Monthly news - March 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news March 2025 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from February 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel (Public Preview) IP addresses can now be excluded from automated responses in attack disruption. This feature allows you to exclude specific IPs from automated containment actions triggered by attack disruption. For more information, see Exclude assets from automated responses in automatic attack disruption. (Public Preview) The PrivilegedEntraPimRoles column is available for preview in the advanced hunting IdentityInfo table. (General Available) You can now view how Security Copilot came up with the query suggestion in its responses in Microsoft Defender advanced hunting. Select See the logic behind the query below the query text to validate that the query aligns with your intent and needs, even if you don't have an expert-level understanding of KQL. We are excited to announce that we increase the Multi Tenant Organization (MTO) tenant limit - and now you can manage up to 100 tenants to your MTO view. With that, you can view incident, hunt, and see and manage all your data from one single pane of glass. This is only the first step to improve management at scale. Learn more in our docs. (General Available) Sentinel only is now in General Available for Unified Security Operations platform. Customers with no E5 license can now onboard their workspace and work in the unified platform for all features (single workspace only, for single tenant and for multi tenant) (General Available) Gov Clouds/ GCCH and DoD is now in General Available for Unified Security Operations platform. Customers with single workspace (for both multi tenant and single tenant) are now able to work in the unified platform on all features. Query assistant - KQL response explanation. The Security Copilot Query Assistant in Advanced Hunting generates KQL queries from requests in natural language, allowing hunting for threats, without having a deep knowledge in KQL and schema. With this new feature, it is possible to review the logic behind the KQL queries generated by Copilot, including a breakdown of the query. This enhancement helps validate the query aligns with the intent and needs, even without deep understanding of KQL. (Public Preview) IP addresses can now be excluded from automated containment responses triggered by automatic attack disruption. Microsoft Sentinel Threat Intelligence Ingestion rules: This feature lets you fine-tune your threat intelligence (TI) feeds before they are ingested to Microsoft Sentinel. You can now set custom conditions and actions on Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), Threat Actors, Attack Patterns, Identities, and their Relationships. Learn more in this blog post. Missed the live session? Watch our recorded webinar on "SIEM as Code", a transformative approach shaping the future of SIEM. Learn how to implement it in Microsoft Sentinel using the repositories feature and explore best practices for automation and scalability. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR Published Scoped coverage in Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR offers scoped coverage for customers who wish to have Defender Experts cover only a section of their organization (for example, specific geography, subsidiary, or function) that requires security operations center (SOC) support or where their security support is limited. Learn more on our docs. Microsoft Defender for Identity (General Available) New Identity Guide Tour We've added an interactive guide tour in the Defender XDR portal to help you navigate identity security features, investigate alerts, and enhance your security posture with ease. (General Available) New attack paths tab on the Identity profile page. This tab provides visibility into potential attack paths leading to a critical identity or involving it within the path, helping assess security risks. For more information, see Overview of attack path within Exposure Management. (General Available) New and updated events in the Advanced hunting IdentityDirectoryEvents table. We have added and updated various events in the IdentityDirectoryEvents table in Advanced Hunting. Learn more on our docs. (General Available) Identity page enhancements such as user timeline side panel, password last change field on the UI, devices tab filters and so on. Defender for Identity integration with Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) - SOC can now view identities in the Defender XDR portal that are eligible to elevate to privileged roles via Entra PIM. New tag and list of user's Entra privileged roles (eligible and assigned) were added to user page and side panel in the Defender XDR portal and Identity Info table. Privileged Access Management (PAM) vendors integration with MDI – CyberArk, Delinea and BeyondTrus. The integration provide the SOC with visibility for on-prem / Entra ID privileged identities managed in the PAM solution, adding new tag on privileged identities in Defender XDR user page, side panel and Identity Info table, allowing for incident prioritization, custom detections, advanced hunting and more. SOC can also initate a remediation action to 'enforce password rotation' on compromised privileged identity directly in the XDR Defender portal. Intagration need to be enabled by the customer in the Partners portal. Go to XDR Technical Partners catalog to see the new partners integrations, and access the PAM vendors marketplace. 2 New Entra Detections and on-prem detection improvement. Entra new detections: "suspicious multiple TAP creation for the same user account" and "suspicious alternative phone number addition". Detection improvement in on-prem: "Blood hound python" - version udpate to cover FN. New recommendations for Identity Security Posture. In this blog we will focus on some key things to consider for your Active Directory (AD) footprints. Active Directory is a critical element of user authentication, and its complexity leaves many opportunities for potential misconfigurations, making it a prime target for attackers. To address these vulnerabilities, we’ve added 10 new recommendations aimed at strengthening your identity security posture and protecting against evolving threats. Microsoft Security Exposure Management The following predefined classification rules were added to the critical assets list: Azure Key Vault with high number of operations: This rule identifies and classifies Azure Key Vaults that experience a high volume of operations, indicating their criticality within the cloud environment. Security Operations Admin Device: This rule applies to critical devices used to configure, manage, and monitor the security within an organization are vital for security operations administration and are at high risk of cyber threats. They require top-level security measures to prevent unauthorized access. For more information, see, Predefined classifications Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (General Available) Aggregated reporting in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is now generally available. For more information, see Aggregated reporting in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Guidance for penetration testing and breach-and-attack-simulation scenarios with Defender for Endpoint. This new article describes common challenges and potential misconfigurations that might arise during penetration testing (pen testing) or using breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools. This article also describes how to submit potential false negatives for investigation. This article describes how to use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Security Settings Management to manage Microsoft Defender Antivirus. Microsoft Blogs Code injection attacks using publicly disclosed ASP.NET machine keys. The BadPilot campaign: Seashell Blizzard subgroup conducts multiyear global access operation