Tamper protection in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint protects your organization from unwanted changes to your security settings. Tamper protection helps prevent unauthorized users and malicious actors from turning off threat protection features, such as antivirus protection. Tamper protection also includes the detection of, and response to, tampering attempts.
Starting last year, to better protect our customers from ransomware attacks we turned on tamper protection by default for all new customers with Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 or Microsoft 365 E5 licenses. To further protect our customers, we are announcing that tamper protection will be turned on for all existing customers, unless it has been explicitly turned off in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. For customers who haven’t already configured tamper protection, they’ll soon receive a notification stating that it will be turned on in 30 days. For example, public preview customers receive a notification on September 21, 2022 indicating that tamper protection will be turned on 30 days later, on October 24, 2022.
The following screenshot shows what the notification looks like:
Human operated ransomware is one of the biggest cybersecurity challenges facing customers today. Post-mortems of ransomware attacks have revealed two things:
We recommend that you turn tamper protection on and keep it enabled across your organization.
If you prefer that tamper protection not be turned on automatically for your tenant, you can explicitly opt out as follows:
By explicitly turning tamper protection off, your intent to keep tamper protection turned off will be registered for your tenant. For more information see Protect security settings with tamper protection | Microsoft Docs.
If you manage a device with | You disable tamper protection by |
Intune (Microsoft Endpoint Manager) |
Creating a Windows Security experience profile in Microsoft Endpoint Manager |
Configuration Manager, version 2006 using tenant attach | Creating an endpoint security policy |
Microsoft 365 Defender portal or 3rd party MDM |
Using Security Management for Defender for Endpoint Note: Tamper protection is included in the Windows Security Experience, located within the Virus & threat protection settings section. |
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