Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What’s new in Defender for Cloud? Defender for SQL on machines plan has an enhanced agent solution aimed to provide an optimized onboarding experience and improved protection coverage across SQL servers installed in Azure, on premise and GCP/AWS. More information on the enhanced agent solution can be found here. General Availability for Customizable on-upload malware scanning filters in Defender for Storage On-upload malware scanning now supports customizable filters. Users can set exclusion rules for on-upload malware scans based on blob path prefixes, suffixes as well as by blob size. By excluding specific blob paths and types, such as logs or temporary files, you can avoid unnecessary scans and reduce costs. For more details, please refer to our documentation. Blog(s) of the month In May, our team published the following blog posts we would like to share: The Risk of Default Configuration: How Out-of-the-Box Helm Charts Can Breach Your Cluster From visibility to action: The power of cloud detection and response Plug, Play, and Prey: The security risks of the Model Context Protocol Connecting Defender for Cloud with Jira Enhancements for protecting hosted SQL servers across clouds and hybrid environments GitHub Community You can now use our new Defender for AI Services pricing estimation script to calculate the projected costs of securing your AI workloads! Microsoft Defender for AI – Price Estimation Scripts Visit our GitHub page Defender for Cloud in the field Watch the latest Defender for Cloud in the Field YouTube episode here: Kubernetes gated deployment in Defender for Cloud Visit our new YouTube page Customer journey Discover how other organizations successfully use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect their cloud workloads. This month we are featuring Make-A-Wish. Make-A-Wish transitioned to the Azure cloud, where it has unified its data and rebuilt vital applications. To make children’s wishes come true, Make-A-Wish stewards families’ data, including sensitive information such as medical diagnoses. The nonprofit is dedicated to protecting children’s privacy through industry-leading technology safeguards. Microsoft security products and services shield Make-A-Wish's operations across the board. Microsoft Defender for Cloud uses advanced threat protection, detection, and response for the nonprofit’s cloud applications, storage, devices, identities, and more. Show me more stories Security community webinars Join our experts in the upcoming webinars to learn what we are doing to secure your workloads running in Azure and other clouds. Check out our upcoming webinars this month! I would like to register Watch past webinars We offer several customer connection programs within our private communities. By signing up, you can help us shape our products through activities such as reviewing product roadmaps, participating in co-design, previewing features, and staying up-to-date with announcements. Sign up at aka.ms/JoinCCP. We greatly value your input on the types of content that enhance your understanding of our security products. Your insights are crucial in guiding the development of our future public content. We aim to deliver material that not only educates but also resonates with your daily security challenges. Whether it’s through in-depth live webinars, real-world case studies, comprehensive best practice guides through blogs, or the latest product updates, we want to ensure our content meets your needs. Please submit your feedback on which of these formats do you find most beneficial and are there any specific topics you’re interested in https://aka.ms/PublicContentFeedback. Note: If you want to stay current with Defender for Cloud and receive updates in your inbox, please consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter: https://aka.ms/MDCNewsSubscribeGuidance for handling CVE-2025-31324 using Microsoft Security capabilities
Short Description Recently, a CVSS 10 vulnerability, CVE-2025-31324, affecting the "Visual Composer" component of the SAP NetWeaver application server, has been published, putting organizations at risk. In this blog post, we will show you how to effectively manage this CVE if your organization is affected by it. Exploiting this vulnerability involves sending a malicious POST request to the "/developmentserver/metadatauploader" endpoint of the SAP NetWeaver application server, which allows allow arbitrary file upload and execution. Impact: This vulnerability allows attackers to deploy a webshell and execute arbitrary commands on the SAP server with the same permissions as the SAP service. This specific SAP product is typically used in large organizations, on Linux and Windows servers across on-prem and cloud environments - making the impact of this vulnerability significant. Microsoft have already observed active exploits of this vulnerability in the wild, highlighting the urgency of addressing this issue. Mapping CVE-2025-31324 in Your Organization The first step in managing an incident is to map affected software within your organization’s assets. Using the Vulnerability Page Information on this CVE, including exposed devices and software in your organization, is available from the vulnerability page for CVE-2025-31324. Using Advanced Hunting This query searches software vulnerable to the this CVE and summarizes them by device name, OS version and device ID: DeviceTvmSoftwareVulnerabilities | where CveId == "CVE-2025-31324" | summarize by DeviceName, DeviceId, strcat(OSPlatform, " ", OSVersion), SoftwareName, SoftwareVersion To map the presence of additional, potentially vulnerable SAP NetWeaver servers in your environment, you can use the following Advanced Hunting query: *Results may be incomplete due to reliance on activity data, which means inactive instances of the application - those installed but not currently running, might not be included in the report. DeviceProcessEvents | where (FileName == "disp+work.exe" and ProcessVersionInfoProductName == "SAP NetWeaver") or FileName == "disp+work" | distinct DeviceId, DeviceName, FileName, ProcessVersionInfoProductName, ProcessVersionInfoProductVersion Where available, the ProcessVersionInfoProductVersion field contains the version of the SAP NetWeaver software. Optional: Utilizing software inventory to map devices is advisable even when a CVE hasn’t been officially published or when there’s a specific requirement to upgrade a particular package and version. This query searches for devices that have a vulnerable versions installed (you can use this link to open the query in your environment): DeviceTvmSoftwareInventory | where SoftwareName == "netweaver_application_server_visual_composer" | parse SoftwareVersion with Major:int "." Minor:int "." BuildDate:datetime "." rest:string | extend IsVulnerable = Minor < 5020 or BuildDate < datetime(2025-04-18) | project DeviceId, DeviceName, SoftwareVendor, SoftwareName, SoftwareVersion, IsVulnerable Using a dedicated scanner You can leverage Microsoft’s lightweight scanner to validate if your SAP NetWeaver application is vulnerable. This scanner probes the vulnerable endpoint without actively exploiting it. Recommendations for Mitigation and Best Practices Mitigating risks associated with vulnerabilities requires a combination of proactive measures and real-time defenses. Here are some recommendations: Update NetWeaver to a Non-Vulnerable Version: All NetWeaver 7.x versions are vulnerable. For versions 7.50 and above, support packages SP027 - SP033 have been released and should be installed. Versions 7.40 and below do not receive new support packages and should implement alternative mitigations. JIT (Just-In-Time) Access: Cloud customers using Defender for Servers P2 can utilize our "JIT" feature to protect their environment from unnecessary ports and risks. This feature helps secure your environment by limiting exposure to only the necessary ports. The Microsoft research team has identified common ports that are potential to be used by these components, so you can check or use JIT for these. It is important to mention that JIT can be used for any port, but these are the most common ones. Learn more about the JIT capability Ports commonly used by the vulnerable application as observed by Microsoft: 80, 443, 50000, 50001, 1090, 5000, 8000, 8080, 44300, 44380 Active Exploitations To better support our customers in the event of a breach, we are expanding our detection framework to identify and alert you about the exploitation of this vulnerability across all operating systems (for MDE customers). These detectors, as all Microsoft detections, are also connected to Automatic Attack Disruption, our autonomous protection vehicle. In cases where these alerts, alongside other signals, will allow for high confidence of an ongoing attack, automatic actions will be taken to contain the attack and prevent further progressions of the attack. Coverage and Detections Currently, our solutions support coverage of CVE-2025-31324 for Windows and Linux devices that are onboarded to MDE (in both MDE and MDC subscriptions). To further expand our support, Microsoft Defender Vulnerability management is currently deploying additional detection mechanisms. This blog will be updated with any changes and progress. Conclusion By following these guidelines and utilizing end-to-end integrated Microsoft Security products, organizations can better prepare for, prevent and respond to attacks, ensuring a more secure and resilient environment. While the above process provides a comprehensive approach to protecting your organization, continual monitoring, updating, and adapting to new threats are essential for maintaining robust security.Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What’s new in Defender for Cloud? The updated edition of Microsoft Defender for Cloud's "From Plan to Deployment" eBook is now available. This comprehensive guide focuses on implementing a cloud-native application platform (CNAPP) strategy. You can access a free version of this eBook here. General Availability for Defender for AI Services Defender for Cloud now supports runtime protection for Azure AI services. Protection for Azure AI services covers threats specific to AI services and applications, such as jailbreak, wallet abuse, data exposure, suspicious access patterns, and more. For more details, please refer to our documentation. Blog(s) of the month In April, our team published the following blog posts we would like to share: Guidance for handling CVE-2025-30065 using Microsoft Security capabilities Protect what matters to your organization using filtering in Defender for Storage Protecting Your Azure Key Vault: Why Azure RBAC Is Critical for Security RSAC™ 2025: Unveiling new innovations in cloud and AI security General Availability of on-demand scanning in Defender for Storage Guidance for handling CVE-2025-31324 using Microsoft Security capabilities GitHub Community Learn more about code reachability in Defender for Cloud: Module 10 - GCP Visit our GitHub page Defender for Cloud in the field Watch the latest Defender for Cloud in the Field YouTube episode here: Kubernetes gated deployment in Defender for Cloud Visit our new YouTube page Customer journey Discover how other organizations successfully use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect their cloud workloads. This month we are featuring Puritan Life Insurance Company of America . Puritan Life increases revenue by almost 700% with distribution channel built on Azure. The company doesn’t have a dedicated security person, so they appreciate that Azure has “security built in automatically.” With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Puritan