Storm-2372 conducts device code phishing campaign. Threat Analytics Reports (access to the Defender XDR portal required) Activity Profile: Emerald Sleet using PowerShell to exploit targets Actor Profile: Storm-1660 Technique Profile: Code injection attacks using disclosed ASP.NET machine keys Tool Profile: GoldBackdoor Activity Profile: Forest Blizzard targeting Western civilian transportation Activity Profile: BadPilot campaign - Seashell Blizzard subgroup conducts multiyear global access operation Activity Profile: Sapphire Sleet uses fraudulent Zoom domains in recent spear-phishing activities Activity Profile: Malvertising campaign leads to info stealers hosted on GitHub Activity Profile: New Zigzag Hail phishing campaigns adapt long-running malware operation to continue targeting Japan Actor Profile: Storm-1830 Activity Profile: Phishing campaign impersonates Booking.com, delivers multiple commodity malware Activity Profile: Storm-2372 conducts device code phishing campaign Activity Profile: Threat landscape for the information technology sector in 2024 Vulnerability Profile: CVE-2025-21333 Multiple vulnerabilities found in Windows Hyper-V NT Kernel Integration VSP Vulnerability Profile: CVE-2025-21391 Activity Profile: IronSentry PhaaS launches after NakedPages shuts down Vulnerability Profile: CVE-2024-43583 - Winlogon Tool Profile: FusionDrive Vulnerability Profile: CVE-2025-21420 Vulnerability Profile: CVE-2025-21419 Activity Profile: Salt Typhoon targets telecommunications and internet service providersMonthly news - January 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news January 2025 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from December 2024. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel (Preview) The Link to incident feature in advanced hunting now allows linking of Microsoft Sentinel query results. (Preview) You can now use the adx() operator to query tables stored in Azure Data Explorer. (GA) In advanced hunting, you can now add your frequently used schema tables, functions, queries, and detection rules in the Favorites sections under each tab for quicker access. Learn more on our docs. Hyperscale ML threat intelligence for early detection & disruption. This blog talks about Threat Intelligence Tracking via Dynamic Networks (TITAN) - a groundbreaking approach that uses the power of machine learning to transform threat intelligence and attack disruption by automatically neutralizing malicious activity at scale. You can now view Microsoft Sentinel Workbooks directly from Unified SOC Operations Platform. Learn more about it here. (Preview) Recommendations based on similar organizations - a first-of-its-kind capability for SOC optimizations. Recommendations based on similar organizations use peer-based insights to guide and accelerate your decision-making process. New documentation library for Microsoft's unified security operations platform. Find centralized documentation about Microsoft's unified SecOps platform in the Microsoft Defender portal. Microsoft's unified SecOps platform brings together the full capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Security Exposure Management, and generative AI into the Defender portal. Learn about the features and functionality available with Microsoft's unified SecOps platform, then start to plan your deployment. SOC Optimization and Auxiliary Logs collaboration. We’re excited to announce the release of our updated recommendation, which now incorporates Auxiliary Logs! Previously, our recommendation focused on identifying unused tables and suggesting users either increase their utilization or switch the tables’ commitment tier to Basic Logs. With this update, we now recommend eligible tables be moved to Auxiliary Logs. The following new privacy documents for Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR have been added: Data security and retention in Microsoft Defender XDR Geographical availability and data residency in Microsoft Sentinel Ninja Show Episodes: Attack Disruption: Live demo This episode features Threat Hunter and Microsoft MVP Mattias Borg as he explains the anatomy of an attack. Through a live demo of an attack in action, gain exclusive insights into what attackers do behind the scenes, the tools they use and how Microsoft Defender steps up to counter these threats, offering a robust defense to help keep your organization secure. Defender XDR’s Data Security Context with Insider Risk Management Join us as product experts Maayan Magenheim and Sravan Kumar Mera showcase the Public Preview of Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM) integration into Defender XDR. Learn how Insider Risk and SOC analysts can now distinguish internal and external threats and gain critical insights, including exfiltration context and user activity tracking. Through a valuable demo, we explore the benefits for incident investigation, threat hunting, the correlation of IRM alerts with other DLP and identity protection alerts and more. Follow up LIVE AMA session Unlocking Advanced Cloud Detection & Response capabilities for containers Learn how the Microsoft Cloud Detection & Response solution empowers SOCs with faster, deeper investigations through near real-time detections, new cloud-native responses, and rich log collection. In this episode Product Managers Maayan Magenheim and Daniel Davrayev demo a real container related incident to show how these new capabilities enhance the entire incident response process, bridging knowledge gaps and proactively securing containerized workloads across multi-cloud environments. Threat Analytics - New Tool profile: SectopRAT (You need access to the Defender portal to read this profile.) Microsoft Sentinel (Preview) New AWS WAF connector. Use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3-based Web Application Firewall (WAF) connector to ingest AWS WAF logs, collected in AWS S3 buckets, to Microsoft Sentinel. Learn more on our docs. Agentless deployment for SAP applications. Microsoft Sentinel for SAP’s latest new capability re-uses the SAP Cloud Connector to profit from already existing setups, established integration processes, and well-understood SAP components. Ninja Show Episode Microsoft Sentinel Data tiering best practices In this episode product experts Yael Bergman and Maria de Sousa-Valadas introduce the powerful new Auxiliary Logs tier, now in Public Preview and explain how to use Summary rules to aggregate data from any log tier in Microsoft Sentinel and Log Analytics. Tune in to learn the full potential of these features, as well as practical tips and use cases to help you reduce ingestion costs and gain more insights from your verbose logs. Upcoming webinar Feb 20, 9AM PT: Mastering API Integration with Sentinel & Unified Security Platform Learn how to effectively integrate APIs with Sentinel and Unified Security Platform. This webinar will cover when to use APIs, how to set them up, potential challenges, and feature live demos to guide you through the process. