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Introducing event timeline – an innovative, new way to manage your security exposure
Published Jul 06 2020 12:42 PM 15.4K Views
Microsoft

Effectively discovering, prioritizing, and remediating endpoint weaknesses is pivotal in running a healthy security program and reducing organizational risk. Threat and vulnerability management, which is part of Microsoft Defender ATP, redefines how security and IT teams reduce organizational exposure, harden endpoint surface areas, and increase organizational resilience. One of the key metrics admins track is the exposure score in their organization – it helps them understand how exposed their organization is to threats as a result of vulnerabilities on devices they manage. The lower the score, the less risk exists.

 

Today, we’re excited to announce public preview of the event timeline, a new, industry-first way for admins to interpret how risk got introduced into their organization, and what mitigation needs to take place to reduce it. Let’s see how it works in real life!

 

Meet Emily, a security admin who uses threat and vulnerability management to help manage and reduce her organization’s exposure to security risks. It’s pretty easy for Emily to get a quick view of the current exposure of devices right from the dashboard. Emily left the office on Friday afternoon with a low exposure score, feeling pretty confident about her organizational exposure to outside threats.

 

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As Emily sits down at her desk on Monday morning, she’s shocked to see a large spike in exposure. What happened over the weekend?

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Emily hovers over the exposure score graph to view the score and top events from the past few days.

 

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She quickly discovers that new software vulnerabilities were found over the weekend, which impacted some of her organization’s devices. But what exactly happened and which of these vulnerabilities should she tackle first? This is where the event timeline steps in to help.

She selects Show all events from this day and is taken to the event timeline page. Emily can now easily see a list of events, the date, related component, the number of originally impacted machines, and the type of event, all in chronological order.

 

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To dig a little deeper, she opens the filters panel and filters out lower impacting events.

 

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By filtering out the lower impact events, Emily finds that several applications have new vulnerabilities and even an exploit that was verified.

 

She selects one event to take a closer look and can see that this event is impacting a large percentage of her devices. This must be the main source of the increase to her exposure score! She needs to act quickly to address this new vulnerability.

 

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Determined to tackle this immediately, Emily selects Go to related security recommendation which takes her to the security recommendations page and the recommendation that will address the new software vulnerability. After reading the description and vulnerability details in the security recommendation, she decides to submit a remediation request.

 

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Making a remediation request in threat and vulnerability management is easy. Emily selects Remediation options and fills out the form to open a remediation request for the IT team via Intune. She’s able to include notes to the IT team to explain the context for the request and why it’s critical for them to perform the remediation quickly.

 

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The IT team receives the request, and immediately sets to work patching the vulnerable application. Throughout the day, Emily is able to easily monitor their progress in the remediation page and have peace of mind that the IT team is taking care of it:

 

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Once the remediation activities are complete, the exposure score returns to a low state and Emily breathes a sigh of relief.

 

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With that incident complete, Emily can start her week with the confidence that she can address whatever new security issues arise.

 

 

Customer feedback

We’re thrilled to be bringing to you this latest innovation in vulnerability management and assessment. Early feedback shared by customers was positive, acknowledging that this feature will help them more quickly understand changes in their exposure score, and that they welcome being able to attribute changes in the score.

 

Ben Watt, an End User Computing Manager at The James Hutton Institute said:

“Great enhancement – just tried it out right now – makes things a lot easier in keeping track of new vulnerabilities and exploits that threat and vulnerability management has detected. I like it!”


Anamika Sharma, IT Security Specialist at Saxo Bank said:

“We really liked the timeline feature in the threat and vulnerability management module. We are managing our Vulnerability Management process from this feature entirely”

 

 

How to get started

To start trying out the event timeline, we encourage you to turn on preview features in the Microsoft Defender Security Center today check out the documentation or go directly to the new event timeline page.

 

To learn more about threat and vulnerability management and our industry disruptive approach to the discovery, prioritization, and remediation of endpoint vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, check out our webinar with SANS or visit our web page.

 

Looking to try out threat and vulnerability management? It’s already included in Microsoft Defender ATP! If you’re not yet taking advantage of Microsoft’s industry leading security optics and detection capabilities for endpoints, sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Defender ATP today.

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‎Jul 06 2020 12:45 PM
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