What’s new in Microsoft Security: July 2026
Source Microsoft Security Blog
Description
Every organization needs security that protects end to end with the speed and scale of AI. Microsoft’s vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. As organizations scale AI and expand across environments, security teams need protection that covers every surface. This month’s updates help security and IT teams secure their AI environments, use AI to defend at speed and scale, and strengthen the foundations that AI-powered operations depend on. Here’s what’s new: Project Perception brings agentic defense to security operations Project Perception , newly announced, is a coordinated system of specialized agents, cybersecurity-focused models, and enterprise-wide signals that transform how security operates. The agents work as a team: red team agents expose weaknesses, blue team agents investigate cyberthreats, and green agents harden what’s found. These multi-agent autonomous workflows work as a team to operate in continuous loops to execute end-to-end security workflows. Learn more about Project Perception Microsoft Defender secures the full AI attack surface, from inbox to cloud Expanded Microsoft Defender protections are designed to reduce risks associated with day-to-day AI interactions, from email inboxes to cloud agent environments. New prompt injection protection in Microsoft Defender, now in preview, identifies and isolates emails containing malicious AI instructions before delivery, reducing the risk of prompt injection attacks reaching the inbox. Unified Defender posture and runtime protection for cloud agents in Microsoft Agent 365 consolidates security posture assessment and runtime protection for Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and third party-managed agents, helping teams reduce AI-specific risk across the agent estate. Accelerate detection, prioritization, and response with AI embedded in SecOps workflows Security teams can accelerate detection, prioritization, and response to cyberthreats with AI embedded directly into security operations (SecOps) workflows through Microsoft Defender. Threat intelligence enhancements, including Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence convergence and an enhanced Threat Intelligence Agent , bring more out-of-the-box intelligence and automation into the unified SecOps workflow, so teams can move from summary to action. Strengthen the cloud, code, and identity foundations AI depends on Microsoft Defender is strengthening the foundational protections that AI-era operations depend on across cloud, code, and identity. Cloud Security Posture Management extends coverage to serverless containers , giving teams visibility and continuous posture assessment across containerized workloads running on Azure Container Apps, Azure Container Instances, and Amazon Web Services Elastic Container Service (AWS ECS) on Fargate. New interconnected experiences between Defender and Microsoft Entra empower the security operations center (SOC) to disable compromised identities directly using a role-based access control (RBAC) mode that maintains least privilege. Microsoft Defender Experts services are also expanding : Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence delivers human-led, curated insight into the cyberthreats most relevant to each organization, and Microsoft Defender Experts MDR extends expert-run detection and response beyond the Microsoft estate into third-party and multicloud signals through Microsoft Sentinel . Microsoft Entra strengthens identity across the AI-powered enterprise Strengthen identity foundations for AI-powered operations New capabilities in Microsoft Entra are designed to strengthen the identity foundations that AI-powered operations depend on. Tenant governance helps organizations discover, manage, and govern tenants across their environment with centralized policies and cross-tenant delegated administration. Microsoft Entra ID is making passkeys the default authentication experience , which helps reduce reliance on SMS…