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR Defender Experts for XDR now offers scoped coverage for customers who wish to define a specific set of devices and/or users, based on geography, subsidiary, or function, for which they'd like Defender Experts to provide support. Experts on demand via Message Center. Select Ask Defender Experts directly inside the Microsoft 365 security portal to get swift and accurate responses to all your threat hunting questions. Experts can provide insight to better understand the complex threats your organization might face. Microsoft Defender for Identity New security posture assessment: Prevent Certificate Enrollment with arbitrary Application Policies (ESC15). Defender for Identity has added the new Prevent Certificate Enrollment with arbitrary Application Policies (ESC15) recommendation in Microsoft Secure Score. Learn more on our docs. Microsoft Security Exposure Management The following predefined classification rules were added to the critical assets list: Classification Description Locked Azure Kubernetes Service cluster This rule applies to Azure Kubernetes Service clusters that are safeguarded by a lock. Premium tier Azure Kubernetes Service cluster This rule applies to premium tier Azure Kubernetes Service clusters. Azure Kubernetes Service cluster with multiple nodes This rule applies to Azure Kubernetes Service clusters with multiple nodes. Azure Arc Kubernetes cluster with multiple nodes This rule applies to Azure Arc clusters with multiple nodes. For more information, see, Predefined classifications Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Considerations for integrating non-Microsoft security services with Microsoft 365: Considerations and recommendations for deploying a defense-in-depth email security strategy using third-party security services. Defender for Office 365 now detects BEC attacks using large language model (LLM)-based filters to analyze an email's language and infer intent. Read this blog to learn more about it. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Defender for Endpoint on iOS now supports iOS/iPadOS 16.x as the minimum version. Defender for Endpoint is ending support for iOS/iPadOS 15 on January 31, 2025. Moving forward, only devices running iOS/iPadOS 16 and later are supported. Learn more on our docs. Android low-touch onboarding is now General Available. Key benefits Faster setup on Android devices – Simplified Android onboarding supports silent sign-on and autogranting of certain permissions on a user's device. As such, users are required to grant only the necessary permissions to onboard to Defender for Endpoint. Intuitive guidance - A clear and intuitive flow to guide users through each step. Broad coverage with support across multiple Android profiles – Android enterprise BYOD, COPE, and fully managed. Configuring low-touch onboarding Although low-touch onboarding is disabled by default, security administrators can enable it through app configuration policies in Intune. See Android low-touch onboarding. . Ninja Show Episode: Defender for Endpoint RDP Telemetry In this episode Cyber Security Researcher Danielle Kuznets Nohi and Senior Product Manager Saar Cohen join us to discuss the importance of Remote Desktop Protocol in Human Operated Attacks considering the current threat landscape. Through a demo, witness critical visibility enhancements made to this important layer of telemetry and learn the powerful capabilities of this tool to identify vulnerable assets and provide deeper threat insights.Monthly news - February 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news February 2025 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from January 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel (Public Preview) Creating a unified, security-focused case management system. We are excited to be introducing a new solution for case management, built specifically for SecOps teams, and integrated into the experience of Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR in the unified SecOps platform. With new case management functionality, available for any customer who has Microsoft Sentinel, customers can benefit from a purpose-built approach to managing and collaborating across security cases. (Public Preview) Device activity events from Microsoft Sentinel's device entity pages are now visible in the Timeline tab on the Device entity page in the Defender portal, in addition to remaining visible on the Sentinel events tab. These device activity events now include blocked, dropped, or denied network traffic originating from a given device. (Public Preview) Users with provisioned access to Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management can now view and manage insider risk management alerts and hunt for insider risk management events and behaviors in the Microsoft Defender portal. For more information, see Investigate insider risk threats in the Microsoft Defender portal with insights from Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management. (General Available) Advanced hunting context panes are now available in custom detection experiences. This allows you to access the advanced hunting feature without leaving your current workflow. For incidents and alerts generated by custom detections, you can select Run query to explore the results of the related custom detection. In the custom detection wizard's Set rule logic step, you can select View query results to verify the results of the query you are about to set. (General Available) The Link to incident feature in Microsoft Defender advanced hunting now allows linking of Microsoft Sentinel query results. In both the Microsoft Defender unified experience and in Defender XDR advanced hunting, you can now specify whether an entity is an impacted asset or related evidence. (General Available) Migrating custom detection queries to Continuous (near real-time or NRT) frequency is now generally available in advanced hunting. Using the Continuous (NRT) frequency increases your organization's ability to identify threats faster. It has minimal to no impact to your resource usage, and should thus be considered for any qualified custom detection rule in your organization. Migrate compatible KQL queries by following the steps in Continuous (NRT) frequency. Microsoft Sentinel Threat intelligence for Microsoft Sentinel in the Defender portal has changed! We've renamed the page Intel management and moved it with other threat intelligence workflows. There's no change for customers using Microsoft Sentinel in the Azure experience. Learn more on our docs. Unlock advanced hunting with new STIX objects by opting in to new threat intelligence tables. Tables supporting the new STIX object schema are in private preview. In order to view threat intelligence for STIX objects and unlock the hunting model that uses them, request to opt in with this form. Ingest your threat intelligence into the new tables, ThreatIntelIndicator and ThreatIntelObjects alongside with or instead of the current table, ThreatIntelligenceIndicator, with this opt-in process. For more information, see the blog announcement New STIX objects in Microsoft Sentinel. Threat intelligence upload API now supports more STIX objects. The upload API supports the following STIX objects: indicator attack-pattern identity threat-actor relationship For more information, see the following articles: Connect your threat intelligence platform with the upload API (Preview) Import threat intelligence to Microsoft Sentinel with the upload API (Preview) New STIX objects in Microsoft Sentinel Both premium and standard Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence data connectors are now generally available (GA) in content hub. For more information, see the following articles: Explore Defender Threat Intelligence licenses Enable the Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence data connector (Public Preview) Bicep template support for repositories. Use Bicep templates alongside or as a replacement of ARM JSON templates in Microsoft Sentinel repositories. Bicep provides an intuitive way to create templates of Azure resources and Microsoft Sentinel content items. Not only is it easier to develop new content items, Bicep makes reviewing and updating content easier for anyone that's a part of the continuous integration and delivery of your Microsoft Sentinel content. View granular solution content in the Microsoft Sentinel content hub. You can now view the individual content available in a specific solution directly from the Content hub, even before you've installed the solution. This new visibility helps you understand the content available to you, and more easily identify, plan, and install the specific solutions you need. For more information, see Discover content. