The Tool Desk
Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Microsoft executives told a Black Hat USA audience that CISOs are stronger when they operate as part of a connected defender community—not as isolated owners of security risk. Their message linked the July 19, 2024 CrowdStrike outage to the need for cross-company incident coordination, while presenting AI as a way to reduce defender workload without replacing human judgment and relationships.
What Microsoft said CISOs should learn from the CrowdStrike outage
At Black Hat USA in August 2024, Ann Johnson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy CISO, and Sherrod DeGrippo, the company’s director of threat intelligence strategy, discussed the July 19, 2024 faulty configuration update for CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform. The update caused Windows failures and required a broad operational response.
Johnson recounted that she initially understood a separate Azure issue to be resolved, then began seeing customer reports of blue screens. She described Microsoft personnel and other industry workers organizing coverage in shifts. In her words, “The industry was working around the clock.” That account illustrates a practical lesson for CISOs: a major technology incident can cross organizational boundaries immediately, so response plans must include trusted contacts outside the company.
The Dark Reading report does not provide a primary technical investigation of the outage or an independently verified measurement of its total impact. The episode is best used as an example of coordination under pressure, not as proof that any particular collaboration model prevents outages.
#1 Best Overall
Operational resilience is broader than the security team
A configuration failure at a security vendor can become an enterprise availability crisis. CISO planning therefore needs relationships with infrastructure, endpoint, cloud, help-desk, communications, legal and executive teams, as well as with vendors and customers. External coordination can help organizations compare symptoms, distinguish a local problem from a widespread one and communicate useful information while facts are still developing.
Why Microsoft says the CISO community matters
DeGrippo described Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) as working closely with customers through intelligence briefings while remaining connected to independent researchers, other vendors and organizations in sectors such as healthcare. Johnson added that companies also share defensive tactics and strategies with public-sector partners.
Rank #2
The community Microsoft described includes several different kinds of participants:
- Customers: They provide observations from real environments and receive threat-intelligence briefings.
- Independent researchers: They can uncover vulnerabilities, techniques or infrastructure that one organization might miss.
- Other vendors: They help correlate activity across products and customer environments.
- Sector peers: Organizations such as healthcare providers contribute context about threats and operational constraints in their industries.
- Public-sector and law-enforcement partners: They can support disruption, investigation and coordinated defense.
The report also mentions Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit in work against Scattered Spider and cooperation with law enforcement. It presents these relationships as part of a wider ecosystem rather than as a single Microsoft program that other organizations can simply adopt.
Free tools Windows power users keep installed
One-click scans. No signup required.
Community defense includes prevention, not only incident response
Johnson argued that visible incidents represent only part of defensive work. She told the Black Hat audience, “For everything you see in the news, there are thousands of [malicious] things that haven’t happened because all the people in this room stopped it from happening.” This is her characterization of community defense, not a measured statistic.
The distinction is important for CISO reporting. Response activity is often visible through an incident ticket, outage or public disclosure. Prevention may appear instead as a blocked technique, a warning shared before exploitation, a detection rule distributed across organizations or a law-enforcement action that removes criminal infrastructure. Those outcomes are harder to count consistently, but they still depend on timely information exchange and relationships built before a crisis.
Rank #4
How Microsoft frames AI’s role for defenders
Johnson said AI and other emerging technologies should make defenders more effective and help reduce burnout. “We want to use technology like AI or whatever the latest technology is to make you more effective, so you can take that time off,” she said.
Her position places AI in a supporting role. Potential uses include accelerating analysis, helping prioritize alerts, summarizing intelligence and reducing repetitive work. The remarks do not establish that AI delivers those benefits in every environment, nor do they identify a particular product or implementation.
Johnson simultaneously stressed that people remain central: “AI does have a very meaningful role in the world of the CISO and in the world of cyber defenders, but … we want to talk about the human beings, the community, the defenders.” For a security program, that means evaluating AI by whether it improves decision quality and gives staff sustainable workloads—not merely by how much automation it can claim.
Efficiency and judgment are different objectives
| Objective | What technology may support | What still requires people |
|---|---|---|
| Faster triage | Grouping alerts, extracting indicators and surfacing likely priorities | Validating context, severity and business impact |
| Threat intelligence | Processing large volumes of reports and telemetry | Building trusted sharing relationships and deciding what to disclose |
| Incident response | Coordinating updates and automating repeatable actions | Making risk decisions, communicating with stakeholders and adapting to unknowns |
| Workforce sustainability | Reducing repetitive tasks | Staffing, training, accountability and time away from work |
What CISOs can apply without treating the remarks as a proven formula
- Map external dependencies. Identify vendors, sector peers, researchers and public-sector contacts that may matter during a shared incident.
- Establish communication paths before an outage. Record alternate contacts and escalation routes for situations in which normal systems are unavailable.
- Practice cross-functional response. Include infrastructure, endpoint, operations, communications and leadership teams in exercises, not only the security function.
- Share actionable information responsibly. Define what can be exchanged, with whom and under which privacy, legal and contractual constraints.
- Measure prevention separately from response. Track useful indicators such as warnings acted on, detections shared and attacks disrupted, while documenting how each measure was derived.
- Pilot AI against a defined workload problem. Set human review points, test error modes and assess whether automation actually returns time to defenders.
What this Black Hat discussion does—and does not—establish
The August 2024 report records the speakers’ experiences and views. It supports the conclusion that Microsoft sees collaboration, intelligence sharing and human-centered technology adoption as important to CISO effectiveness. It does not constitute a controlled assessment showing that community participation or AI improves security outcomes by a specific percentage, and it does not provide a universal incident-response playbook.
Its most practical takeaway is narrower: security leaders should build the relationships and operating habits that let organizations exchange information and coordinate when a problem extends beyond one company. AI can assist that work, but the community of defenders remains the element Microsoft placed at the center.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