Life can detect and block malware attacks and threats. “We look at the automated reports from Defender to review findings and perform necessary actions, which helps us to manage security efficiently without needing additional personnel,” says John Meister, Vice President of Technology, Puritan Life Show me more stories Security community webinars Join our experts in the upcoming webinars to learn what we are doing to secure your workloads running in Azure and other clouds. Check out our upcoming webinars this month! May 13 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Safeguard Your Container Supply Chain with Microsoft Defender for Cloud May 15 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Securing Custom Built AI Applications with Microsoft Defender for Cloud May 22 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | What's New in Defender for Storage May 27 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Defender for SQL on Machines Enhanced Agent Update We offer several customer connection programs within our private communities. By signing up, you can help us shape our products through activities such as reviewing product roadmaps, participating in co-design, previewing features, and staying up-to-date with announcements. Sign up at aka.ms/JoinCCP. We greatly value your input on the types of content that enhance your understanding of our security products. Your insights are crucial in guiding the development of our future public content. We aim to deliver material that not only educates but also resonates with your daily security challenges. Whether it’s through in-depth live webinars, real-world case studies, comprehensive best practice guides through blogs, or the latest product updates, we want to ensure our content meets your needs. Please submit your feedback on which of these formats do you find most beneficial and are there any specific topics you’re interested in https://aka.ms/PublicContentFeedback. Note: If you want to stay current with Defender for Cloud and receive updates in your inbox, please consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter: https://aka.ms/MDCNewsSubscribe
From visibility to action: The power of cloud detection and response
Cloud attacks aren’t just growing—they’re evolving at a pace that outstrips traditional security measures. Today’s attackers aren’t just knocking at the door—they’re sneaking through cracks in the system, exploiting misconfigurations, hijacking identity permissions, and targeting overlooked vulnerabilities. While organizations have invested in preventive measures like vulnerability management and runtime workload protection, these tools alone are no longer enough to stop sophisticated cloud threats. The reality is: security isn’t just about blocking threats from the start—it’s about detecting, investigating, and responding to them as they move through the cloud environment. By continuously correlating data across cloud services, cloud detection and response (CDR) solutions empower security operations centers (SOCs) with cloud context, insights, and tools to detect and respond to threats before they escalate. However, to understand CDR’s role in the broader cloud security landscape, let’s first understand how it evolved from traditional approaches like cloud workload protection (CWP). The natural progression: From protecting workloads to correlating cloud threats In today’s multi-cloud world, securing individual workloads is no longer enough—organizations need a broader security strategy. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers cloud workload protection as part of its broader Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), securing workloads across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. It protects multicloud and on-premises environments, responds to threats quickly, reduces the attack surface, and accelerates investigations. Typically, CWP solutions work in silos, focusing on each workload separately rather than providing a unified view across multiple clouds. While this solution strengthens individual components, it lacks the ability to correlate the data across cloud environments. As cloud threats become more sophisticated, security teams need more than isolated workload protection—they need context, correlation, and real-time response. CDR represents the natural evolution of CWP. Instead of treating security as a set of isolated defenses, CDR weaves together disparate security signals to provide richer context, enabling faster and more effective threat mitigation. A shift towards a more unified, real-time detection and response model, CDR ensures that security teams have the visibility and intelligence needed to stay ahead of modern cloud threats. If CWP is like securing individual rooms in a building—locking doors, installing alarms, and monitoring each space separately—then CDR is like having a central security system that watches the entire building, detecting suspicious activity across all rooms, and responding in real time. That said, building an effective CDR solution comes with its own challenges. These are the key reasons your cloud security strategy might be falling short: Lack of Context SOC teams can’t protect what they can’t see. Limited visibility and understanding into resource ownership, deployment, and criticality makes threat prioritization difficult. Without context, security teams struggle to distinguish minor anomalies from critical incidents. For example, a suspicious process in one container may seem benign alone but, in context, could signal a larger attack. Without this contextual insight, detection and response are delayed, leaving cloud environments vulnerable. Hierarchical Complexity Cloud-native environments are highly interconnected, making incident investigation a daunting task. A single container may interact with multiple services