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Get visibility into your DeepSeek use with Defender for Cloud Apps. Defender for Cloud Apps helps you discover and protect more than 800 generative AI applications, now including DeepSeek. It provides the necessary overview of an app's usage in your organization, combined with the potential risk that the app poses for your organization. In fact, it profiles more than 90 separate risk attributes for each application in the Cloud App Catalog so you can make informed choices in a unified experience. Learn more in this blog post. Microsoft Defender for Identity Introducing the new Defender for Identity sensor management API. This blog discusses the new Defender for Identity sensor management API.This blog discusses Microsoft Security Exposure Management Metrics enhancements The metrics have been enhanced to show the improvement of the exposure levels with a progress bar, progressing from left to right and from 0% (indicating high exposure) to 100% (indicating no exposure). In addition, the metrics weight is now displayed as high, medium, or low, based on the metric's importance to the initiative. The weight can also be defined as risk accepted. For more information, see, Working with metrics Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Use the built-in Report button in Outlook: The built-in Report button in Outlook for iOS and Android version 4.2446 or later now supports the user reported settings experience to report messages as Phishing, Junk, and Not Junk. Build custom email security reports and dashboards with workbooks in Microsoft Sentinel. In this blog, we will showcase how you can use workbooks in Microsoft Sentinel to build a custom dashboard for Defender for Office 365. We will also share an example workbook that is now available and can be customized based on your organization’s needs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Public Preview) Aggregated reporting in Defender for Endpoint: Aggregated reporting extends signal reporting intervals to significantly reduce the size of reported events while preserving essential event properties. This feature is available for Defender for Endpoint Plan 2. For more information, see Aggregated reporting in Defender for Endpoint. (Public Preview) Defender for Endpoint extends support to ARM-based Linux servers. As the demand for ARM64 servers continues to rise, we are thrilled to announce that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now supports ARM64 based Linux servers in Public Preview. This update marks a new milestone in our commitment to providing comprehensive endpoint security across all devices and platforms. More details in this announcement blog. Microsoft Defender for IoT Aggregating multiple alerts violations with the same parameters. To reduce alert fatigue, multiple versions of the same alert violation and with the same parameters are grouped together and listed in the alerts table as one item. The alert details pane lists each of the identical alert violations in the Violations tab and the appropriate remediation actions are listed in the Take action tab. For more information, see our docs.Securing Identities: 10 recommendations for building a stronger identity security posture
Attack strategies are constantly evolving, your identity security posture should too. Microsoft Defender for Identity is a core part of Microsoft Defender XDR and is specifically focused on helping customers prevent, detect and ultimately respond to identity-based threats. As part of this mission, the Defender for Identity team continually augments and updates the identity security posture recommendations (ISPM’s) within the platform. These recommendations are designed to help customers implement current best practices by addressing known misconfigurations or other weak security elements within identity environments. Additionally, integrating Microsoft Exposure Management with Defender for Identity can provide a clear and unified view of your organization's exposure status. This solution leverages identity data and insights to help you proactively identify and mitigate potential risks before they are exploited by attackers. In this blog we will focus on some key things to consider for your Active Directory (AD) footprints. Active Directory is a critical element of user authentication, and its complexity leaves many opportunities for potential misconfigurations, making it a prime target for attackers. To address these vulnerabilities, we’ve added 10 new recommendations aimed at strengthening your identity security posture and protecting against evolving threats. These recommendations fall into 4 main themes: 1. Mitigating Escalation Risks with GPOs One of the most common attack vectors is the ability to escalate privileges through misconfigured permissions. This can often be traced back to improper Group Policy Object (GPO) settings, which may inadvertently grant unprivileged users access to elevated roles. GPO Assigns Unprivileged Identities to Local Groups with Elevated Privileges Using Group Policy Objects (GPO) to add membership to a local group can create a security risk if the target group has excessive permissions or rights. This recommendation outlines which non-privileged users have been granted elevated permissions through GPO’s so that security professionals can review each member and ensure they are authorized to have those permissions. GPO Can Be Modified by Unprivileged Accounts This recommendation aims to prevent potential security risks by ensuring that only authorized and privileged accounts can modify GPOs. The goal is to identify and fix any GPOs with abnormal modify permissions (Access Control Lists or ACLs) that attackers could use to gain elevated access, manipulate critical data, or compromise the security of the network. Reversible Passwords Found in GPOs This recommendation focuses on scanning and documenting all GPO’s within your environment that contain password data. In the past Group Policy Preferences (GPP’s) allowed administrators to embed credentials in domain policies and while updates have eliminated this practice the files containing those passwords could still be accessible and must be addressed. Reversible passwords found in Group Policy Objects (GPOs) pose a significant risk of credential theft. Attackers can crack these passwords, gaining access to critical systems or accounts, which could lead to further exploitation within the environment, including privilege escalation and unauthorized access to sensitive resources. 2. Strengthening Account Security Attackers frequently target accounts with weak or outdated security settings. It is important to ensure that your accounts are properly secured to significantly reduce the risk of a breach. Accounts with Non-Default Primary Group ID This recommendation catalogs all AD users and computer accounts whose primaryGroupId is not set to the default value. The primaryGroupId attribute grants implicit membership to a group but does not appear in some interfaces allowing for attackers to potentially hide group membership or escalate privileges without triggering normal auditing for group member changes. Ensure Privileged Accounts Are Not Delegated Privileged accounts within AD should be configured with a setting that prohibits their access from being delegated to other users or accounts. This recommendation helps teams identify and remediate any accounts within their environment that meet these criteria. 