Microsoft on Tuesday announced that its AccountGuard service would be made available for free for healthcare organizations working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. The service is an anti-phishing protection system that the Windows maker offers to only a selected number of users.
Launched in 2018, AccountGuard has serviced organizations involved in the electoral process, including election officials and political campaigns.
Individuals and organizations admitted in the AccountGuard service are given extra attention and protection from Microsoft. The program offers several security features for their email accounts to detect phishing emails from hackers.
In a blog post, Tom Burt, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President on Customer Security and Trust detailed the AccountGuard features that will be offered for free for healthcare organizations and human rights groups as well. The move follows the series of cybersecurity incidents that caused a disruption of services in clinics and hospitals during the ongoing pandemic.
This includes incidents like the attacks targeting the World Health Organization, Spain's main hospital network, the Paris hospital system, Brno University Hospital in the Czech Republic, hospitals in Thailand, and a health agency in Illinois, USA.
AccountGuard may not have been able to prevent all the attacks listed above, but it could have prevented some, namely those that began with a spear-phishing email received by a hospital employee. Microsoft says that it will remain free for all healthcare organizations for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to healthcare organizations, Microsoft will also offer AccountGuard free for humanitarian organizations and human rights groups. The company says that this has no connection with the coronavirus pandemic but a natural expansion of the AccountGuard service.
The company said it had tracked five separate nation-state groups attempting to hack email accounts at nine prominent human rights organizations almost 1,000 times in the last year alone.
"Leading human rights and humanitarian organizations including Amnesty International, CyberPeace Institute, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights have already registered for our AccountGuard threat notification service through an initial pilot," Burt said.
As with healthcare organizations, human rights organizations are also often a target of hacking groups. With AccountGuard's service, spear-phishing attacks can be easily detected and therefore avoided.
Humanitarian organizations and healthcare groups can sign up for AccountGuard's free service on Microsoft's official website. It will be available in 29 countries across the United States and Europe, where it is currently already available.
Microsoft has plans to expand its security service to more countries pending local laws and regulations, though a target date has not been provided as of writing.
