find out what got her into the field of security analytics and A.I. in the first place, and how her past in academia helped that trajectory. In this Episode You Will Learn: • How the Identity Security team uses AI to authenticate billions of logins across Microsoft • Why Fingerprints are fallible security tools • How machine learning infrastructure has changed over the past couple of decades at Microsoft Some Questions that We Ask: • Is the sheer scale of authentications throughout Microsoft a dream come true or a nightmare for a data analyst? • Do today’s threat-detection models share common threads with the threat-detection of previous decades? • How does someone become Microsoft’s Lead Data Scientist for Identity Security and Protection? Resources: Maria’s First Appearance on Security Unlocked, Tackling Identity Threats with A.I.: https://securityunlockedpodcast.com/episodes/tackling-identity-threats-with-ai Maria’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariapuertas/ Nic’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicfill/ Natalia’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliagodyla/ Microsoft Security Blog: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.