3. Enforcing Regular Account Password Rotations Old passwords are a common target for attackers, as they may not align with modern security standards and are more likely to have been leaked in breaches. Regularly updating passwords reduces the risk of compromise by ensuring they remain strong and secure against evolving threats. Change Password of krbtgt Account The krgtgt account is a special account used but the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) to encrypt and sign all Kerberos tickets within the domain. This recommendation highlights such accounts that have not had their password updated for an extended period of time and could be vulnerable. Changing the password of the krbtgt account is essential to prevent Kerberos ticket forging, also known as pass-the-ticket attacks. If attackers compromise this account, they can forge Kerberos tickets to impersonate legitimate users, escalate privileges, and gain unauthorized access to critical systems and resources within the domain. Change Password of Built-in Domain Administrator Account Changing the password of the built-in domain administrator account is crucial to prevent credential dumping attacks. If attackers gain access to this account, they can extract sensitive information, modify system configurations, and maintain control over the environment, enabling them to escalate privileges and further compromise the domain. Any domain admin accounts that have not had their password updated in an extended period of time will be presented in the report. Change Domain Controller Computer Account Old Password This recommendation identifies any domain controller computer accounts within AD whose passwords have not been updated for an extended period of time. By default domain controllers are configured to change their passwords automatically every 30 days so if this process is not occurring as expected it may indicate a potential issue that needs to be investigated. 4. Securing Access and Permissions Built-in Active Directory Guest Account is Enabled Guest accounts in AD are built-in, non-nominative accounts that permit access to the domain without requiring passwords. This recommendation identifies any such accounts so they can be disabled, limiting the potential of anonymous access to the domain. Unsafe Permissions on the DnsAdmins Group This recommendation scours the DnsAdmins group, highlighting any member that is not a privileged user. Excessive permissions granted via this group can be especially unsafe as group members have administrative control over the DNS server service within the domain. Securing your identity infrastructure is an ongoing process that requires continued vigilance. The recommendations discussed above can be found within Microsoft Secure Score and the Recommendations catalog. Implementing these recommendations, and the others outlined within Microsoft Secure Score, you can address common vulnerabilities and strengthen your security posture. The Defender for Identity team is committed to continually expanding our recommendations to cover identities across your unique landscape, whether they are on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid. The team also regularly updates existing recommendations so it is important that you stay vigilant and check back regularly to ensure you have the latest protections in place. For instance, the report of "Modify unsecure Kerberos delegations to prevent impersonation" now includes indication of Kerberos Constrained Delegation with Protocol Transition to a privileged service. Learn more about the new posture assessments in our documentation here and stay tuned for more updates and insights on how Defender for Identity continues to innovate in the realm of cybersecurity, ensuring that your organization remains secure in an ever-changing digital world, follow our What’s New documentation page.Monthly news - December 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news December 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from November 2024. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel Ignite news: What's new in Microsoft Defender XDR? This blog summarizes Ignite news related to Defender XDR. Security Copilot: A game changer for modern SOC We have enhanced numerous features and introduced new skills that significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SOC teams. (Preview) Attack paths in the incident graph are now available in the Microsoft Defender portal. The attack story now includes potential attack paths that show the paths that attackers can potentially take after compromising a device. This feature helps you prioritize your response efforts. For more information, see attack paths in the attack story. (Preview) Microsoft Defender XDR customers can now export incident data to PDF. Use the exported data to easily capture and share incident data to other stakeholders. For details, see Export incident data to PDF. (GA) The last update time column in the incident queue is now generally available. (Preview) Cloud-native investigation and response actions are now available for container-related alerts in the Microsoft Defender portal. Security operations center (SOC) analysts can now investigate and respond to container-related alerts in near real-time with cloud-native response actions and investigation logs to hunt for related activities. For more information, see Investigate and respond to container threats in the Microsoft Defender portal. (GA) The arg() operator in advanced hunting in Microsoft Defender portal is now generally available. Users can now use the arg() operator for Azure Resource Graph queries to search over Azure resources, and no longer need to go to Log Analytics in Microsoft Sentinel to use this operator if already in Microsoft Defender. (Preview) The CloudProcessEvents table is now available for preview in advanced hunting. It contains information about process events in multicloud hosted environments. You can use it to discover threats that can be observed through process details, like malicious processes or command-line signatures. (Preview) Migrating custom detection queries to Continuous (near real-time or NRT) frequency is now available for preview in advanced hunting. Using the Continuous (NRT) frequency increases your organization's ability to identify threats faster. It has minimal to no impact to your resource usage, and should thus be considered for any qualified custom detection rule in your organization. You can migrate compatible KQL queries by following the steps in Continuous (NRT) frequency. Ninja Show Episodes: Defender XDR’s Data Security Context with Insider Risk Management Join us as product experts Maayan Magenheim and Sravan Kumar Mera showcase the Public Preview of Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM) integration into Defender XDR. Learn how Insider Risk and SOC analysts can now distinguish internal and external threats and gain critical insights, including exfiltration context and user activity tracking. Through a valuable demo, we explore the benefits for incident investigation, threat hunting, the correlation of IRM alerts with other DLP and identity protection alerts and more. Follow up LIVE AMA session Unlocking Advanced Cloud Detection & Response capabilities for containers Learn how the Microsoft Cloud Detection & Response solution empowers SOCs with faster, deeper investigations through near real-time detections, new cloud-native responses, and rich log collection. In this episode Product Managers Maayan Magenheim and Daniel Davrayev demo a real container related incident to show how these new capabilities enhance the entire incident response process, bridging knowledge gaps and proactively securing containerized workloads across multi-cloud environments. Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel availability in Microsoft Defender portal! (Preview) Now Microsoft Sentinel is also available in the Defender portal even without Microsoft Defender XDR or a Microsoft 365 E5 license. For more information, see: Microsoft Sentinel in the Microsoft Defender portal Connect Microsoft Sentinel to the Microsoft Defender portal Upcoming Ninja Show Episode Dec 10, 9AM PT: Microsoft Sentinel Data tiering best practices In this episode product experts Yael Bergman and Maria de Sousa-Valadas introduce the powerful new Auxiliary Logs tier, now in Public Preview and explain how to use Summary rules to aggregate data from any log tier in Microsoft Sentinel and Log Analytics. Tune in to learn the full potential of these features, as well as practical tips and use cases to help you reduce ingestion costs and gain more insights from your verbose logs. Upcoming webinar Feb 20, 9AM PT: Mastering API Integration with Sentinel & Unified Security Platform Learn how to effectively integrate APIs with Sentinel and Unified Security Platform. This webinar will cover when to use APIs, how to set them up, potential challenges, and feature live demos to guide you through the process. Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Upcoming webinar Jan 14, 9AM PT: How to Get the Most Out of Microsoft Defender for Vulnerability Management Join us to learn about the Defender Vulnerability Management capabilities, business use cases and best practices to develop and implement posture & risk management in your organization. During this session, the engineering team will guide you through the recent released features and capabilities as well as product vision and roadmap. The deprecation process of the Windows authenticated scan will begin on November 2024 and concludes on November 30, 2025. For more information, see Windows authenticated scan deprecation FAQs. We are aware of issues affecting data collection in several versions of CIS, STIG, and Microsoft benchmarks. We are actively working on a fix and will provide an update when the issue is resolved. For more information, see Known issues with data collection. Microsoft Defender for Identity Seamless protection for your on-prem identities with Defender for Identity. This blog summarizes various exciting announcements made at Ignite that simplify how customers deploy and manage their identity threat landscape: One platform, one agent: Streamline your deployment and protection with a single agent across endpoint, OT, identity, and DLP Easily manage your sensors via API: Automate deployment, configuration and monitoring of sensors in your environment Integrate Privileged Access Management solutions: Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management, BeyondTrust, CyberArk, and Delinea Ninja Show episode: Microsoft Defender for Identity for Entra Connect In this episode, product experts Lior Shapira and Ayala Ziv explain how Microsoft Defender for Identity sensor for Entra Connect servers enables comprehensive monitoring of synchronization activities between Entra Connect and Active Directory, providing critical insights into potential security threats. Tune in to explore the latest detections and posture recommendations for Entra Connect by learning the importance of protecting hybrid identities and exploring real-world scenarios. Microsoft Security Exposure Management Announcing the General Availability of Microsoft Security Exposure Management! We are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Security Exposure Management. This powerful tool helps organizations focus on their most critical exposures and act swiftly. We made enhancements to the Attack path Hybrid attack paths: On-Prem to Cloud DACL-based path analysis to learn more about those, please visit our documentation. External data connectors We have introduced new external data connectors to enhance data integration capabilities, allowing seamless ingestion of security data from other security vendors. Learn more on our docs. Discovery sources available in the inventory and attack surface map The Device Inventory and Attack Surface Map now display the data sources for each discovered asset. This feature provides an overview of which tools or products reported each asset, including Microsoft and external connectors like Tenable or ServiceNow CMDB. Learn more on our docs. Microsoft Security Exposure Management is now supported in Microsoft Defender XDR Unified role-based access control (RBAC). Access control to Microsoft Security Exposure Management can now be managed using Microsoft Defender XDR Unified Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) permissions model with dedicated and granular permissions. Learn more on our docs. OT security initiative The new Operational Technology (OT) security initiative equips practitioners with a powerful tool to identify, monitor, and mitigate risks across the OT environment, ensuring both operational reliability and safety. This initiative aims to identify devices across physical sites, assess their associated risks, and provide faster, more effective protection for OT systems. For more information, see, Review security initiatives Content versioning notifications The new versioning feature in Microsoft Security Exposure Management offers proactive notifications about upcoming version updates, giving users advanced visibility into anticipated metric changes and their impact on their related initiatives. A dedicated side panel provides comprehensive details about each update, including the expected release date, release notes, current and new metric values, and any changes to related initiative scores. Additionally, users can share direct feedback on the updates within the platform, fostering continuous improvement and responsiveness to user needs. For more information on exposure insights, see Overview - Exposure insights Exposure history for metrics User can investigate metric changes by reviewing the asset exposure change details. From the initiative's History tab, by selecting a specific metric, you can now see the list of assets where exposure has been either added or removed, providing clearer insight into exposure shifts over time. For more information, see, Reviewing initiative history SaaS security initiative The SaaS Security initiative delivers a clear view of your SaaS security coverage, health, configuration, and performance. Through metrics spanning multiple domains, it gives security managers a high-level understanding of their SaaS security posture. For more information, see, SaaS security initiative Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Secure your SaaS landscape with the latest Defender for Cloud Apps innovations. This blog summarizes the following innovations in Defender for Cloud Apps announced at Ignite to help address these challenges: SaaS security initiative: Microsoft Security Exposure Management empowers security teams to reduce risks and limit exposure of the most critical assets with unified exposure management. We are introducing a new SaaS security initiative within Exposure Management to provide best practice SaaS posture recommendations, along with an easy way for security teams to prioritize the most important controls. Enhanced visibility into OAuth apps: Get expanded visibility into OAuth apps to give security teams deeper insights into app origins, privilege levels, and permissions, while allowing them to set controls to mitigate risks more effectively. Streamlined SaaS security operations: To further enhance operational efficiency for SaaS security management, Defender for Cloud Apps now uses the unified role-based access control (RBAC) model in Defender XDR to enable central permission management, alongside a new discovered apps Graph API, and the ability to customize the block page experience. (Preview) Defender for Cloud Apps support for Graph API Defender for Cloud Apps customers can now query data about discovered apps via the Graph API. Use the Graph API to customize views and automate flows on the Discovered apps page, such as applying filters to view specific data. The API supports GET capabilities only. For more information, see: Work with discovered apps via Graph API Microsoft Graph API reference for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps SaaS Security initiative in Exposure Management Microsoft Security Exposure Management offers a focused, metric-driven way of tracking exposure in specific security areas using security initiatives. The "SaaS security initiative" provides a centralized location for all best practices related to SaaS security, categorized into 12 measurable metrics. These metrics are designed to assist in effectively managing and prioritizing the large number of security recommendations. This capability is General Availability (Worldwide) - Note Microsoft Security Exposure Management data and capabilities are currently unavailable in U.S