Suggestion: Centralize Microsoft Defender XDR Role Management into Microsoft Entra ID
Microsoft Entra ID has evolved into a strong, centralized identity and access management solution. Likewise, the Defender XDR portal (formerly Microsoft 365 Defender) provides a unified experience for security monitoring, investigation, and response across endpoints, email, identities, and more. These tools are critical to modern SecOps. However, managing access across them is still more complex than it needs to be. Key challenges: Dual RBAC confusion: Defender for Endpoint uses its own RBAC system, separate from Entra ID. This leads to misunderstandings — for example, assigning a user the Security Reader role in Entra ID might not grant expected access in Defender once Defender RBAC is enabled. Hidden roles: Roles like Defender for Endpoint Administrator aren’t visible in the Entra portal, making centralized management harder. Access risks: Enabling Defender RBAC can revoke access for some users unless they’re added manually to MDE role groups — often without clear warning. Admin overhead: Managing permissions separately in Entra and Defender adds duplication, friction, and potential for misconfiguration. Suggestions Let’s build on the strength of Microsoft Entra ID by moving all Defender role assignments into Entra, where identity and access is already managed securely and consistently. Goal: Use only Entra ID roles to manage access to the Defender XDR portal — eliminating the need for custom RBAC roles or portal-based configurations in MDE, MDO, or MDI. Benefits of this change: Centralized, consistent access management across Microsoft security solutions Simplified admin experience with reduced configuration errors Better alignment with Zero Trust and least-privilege principles Clear, discoverable roles for Security and SOC teams Seamless experience during role onboarding/offboarding Suggested new Entra built-in roles for Defender XDR: Defender Endpoint Security Administrator Defender Email Security Administrator Defender Cloud Security Administrator SOC L1 Analyst (read-only) SOC L2 Analyst (response) SOC L3 Analyst (hunting) Defender XDR Administrator / Engineer Vulnerability Analyst Microsoft has done a fantastic job modernizing Entra and unifying security visibility in Defender XDR — and this would be a great next step forward. #MicrosoftEntraID #MicrosoftDefenderXDR #SecurityOperations #IAM #RBAC #CloudSecurity #ZeroTrust #MicrosoftSecurity #SecOps #SOC
Secure Score - gMSA not recognized ("Change service account to avoid cached password in registry")
Hello, we have several SQL Servers who were marked as "exposed devices" in the secure score recommendation "Change service account to avoid cached password in windows registry". The remediation option called for the use of "group Managed Service Accounts" ("gMSA"). We implemented those gMSAs. However, the servers are still marked as exposed. What did we do wrong? Is this a false-positive? I already did some checks with the help of Microsoft Copilot - there are no cached credentials for the gMSAs present, the Accounts are correctly set up (they are working for SQL Server services), and we don't use Microsoft Defender for Identity (if that is needed). Any advises? Thank you very much!Investigation state Queued
I see a number of messages in our Defender XDR Incidents with a status of Queued. What does this status mean? This appears to only be related to Defender for Office 365 incidents, usually email reported as junk/phish/notjunk etc type of incidents. Regardless of whether I investigate or change the status of the incident, in remains in the Incidents list as queued. I cannot find clear documentation on what this state means or what action is required to resolve/close the incident. Can anyone shed any light on the what the queued state means and how to resolve a queued incident.
Secure Score - identifying actions marked as Resolved through Third Party
At the moment we have some recommendations that are addressed through a third party application (e.g. we use a third party to assess email for impersonation risk). I can mark this in secure score as resolved through Third Party which is great (we've found that email flow is too slow if we 'double' up the protection). What I'm trying to work out is that, if we decide to stop using the third party software, is there a way I can find the recommendations that have been marked as Resolved through Third Party? I can see that tagging the recommendation with the name of the Third Party might help identify them - but I can't see any way to filter or find the recommendations in Secure Score that do not have a Status of 'To address'? Can you filter on Status in the Secure Score section of Defender? If not, is there another way to access this underlying data and update it?Importing Purview roles into XDR RBAC
I want to activate Email & collaboration into XDR RBAC, so in XDR RBAC, I go and "choose roles to import" and I see the built-in Purview eDiscovery Manager role. Ok, fine, so I choose to import it into XDR RBAC and assume that my two groups of users in that role group (eDiscovery Managers (Sally and Sue) and eDiscovery Admins (Bob)) would be different. Sally and Sue can only manage their own cases and Bob can manage all cases. Different roles. But after it imports, there's only 1 role: eDiscovery Manager and all my users are in there - Sally, Sue and Bob with "Raw data (Email & collaboration) " - both read permissions are selected. But that's it. Question 1) I'm confused on why the eDiscovery role is being imported into XDR RBAC and if that means that over in Purview, after I activate the "Defender for Office365" workload in XDR RBAC - will something change with what Sally and Sue and Bob can do in Purview eDiscovery? Will I still be managing my eDiscovery users in Purview roles for when I need to add Billy to the list of eDiscovery Admins? Question 2) I see that the other Purview role groups I have users assigned (Audit Manager and Organization Management as well as a custom "Search and Purge" role group) were also imported into XDR RBAC permissions and roles but yet aren't applicable until I activate the workload. Wondering what exactly will happen when I activate the Email & collaboration workload. Will anything negative happen to the PIM groups I gave the Purview role groups to? Would I then need to clean anything up over in Purview roles after I activate the workload in XDR RBAC? This isn't clear at all what to do after I activate the email and collaboration workload and can I just undo it if it messes anything up?
SecureScore bugs
There needs to be a way to submit feedback for SecureScore. There's so many outdated links within the 'implementation' tab, and so many quirks. For example, the 'enable safe attachments' policy will fail if you use a custom Quarantine policy, even if it IS admin-only. Feels kinda sketchy to be setting these to 'Resolved through Alternate Mitigation' when you actually haven't. Another example - the Outbound Spam filter specifies no limits for emails. However the documentation DOES. This should be part of the SecureScore recommendation, no? Not sure if this is the right hub - but this is where the doc links for feedback.
How to get access to Move or Delete e-mail?
So this week I had some phishing e-mails that made it past Defender's filtering and were delivered to user mailboxes. I wanted to pull them back, so I found the relevant message the Defender XDR portal, and clicked on Take Action, but the only option available to me there was Submit to Microsoft for review. All the others, including Move or Delete, which is what I wanted, were grayed out. I'll add that was doing this using my Global Admin account. Did some research and supposedly assigning my account the Data Investigator role or creating a custom role with Search and Purge capability would provide the desired access So I put my account into both of those groups, and I still can't access Move or Delete. Anybody know what I am missing here? I’d be grateful for any information.DeviceLogonEvents & IdentityLogonEvents
Hey, I'm trying to fetch login events via these 2 tables DeviceLogonEvents & IdentityLogonEvents, Advanced Hunting. which events will appear in the DeviceLogonEvents vs IdentityLogonEvents? are there events that will appear in DeviceLogonEvents and not in IdentityLogonEvents? or wise versa? as I understood, these table are based on Windows logon events? If yes, what is the mapping from the windows event to these tables? On DeviceLogonEvents, when Upn appears on the event? because sometimes it appears on Additional Info map and sometimes on AccountName, and sometimes it doesn't appear at all (some times weird username appear on the AccountName column) Thank you for your assistance
