Forum Discussion
Automate pending actions
MicrosoftHi Joachim83 , Auto reject is not supported natively , however if you take no action to approve "block URL" or "Soft delete emails" the action will be expired in a month...
Could you please elaborate on the scenario / reason for auto reject?
Hi Evald Markinzon
We want to automate as much as possible, so for these actions we want ZAP and native SafeLinks to automatically handle deleting emails and blocking URL.
These extra pending actions are being generated in large volumes and create too many false positives, so we've decided to always reject them and perform these actions manually when necessary.
To avoid alert fatigue and to better highlight the other Actions we need to evaluate, we want to automatically reject these actions so they don't flood the list.
- Lior Ben Porat
Hi Joachim83
Beyond what was already discussed regrading the redundant actions, and your preference for manual investigation. Could you please elaborate more on the false-positives issue that you mentioned?
Would be great if you could provide any concrete details so we can investigate this further and improve our investigation logic accordingly.
In generel e-mail identified as Phishing starts an investigation that creates 4 different E-mail Soft Delete actions and one Block URL action for every URL in the email.
Some of these e-mails are false positives, as an example e-mails from the shipping company postnord.no is regularly detected as phishing. It is very easy for someone to approve these pending actions withouth proper investigation and then legitime e-mails and URL's are deleted and blocked for the entire organization.
If we just let them be and await for them to expire, then the other actions we actually want to look into are harder to notice in the sea of pending actions.
- Lior Ben Porat
Thank you for the quick response Joachim83
In this case, would you consider the email that initiated the investigation to be a false positive? or only the emails/URLs found by the investigation?
johnengelsJoachim83 - Zap does automatically act on emails and is the source of many of these alerts. Zap will perform the action chosen for that threat in the appropriate policy - so if you have phish set to junk, zap will auto-junk it.
However, there are cases where Zap may not remediate the email - e.g. emails that were over 48 hours old with the malicious url/file, phish emails where the user/organization had 'override policies' (e.g. safe sender, safe domain, ETRs, etc.), plus emails from similar emails but with different malicious links/files that don't get identified. I definitely hear your request for clearer needed actions. For the moment want to make sure admins review and give us feedback when they disagree with aspects of the investigation. As Evald said - if you simply ignore the investigations they'll expire.Safe links does auto-block the links today if you're applying the policy to your usrs - the action from the investigation is redundant right now.
I'd suggest you definitely review any 'User compromise' and 'URL verdict change' investigation at a minimum. These are high severity because they are situations where the user may be compromised - so the other details in the investigation are particularly worth reviewing (user evidence, bad URLs, etc.).
- I know this is an old thread, but is there any way to auto-approve 'soft delete emails' or change policies so that they don't even reach action center? I'm seeing close to 1000 actions 'pending approval' per day and it's a pain to clear them manually.
We have a Power Automate job that automatically trigger a full MDATP antivirus scan and investigations on any computer a user has logged in to the last 3 days when a High Threat Management Alert has been triggered by a user. These we do check after they have completed.
However the URL block actions are redundant like you mention as SafeLinks have already blocked them, so we want them automatically rejected.
And if ZAP doesn't automatically delete e-mails we will create manual remediation jobs, so we want to automatically decline the delete email actions as well.