Government clouds - GCC, GCC High and DoD For more information, see SaaS security initiative. Internal Session Controls application notice The Enterprise application “Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps – Session Controls” is used internally by the Conditional Access App Control service. Please ensure there is no CA policy restricting access to this application. For policies that restrict all or certain applications, please ensure this application is listed as an exception or confirm that the blocking policy is deliberate. For more information, see Sample: Create Microsoft Entra ID Conditional Access policies for use with Defender for Cloud Apps. (Preview) Visibility into app origin Defender for Cloud Apps users who use app governance will be able to gain visibility into the origin of OAuth apps connected to Microsoft 365. You can filter and monitor apps that have external origins, to proactively review such apps and improve the security posture of the organization. For more information, see detailed insights into OAuth apps. (Preview) Permissions filter and export capabilities Defender for Cloud Apps users who use app governance can utilize the new Permissions filter and export capabilities to quickly identify apps with specific permissions to access Microsoft 365. For more information, see filters on app governance. (Preview) Visibility into privilege level for popular Microsoft first-party APIs Defender for Cloud Apps users who use app governance can now gain visibility into privilege level for all popular Microsoft first-party API permissions. The enhanced coverage of privilege level classification will enable you to view and monitor apps with powerful permissions into legacy and other non-Graph APIs that have access to Microsoft 365. For more information, see OAuth app permission related details on app governance. (Preview) Granular data usage insights into EWS API access Defender for Cloud Apps users who use app governance can now get granular insights into data accessed by apps using legacy EWS API alongside Microsoft Graph. The enhanced coverage of data usage insights will enable you to get deeper visibility into apps accessing emails using legacy EWS API. For more information, see OAuth app data usage insights on app governance. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Ninja Show Episode: Defender for Endpoint RDP Telemetry In this episode Cyber Security Researcher Danielle Kuznets Nohi and Senior Product Manager Saar Cohen join us to discuss the importance of Remote Desktop Protocol in Human Operated Attacks considering the current threat landscape. Through a demo, witness critical visibility enhancements made to this important layer of telemetry and learn the powerful capabilities of this tool to identify vulnerable assets and provide deeper threat insights. Intune ending support for Android device administrator on devices with GMS in December 2024. Microsoft Intune and Defender for Endpoint are ending support for Device Administrator enrolled devices with access to Google Mobile Services (GMS), beginning December 31, 2024. For devices with access to GMS After Intune and Defender for Endpoint ends support for Android device administrator, devices with access to GMS will be impacted in the following ways: Intune and Defender for Endpoint won’t make changes or updates to Android device administrator management, such as bug fixes, security fixes, or fixes to address changes in new Android versions. Intune and Defender for Endpoint technical support will no longer support these devices. For more information, see Tech Community blog: Intune ending support for Android device administrator on devices with GMS in December 2024.Introducing the new Defender for Identity Health Alert API
Microsoft Defender for Identity (MDI) is a cloud-based security solution that helps monitor and protect identities and infrastructure across your organization. MDI is a core component of Microsoft Defender XDR, leveraging signals from both on-premises Active Directory and cloud identities to help you better identify, detect, and investigate advanced cyberthreats directed at your organization. Recently, Defender for Identity (MDI) introduced Graph based API to view Defender for Identity Health issues.Monthly news - November 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news November 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from October 2024.Ignite news: What's new in Microsoft Defender XDR?
The speed, scale, and precision of AI-powered attacks have introduced an entirely new level of complexity to the cybersecurity landscape. Defending against these advanced threats requires more than just traditional tools; it demands a shift towards AI-enhanced defense mechanisms that not only detect and defend against these attacks, but proactively anticipate and neutralize them before significant damage occurs. To effectively combat these sophisticated threats, not only must organizations build robust strategies around the core pillars of detection and response but establish continuous prevention throughout the entire SOC lifecycle. Today we are excited to share our latest innovations across prevention, detection and response within the unified security operations platform, some of the highlights include: Microsoft Exposure Management is now GA: Exposure insights are now integrated into the SOC investigation experience with visibility into critical assets and potential attack paths. LLM-backed phishing detections to combat a new era of social engineering: these new detections take email security to the next level by using AI to understand attacker intent and block malicious emails from ever being sent to your employees. Threat Intelligence Tracking via Adaptive Networks: Automatic detection and blocking of emerging attacker infrastructure, preventing it from ever being exploited in large-scale attacks. One platform, one agent: Our new unified platform agent built on Defender for Endpoint streamlines deployment and telemetry across endpoints, OT devices, DLP, and identities. Prevention Attackers aren’t thinking about vulnerabilities in lists but instead how they can be combined to build potential attack paths. Preventing these attacks requires the SOC to continuously strengthen their security posture. This process involves having insight into an organization’s exposure and infusing insights from previous attacks to anticipate potential attack paths. This enables defenders to proactively address emerging threats before they can take hold. In March, we introduced Microsoft Security Exposure Management, a unified posture management solution for proactive and continuous threat exposure management. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Security Exposure Management. It uses graph-based technology to visualize and map relationships between entities, assets, data, entry points, and pathways, unifying the broadest, native security dataset in the market that spans cloud, SaaS apps, endpoints, identities, and email, and can now be extended with 3 rd party data. Further, we are enabling these prevention insights to uniquely inform SOC processes by integrating asset criticality information and mapping the attack path to other high-value assets within the existing incident graph. This integration unlocks the ability for exposure insights to inform a continuous cycle of strengthening an organization’s defenses. . This motion graphic shows the new attack paths that are now integrated into the incident view in Defender XDR As part of the general availability, we are also introducing a new posture initiative in Exposure management focused on SaaS security. It provides best practice recommendations, along with an easy way for security teams to prioritize the most important controls to improve the SaaS security posture of their organization in one place. Learn more about today’s Microsoft Security Exposure Management announcements here. Detection and Protection As we observe adversaries increasingly