across layers of VMs, microservices, and networks, creating a complex attack surface. Tracing an attack through these layers is like finding a needle in a haystack—one compromised component, such as a vulnerable container, can become a steppingstone for deeper intrusions, targeting cloud secrets and identities, storage, or other critical assets. Understanding these interdependencies is crucial for effective threat detection and response. Ephemeral Resources Cloud native workloads tend to be ephemeral, spinning up and disappearing in seconds. Unlike VMs or servers, they leave little trace for post-incident forensics, making attack investigations difficult. If a container is compromised, it may be gone before security teams can analyze it, leaving minimal evidence—no logs, system calls, or network data to trace the attack’s origin. Without proactive monitoring, forensic analysis becomes a race against time. A unified SOC experience with cloud detection and response The integration of Microsoft Defender for Cloud with Defender XDR empowers SOC teams to tackle modern cloud threats more effectively. Here’s how: 1. Attack Paths One major challenge for CDR is the lack of context. Alerts often appear isolated, limiting security teams’ understanding of their impact or connection to the broader cloud environment. Integrating attack paths into incident graphs can improve CDR effectiveness by mapping potential routes attackers could take to reach high-value assets. This provides essential context and connects malicious runtime activity with cloud infrastructure. In Defender XDR, using its powerful incident technology, alerts are correlated into high-fidelity incidents and attack paths are included in incident graphs to provide a detailed view of potential threats and their progression. For example, if a compromised container appears on an identified attack path leading to a sensitive storage account, including this path in the incident graph provides SOC teams with enhanced context, showing how the threat could escalate. Attack path integrated into incident graph in Defender XDR, showing potential lateral movement from a compromised container. 2. Automatic and Manual Asset Criticality Classification In a cloud native environment, it’s challenging to determine which assets are critical and require the most attention, leading to difficulty in prioritizing security efforts. Without clear visibility, SOC teams struggle to identify relevant resources during an incident. With Microsoft’s automatic asset criticality, Kubernetes clusters are tagged as critical based on predefined rules, or organizations can create custom rules based on their specific needs. This ensures teams can prioritize critical assets effectively, providing both immediate effectiveness and flexibility in diverse environments. Asset criticality labels are included in incident graphs using the crown shown on the node to help SOC teams identify that the incident includes a critical asset. 3. Built-In Queries for Deeper Investigation Investigating incidents in a complex cloud-native environment can be overwhelming, with vast amounts of data spread across multiple layers. This complexity makes it difficult to quickly investigate and respond to threats. Defender XDR simplifies this process by providing immediate, actionable insights into attacker activity, cutting investigation time from hours or days to just minutes. Through the “go hunt” action in the incident graph, teams can leverage pre-built queries specifically designed for cloud and containerized threats, available at both the cluster and pod levels. These queries offer real-time visibility into data plane and control plane activity, empowering teams to act swiftly and effectively, without the need for manual, time-consuming data sifting. 4. Cloud-Native Response Actions for Containers Attackers can compromise a cloud asset and move laterally across various environments, making rapid response critical to prevent further damage. Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s integration with Defender XDR offers real-time, multi-cloud response capabilities, enabling security teams to act immediately to stop the spread of threats. For instance, if a pod is compromised, SOC teams can isolate it to prevent lateral movement by applying network segmentation, cutting off its access to other services. If the pod is malicious,it can be terminated entirely to halt ongoing malicious activity. These actions, designed specifically for Kubernetes environments, allow SOC teams to respond instantly with a single click in the Defender portal, minimizing the impact of an attack while investigation and remediation take place. New innovations for threat detection across workloads, with focused investigation and response capabilities for containers—only with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. New innovations for threat detection across workloads, with focused investigation and response capabilities for containers—only with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. 5. Log Collection in Advanced Hunting Containers are ephemeral and that makes it difficult to capture and analyze logs, hindering the ability to understand security incidents. To address this challenge, we offer advanced hunting that helps ensure critical logs—such as KubeAudit, cloud control plane, and process event logs—are captured in real time, including activities of terminated workloads. These logs are stored in the CloudAuditEvents and CloudProcessEvents tables, tracking security events and configuration changes within Kubernetes clusters and container-level processes. This enriched telemetry equips security teams with the tools needed for deeper investigations, advanced threat hunting, and creating custom detection rules, enabling faster detection and resolution of security threats. 