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PODCAST

Entra.Chat

Merill Fernando

Entra Chat is a weekly podcast hosted by Merill Fernando and delivers practical insights for Microsoft administrators and security professionals through conversations with identity experts who"ve been in the trenches. Episodes feature seasoned Entra practitioners sharing real-world deployment experiences and Microsoft Entra team members who build the features you use daily. Get the inside track on best practices, implementation strategies, and upcoming capabilities directly from those who design

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All Episodes

34:16

Your AI Coding Agent Is Creating Secrets You Don’t...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/10/02

Ask a coding agent to build something that talks to another service and watch what it does. It creates a client secret. Then another one. As Arturo Lucatero puts it, next thing you know you have ten secrets that were created without you knowing about it. At the speed AI is moving, he thinks we could be cleaning up a few million new secrets within six months.That would undo a lot of hard work. Under Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, Microsoft spent years removing secrets from its own estate and

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36:36

Active Directory Security Testing in Maester 2.2

Entra.Chat ·

2026/09/17

Active Directory is not dead. It is nearly thirty years old, Microsoft is still shipping new capabilities and new telemetry for it, and most of the forests running today will outlive the people currently administering them. What has changed is that you can now test it the same way you test your cloud tenant.Maester, the open-source PowerShell testing framework, added Active Directory coverage: 269 opt-in checks across 19 areas, from users, groups, computers and service principal names through GPO

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59:13

Microsoft Security Architect: Active Directory Is 10x...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/09/06

At Black Hat USA 2026, Microsoft’s David Weston put three numbers on a slide that anyone still running domain controllers should sit with. The Microsoft Security Response Center went from 80 patches in February to 1,142 at the July Patch Tuesday. The fastest observed breakout time dropped from 98 minutes to 27 seconds. And mean time-to-exploit flipped from 63 days after a patch shipped to seven days before the patch existed.Tarek Dawoud, Lead Architect on the Technical Excellence Team in Microsoft

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43:55

How General Motors Moved 200,000 People to Passkeys

Entra.Chat ·

2026/08/31

Microsoft starts making passkeys the default in Microsoft Entra ID on 1 September 2026, and retires Microsoft-provided SMS and voice MFA on 1 February 2027. Every organisation with a large, messy population now has to answer a question that has nothing to do with passkey technology itself: how do you move a hundred thousand real people - office workers, factory floors, call centres and guests - without locking someone out?In this episode, Merill sits down with the person who has already done it

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42:56

Microsoft Entra memberOf Retirement: What Admins Must Do

Entra.Chat ·

2026/08/25

On 3 November 2026, the memberOf operator in Microsoft Entra dynamic membership groups stops working. Nothing errors. Nothing breaks loudly. Every dynamic group, dynamic administrative unit and entitlement management auto-assignment policy that uses it simply freezes in its last known state the people who should be added are not added, and the people who should be removed stay.It was a preview feature for four years. It is in a lot of production tenants.In this episode of Entra.Chat, Merill is

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36:29

Pass-the-Passkey: What Michael Grafnetter's Black Hat...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/08/17

Passkeys are phishing-resistant. But that resistance is enforced by your browser, which binds every authentication to the origin that requested it. Skip the browser, and the guarantee weakens.In this episode of Entra.Chat, I spoke with Michael Grafnetter, Principal Security Researcher at SpecterOps and Microsoft MVP, about the Pass-the-Passkey research he presented at Black Hat USA 2026. A family of attacks against passkey implementations across Windows, Microsoft Entra ID, browsers and password

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53:28

From SMS MFA to Passkeys: A Practical Microsoft Entra...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/08/10

Microsoft-managed SMS and voice MFA will stop working on February 1, 2027. That deadline makes passkey planning urgent, but enabling a new authentication method is only the first milestone.In this episode of Entra.Chat, Merill speaks with Jai Maharaj, Product Manager at Microsoft, about the practical journey from legacy MFA to a passwordless Microsoft Entra environment. Jai explains what is actually being retired, why organizations can still use a customer-managed telecom provider, and how passkey

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48:36

The Ultimate Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/08/03

An Entra GSA migration should not mean throwing away years of useful SSE policy work and rebuilding every application, segment, and rule by hand.Existing configuration carries hard-won intent: which populations need access, which destinations should be blocked, and which exceptions keep the business running. Migrate2GSA creates a path to preserve the useful parts while making the migration a deliberate cleanup opportunity.In this episode of Entra.Chat, I spoke with Andres Canello, Principal Product

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54:14

Why Entra Admins Need Microsoft Purview Now

Entra.Chat ·

2026/07/28

Conditional Access no longer begins and ends with identity signals.Microsoft Purview can now influence the controls Entra administrators are asked to implement. From insider-risk conditions in Conditional Access to inline protection for sensitive data moving toward unsanctioned AI apps. That means Entra teams need enough Purview knowledge to understand what triggers a policy, how users experience it, and who should respond when an alert fires.In this episode of Entra.Chat, Merill speaks with Ray

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46:32

How Xbox Secures 70+ Entra Tenants Every Night with...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/07/20

Xbox Security runs a gaming-specific Microsoft Entra baseline across more than 70 tenants every night.The scale is striking: about 50 controls, dozens of independently operated game-studio tenants, and one parallel pipeline that checks whether each environment still matches Xbox’s security intent. When a Conditional Access policy moves to report-only or a required service principal loses a permission, the next run finds it.In this episode of Entra.Chat, Merill speaks with Audrey Long, Principal