use GenAI, it is critical that security solutions advance alongside and ahead of these new tactics by using GenAI to boost security defenses across all stages of the lifecycle. Over the past year we have heavily invested in detection and protection capabilities to build capabilities grounded in AI, while also expanding the native signal that is automatically correlated via Microsoft Defender XDR. The combination of AI-powered detections and breadth of signal, uniquely enables Microsoft Defender XDR to protect against the latest threats, while providing the most comprehensive, out-of-the-box incident investigation for SOC teams. Our research teams have been observing a trend where adversaries are now using GenAI to craft phishing emails, making it harder for recipients and email security solutions to identify them. That’s why we are redefining email and collaboration security in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 by uses purpose-built Large Language Models (LLM) at scale to tackle this new era of social engineering. Our solution now parses language to understand and identify attacker intent and classifies threats at machine speed – keeping malicious emails out of your inbox and giving security operations (SOC) teams a new level of insight into adversary techniques. Since our initial rollout to select customers over the past few months, we’ve seen a tremendous impact in keeping malicious emails out of our customers’ inboxes and as of today this is generally available across all customers. For the complete announcement, read our blog here. While detection and protection logic is critical to an effective response, so is the breadth of signal that is natively correlated without cumbersome, manual work by the security team. Earlier this year at RSA, we introduced the integration between Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM) and Defender XDR, which added context to a user’s activity timeline with insights from IRM. Today, we are excited to share that IRM alerts are now automatically correlated into the unified incident experience in Defender, with complete alert context. In addition, we are providing new data security tables in advanced hunting, so analysts can build queries to better understand the impact of incidents and more easily identify attack patterns. Of course, all this data is also available through the Graph API so customers can integrate it into their case management workflows. While detection is key to identifying threats early, a swift and effective response is essential to mitigate potential damage and ensure business continuity. We are excited to share how we’ve taken insights from real world customers attack and used them to help us prevent them at the earliest stage in the kill chain. Response Attackers will continue to evolve and organizations will continue to be breached. The Microsoft Security research division continuously analyzes the methods threat actors use to infiltrate environments and have identified a pattern where threat actors are highly likely to replicate methods for different target. The same applies to the type of infrastructure used to breach an organization - attackers rely on interconnected toolkits like command-and-control servers, domain names, and phishing kits to execute their operations. At Microsoft, we’ve made significant investments to use these insights to feed our most powerful response capability - automatic attack disruption - which enables Defender XDR to now prevent advanced attacks at the pre-breach stage. Traditionally, security researchers manually update detection models, but attackers continuously evolve their tactics, creating an ongoing cycle of evasion and detection. We’re excited to introduce a new capability called Threat Intelligence Tracking via Adaptive Networks (TITAN) that combines Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender XDR to automatically detect and block emerging attacker infrastructure before it can be used in large-scale attacks. TITAN automatically runs in the background using machine learning and AI to analyze the relationships between millions of entities (alerts, incidents, etc) and can effectively unveil new infrastructure associated with them. For example, in a recent real-world attack, a threat actor exploited malicious OAuth applications to gain access to emails, alter inbox rules, and send phishing emails both internally and externally. With TITAN, we identified 26 similar incidents across 21 organizations, enabling Defender XDR to confidently disable the malicious OAuth app whenever its use was detected in other environments at the initial access stage, blocking attackers from even starting their campaigns. TITAN fundamentally changes the game for defenders – it allows a shift from post-breach intervention where the goal is minimizing the impact, to true, preventive protection using known Threat Intelligence to pre-emptively stop sophisticated attacks before they happen. Platform Lastly, we’ve made significant investments across the platform that further streamline deployment and operations across our platform. Agents serve as one of the first lines of defense against threat actors, as they continuously scan corporate resources for malicious activity or misconfigurations, but they can add deployment overhead. Today, we're streamlining this with a unified Defender for Identity agent integrated into Defender for Endpoint. This single agent now provides protection and telemetry across endpoints, OT devices, DLP, and identities, simplifying deployment and reducing maintenance. Defender for Endpoint customers can easily deploy Defender for Identity from the Defender portal, gaining immediate protection against on-premises identity attacks. All telemetry is correlated within Microsoft’s security platform, giving SOC teams a comprehensive, real-time view for faster response. To learn more about the unified agent, read more in our announcement blog. Finally, we are expanding the unified role-based access control (RBAC) model in Defender XDR to include SaaS security. As organizations increasingly rely on SaaS apps, the complexity of securing this landscape has grown substantially. To make it easier for security teams to prioritize SaaS security, Defender for Cloud Apps is now integrated with the unified RBAC model in Defender XDR to enable central permission management across SaaS apps, endpoint, email, and identities. By using the unified RBAC model, SaaS security can now be managed with greater granularity, consistent role assignments, and the flexibility to manage multiple roles effectively. To learn about other innovations in the SaaS security space, check out our Ignite blog. Prevention is key to staying ahead of threats As cyber threats continue to evolve, investing in prevention is more crucial than ever. By embedding prevention throughout the SOC lifecycle, organizations can proactively reduce risk and stop attacks before they escalate. We're excited to share these groundbreaking security innovations designed to empower your SOC teams, enhance threat detection, and strengthen your defenses. With these new capabilities, we're committed to helping you stay one step ahead, better protecting your organization from the ever-growing landscape of cyber threats. Be sure to check out resources on all the exciting Ignite news throughout the week! More information Join us online or in-person to see these capabilities in action: o Simplify your SOC with Rob Lefferts & Allie Mellen o AI-Driven Ransomware Protection at Machine Speed: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint o Innovating security operations with Microsoft Sentinel And there’s so much more! Read up on announcements we made today across Microsoft Security: Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Microsoft Defender for Business Microsoft Defender for Identity Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Microsoft Security Copilot Learn more about Microsoft Defender XDR or start a free trial today!
