Security Researcher Intern, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center – Internship Opportunity - #142556

Come build community, explore your passions and do your best work at Microsoft with thousands of University interns from every corner of the world. This opportunity will allow you to bring your aspirations, talent, potential—and excitement for the journey ahead.

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions.

The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centred on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) have unique optics into end-to-end attacks and how different stages manifest across our telemetry: we join the dots and show the art of the possible. MSTIC research and analyst teams research and develop new capability to detect attacks and threat actors through novel correlation and analysis ideas. We automate the generation of threat intelligence, and then achieve global impact by partnering across the company to connect it to our security solutions and defenders.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

We are looking for an innovative Security Researcher summer intern, who can apply their researcher mindset to help our analysts and threat hunters detect and track threats in our telemetry sources, increasing their effectiveness.

You will

• Create detections and heuristics that run at scale on our telemetry across multiple services and data sources and apply them at cloud scale.
• Work with our threat hunters and analysts to develop novel approaches to tracking and monitoring threat actors that target Microsoft customers.
• Deliver end to end solutions for processing large scale data that originates from users, services, or other automated systems.
• Partner across Microsoft Threat Intelligence to deliver end to end solutions to our products and services.
• Your work will combine data analysis, security research and rapid prototyping to protect Microsoft and our customers.
  
  

This role will require access to information that is controlled for export under export control regulations, potentially under the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations or Export Administration Regulations, the EU Dual Use Regulation, and/or other export control regulations.  As a condition of employment, the successful candidate will be required to provide either proof of their country of citizenship or proof of their U.S. permanent residency or other protected status (e.g., under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)) for assessment of eligibility to access the export controlled information. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate’s citizenship will be verified with a valid passport. Lawful permanent residents, refugees, and asylees may verify status using other documents, where applicable.

Qualifications

Required qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent.
• Must have at least one additional quarter/semester of school remaining following the completion of the internship.
• Strong programming skills.
• An ability to learn new skills quickly to apply them to threat-tracking problems in MSTIC.
  
  

We Are Hiring For Summer Internship Positions Across Both AI/ML And Security Research Disciplines. Depending On The Discipline You Are Most Aligned To, You Will Have

• Demonstrable experience applying data-driven inference methods such as statistics, machine learning or AI to a concrete security-oriented project (e.g., in a university project or previous internship)
• Experience using deep learning libraries such as PyTorch/Tensorflow in an AI/ML project
• Experience applying LLMs and RAG-based methodologies within projects in the security domain
  

Or

• Track record of applying your security knowledge to solve novel security problems, e.g., as demonstrated by success in CTFs, previous internship or university projects.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Malware analysis experience using tools such as Ghidra and IDA.
  
  

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.