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54:28

One Compromised Agent ID Blueprint Can Cross Tenant...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/07/12

Microsoft Entra Agent ID uses familiar application and service-principal objects under the hood, but its one-to-many hierarchy creates a different security boundary. A blueprint can be associated with many agent identities. When that blueprint belongs to a third-party provider and is trusted across customer tenants, the provider’s credential security becomes part of every customer’s risk model.In this episode of Entra.Chat, Merill speaks with Katie Knowles, Senior Security Researcher at Datadog,

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44:19

Attackers Are Targeting The AI Ecosystem You Cannot See

Entra.Chat ·

2026/07/04

AI agent security is not just about attackers using AI.It is also about attackers targeting the agent ecosystem most organizations cannot see clearly yet: MCP servers, agent skills, packages, API keys, prompts, tools, and the identity layer underneath all of it.In this episode, I sit down with Thomas Roccia, founder of Security Break and a former Microsoft threat researcher, to look at AI agents from the threat-intelligence side. Thomas explains why the easiest path for attackers may not be

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47:28

From Windows Core to Leading Agent ID: Vince Smith’s...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/06/28

Folks, every big thing in identity started as somebody’s late-night side quest and Vince Smith has been in the room for a lot of them. In this episode of Entra Chat, Vince (the PM lead driving Microsoft Entra Agent ID) walks us back through a 25-year run at Microsoft: shipping beta products off a machine wired straight to the internet under a neighbor’s desk, owning the early RBAC and custom roles work that shaped Entra, surviving a couple of security incidents he mostly can’t talk about, and

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68:49

Shadow Admins: The Non-Human Identities Hiding in...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/06/20

Not every admin in your tenant is a person. Service principals, app registrations, and the new wave of agent identities can quietly hold permissions powerful enough to own your entire environment and most orgs can’t even see them. In this episode of Entra Chat, we sits down again with Erika Zellig to expose the “shadow admins” hiding in your Entra tenant, and what to do about them.What we get into:* Application vs. delegated API permissions and why both can be shadow admins* The most dangerous

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43:44

How Microsoft Is Securing AI Agents in Entra -...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/06/13

AI agents can make decisions and act faster than any human — which means your old identity security playbook no longer holds. In this episode of Entra Chat, [host name] sits down with Nikhil, a 10+ year Microsoft identity veteran from the Authentication Stack and Identity Protection team, to break down how Microsoft Entra, Conditional Access, Defender, and Purview are evolving to secure agentic AI.We get into why “security = MFA” is dead, why the only recommended Conditional Access control for

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34:52

The Learn-It-All Career Playbook for Identity and...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/06/06

In this episode of Entra Chat, we sit down with Christina Morillo, the Senior Director of Information Security for the New York Football Giants, to explore her inspiring transition from an identity specialist to a top-tier security leader. Christina shares her “ground floor” start at a technical help desk and her progression through network administration and specialized identity roles at Microsoft. Her story is a powerful testament to the “learn-it-all” mindset, illustrating how a deep baseline in

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46:27

5 Lessons from Rolling Out Passkeys to Millions of Users

Entra.Chat ·

2026/05/31

Passkeys are one of those technologies that sound simple on paper.Turn them on.Users register them.Passwords go away.Everyone is more secure.But in the real world, passkey rollouts are not just an authentication setting. They are a product rollout, a user experience change, a support change, and an operational change all at once.In this episode, I spoke with Vincent Delitz from Corbado, who has worked on large-scale passkey deployments in customer identity scenarios, including public-sector and

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49:14

The New Control Plane for Microsoft Entra Tenant...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/05/23

Microsoft had 7 million internal tenants and almost lost control of their environment and your org might be facing the same problem at a smaller scale. In this episode, we sit down with Jeff Staiman, PM Area Lead for Tenant Governance at Microsoft, to break down the feature born from the Midnight Blizzard attack. We cover discovery, drift detection, governance relationships, secure tenant creation, licensing, and exactly where admins should start.What Can Your AI Applications Access?Organizations

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50:03

What’s New in Microsoft Entra - May 2026: Passkeys,...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/05/16

Fabian and Thomas join the podcast to share their extensive experience and unpack the massive wave of updates coming to Microsoft Entra.We talk about the massive shift toward Passkeys and registration campaigns, the impending migration from Entra Connect Sync to Cloud Sync, and the rapidly evolving world of Agent IDs and AI workloads. We also cover how Entra admins can leverage new Defender XDR features and Security Copilot agents to secure their environments.Subscribe with your favorite podcast

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44:31

If You Manage Entra Permissions, Watch This Before...

Entra.Chat ·

2026/05/09

Microsoft Entra Agent ID Just Went GA Here’s What You Need to Know About Agent PermissionsIf you’ve been waiting for the dust to settle on Microsoft Entra Agent ID before diving in, the wait is over. Agent ID hit General Availability on May 1st, and in this episode of Entra Chat, Erin Greenlee, a PM in the the Entra AuthN team joins to break down one of the trickiest parts of the new model: how permissions actually work.The three-tier model you need to understandThe biggest mental shift with Agent

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