Blog & Guides
Practical cybersecurity articles, step-by-step guides, and quick-reference cheat sheets — from Active Directory hardening to Microsoft 365 and zero trust. Written by someone who's done the work. No hype, no fluff.
Passkeys by Default and the Retirement of Microsoft SMS and Voice MFA: The Entra Migration Playbook
Microsoft Entra ID is making passkeys the default sign-in experience and retiring Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication. Two dates matter: on 1 September 2026 passkeys are auto-enabled for every user still on SMS or voice and a Microsoft-managed registration campaign starts nudging them; on 1 February 2027 Microsoft-provided SMS and voice telecom delivery is retired, and after that any user whose only MFA method is SMS or voice hits a blocking passkey-registration prompt with no opt-out. This playbook covers who is in scope, how to find your exposed users, how to move them to passkeys, when a customer-managed telecom provider is worth it, the temporary Graph opt-out and its limits, and how it all ties into your Conditional Access baseline. Dates and behaviours validated against Microsoft Learn, August 2026.
The Microsoft 365 2026 Deprecation Deadline Tracker
Every material Microsoft 365, Exchange Online and Entra ID deprecation landing in 2026 — EWS, SMTP AUTH basic auth, Identity Protection risk policies, Azure ACS and more — in date order, with what breaks and the one fix that keeps you ahead of each deadline.
Anatomy of a Device Code Phishing Email: A Real Investigation
A phishing email with no malware, no cloned login page and a clean URL reputation would still have handed an attacker a fully authenticated Microsoft 365 session — without ever seeing the password, and without the victim's MFA slowing them down. This is a captured, screen-by-screen walkthrough of a device code phishing email (the Cloudflare hold-to-continue gate, the copied Microsoft device code, the genuine sign-in page) plus the detection, hardening, and full mitigating and compensating controls to stop it.
Securing AI Agent Identities in Microsoft Entra: Governance, Conditional Access and Least Privilege in 2026
Copilot and low-code agents now get their own identities in Microsoft Entra. This guide covers Entra Agent ID — the sponsor/owner model, blueprints, Conditional Access and ID Protection for agents, least-privilege connector governance, and the lifecycle controls that stop agent sprawl — in the order a security team should apply them.
Securing Microsoft 365 Copilot: The Oversharing Remediation Playbook
Copilot inherits your permissions — including the broken ones. A practitioner's classify-restrict-monitor sequence for finding and fixing data oversharing before you enable AI across the tenant.
The ISO 27001:2022, NIST CSF 2.0 and SOC 2 Crosswalk: One Control Set, Three Frameworks
How ISO 27001:2022 Annex A, NIST CSF 2.0 and the SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria actually map to each other — where they genuinely overlap, where they diverge, and how to build a unified control library that satisfies all three.
EPSS vs CVSS vs KEV: Building a Data-Driven Patch Prioritisation Model
CVSS measures severity, EPSS estimates exploitation likelihood, and KEV records confirmed exploitation. Here is how to combine all three into a defensible patching queue — and why a CVSS-only backlog is unpatchable by design.
Govern Microsoft 365 Copilot with Purview DSPM: Stop Oversharing Before You Deploy
Microsoft 365 Copilot governance means controlling what Copilot can surface, not just who can use it. Copilot does not break your permissions — it exposes them, turning a decade of overshared SharePoint sites into plain-English answers. This guide walks the actual Purview and SharePoint controls that fix it, in the order a security team should apply them: DSPM for AI to find overshared data, sensitivity labels plus DLP to stop Copilot processing it, and SharePoint Restricted Content Discovery to keep high-risk sites out of Copilot answers. Licence and GA/preview status validated against Microsoft Learn, August 2026.
Conditional Access Baseline Policies Every Microsoft 365 Tenant Needs in 2026
Every Microsoft 365 tenant should run a baseline of roughly eight to ten Conditional Access policies — block legacy authentication, require MFA for all users, phishing-resistant MFA for admins, compliant or managed devices, block device code flow, sign-in and user-risk policies, session controls, guest MFA, and a break-glass exclusion group — deployed in report-only first, piloted with a ring group, then enforced. This guide gives the named set, the safe rollout order, the P1/P2 licensing reality, the enforcement changes that landed in June and July 2026, and the production gotchas that lock teams out of their own tenant.