Microsoft expands AccountGuard features to high-risk entities in 31 countries

AccountGuard is Microsoft's cybersecurity offering that protects the digital security of high-risk entities such as political parties and their candidates, journalists, human rights workers, and more. The service is available in dozens of regions including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain.

Now, Microsoft has announced that it is expanding AccountGuard's identity and access management protections to 31 democracies.

Microsoft states that these "enterprise-grade" features were first made available to political campaigns in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, and the company noted an 18% enhancement in the Microsoft Identity Protection Security Score for customers who utilized it. As such, it is now rolling these out to 31 democracies - where AccountGuard is already available - at no extra cost.

Five of these 31 countries have elections coming up this year, which is why AccountGuard may play a crucial role. It will strengthen defenses against state-sponsored cyberattacks, hack-and-leak operations, and impersonation of campaign staff.

Microsoft is also expanding its partnership with Yubico, with the latter now supplying 25,000 hardware security keys. Eligible customers will have access to a fixed number of YubiKeys depending upon their organization size.

Identity and access management protections in AccountGuard include multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), privileged identity management (PIM), conditional access policies, and access governance. Microsoft says that deployment teams of engineers and partners such as the Patriot Consulting Technology Group will be assisting customers in onboarding to these solutions and making use of the aforementioned protections, if needed.