6. Guided response with Copilot Defender for Cloud's integration with Microsoft Security Copilot guides your team through every step of the incident response process. With tailored remediation for cloud native threats, it enhances SOC efficiency by providing clear, actionable steps, ensuring quicker and more effective responses to incidents. This enables teams to resolve security issues with precision, minimizing downtime and reducing the risk of further damage. Use case scenarios In this section, we will follow some of the techniques that we have observed in real-world incidents and explore how Defender for Cloud’s integration with Defender XDR can help prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to these incidents. Many container security incidents target resource hijacking. Attackers often exploit misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in public-facing apps — such as outdated Apache Tomcat instances or weak authentication in tools like Selenium — to gain initial access. But not all attacks start this way. In a recent supply chain compromise involving a GitHub Action, attackers gained remote code execution in AKS containers. This shows that initial access can also come through trusted developer tools or software components, not just publicly exposed applications. After gaining remote code execution, attackers disabled command history logging by tampering with environment variables like “HISTFILE,” preventing their actions from being recorded. They then downloaded and executed malicious scripts. Such scripts start by disabling security tools such as SELinux or AppArmor or by uninstalling them. Persistence is achieved by modifying or adding new cron jobs that regularly download and execute malicious scripts. Backdoors are created by replacing system libraries with malicious ones. Once the required configuration changes are made for the malware to work, the malware is downloaded, executed, and the executable file is deleted to avoid forensic analysis. Attackers try to exfiltrate credentials from environment variables, memory, bash history, and configuration files for lateral movement to other cloud resources. Querying the Instance Metadata service endpoint is another common method for moving from cluster to cloud. Defender for Cloud and Defender XDR’s integration helps address such incidents both in pre-breach and post-breach stages. In the pre-breach phase, before applications or containers are compromised, security teams can take a proactive approach by analyzing vulnerability assessment reports. These assessments surface known vulnerabilities in containerized applications and underlying OS components, along with recommended upgrades. Additionally, vulnerability assessments of container images stored in container registries — before they are deployed — help minimize the attack surface and reduce risk earlier in the development lifecycle. Proactive posture recommendations — such as deploying container images only from trusted registries or resolving vulnerabilities in container images — help close security gaps that attackers commonly exploit. When misconfigurations and vulnerabilities are analyzed across cloud entities, attack paths can be generated to visualize how a threat actor might move laterally across services. Addressing these paths early strengthens overall cloud security and reduces the likelihood of a breach. If an incident does occur, Defender for Cloud provides comprehensive real-time detection, surfacing alerts that indicate both malicious activity and attacker intent. These detections combine rule-based logic with anomaly detection to cover a broad set of attack scenarios across resources. In multi-stage attacks — where adversaries move laterally between services like AKS clusters, Automation Accounts, Storage Accounts, and Function Apps — customers can use the "go hunt" action to correlate signals across entities, rapidly investigate, and connect seemingly unrelated events. Attackers increasingly use automation to scan for exposed interfaces, reducing the time to breach containers—sometimes in under 30 minutes, as seen in a recent Geoserver incident. This demands rapid SOC response to contain threats while preserving artifacts for analysis. Defender for Cloud enables swift actions like isolating or terminating pods, minimizing impact and lateral movement while allowing for thorough investigation. Conclusion Microsoft Defender for Cloud, integrated with Defender XDR, transforms cloud security by addressing the challenges of modern, dynamic cloud environments. By correlating alerts from multiple workloads across Azure, AWS, and GCP, it provides SOC teams with a unified view of the entire threat landscape. This powerful correlation prevents lateral movement and escalation of threats to high-value assets, offering a deeper, more contextual understanding of attacks. Security teams can seamlessly investigate and track incidents through dynamic graphs that map the full attack journey, from initial breach to potential impact. With real-time detection, automatic alert correlation, and the ability to take immediate, decisive actions—like isolating compromised containers or halting malicious activity—Defender for Cloud’s integration with Defender XDR ensures a proactive, effective response. This integrated approach enhances incident response and empowers organizations to stop threats before they escalate, creating a resilient and agile cloud security posture for the future. Additional resources: Watch this cloud detection and response video to see it in action Try our alerts simulation tool for container security Read about some of our recent container security innovations Check out our latest product releases Explore our cloud security solutions page Learn how you can unlock business value with Defender for Cloud Start a free 30-day trial of Defender for Cloud todayGeneral Availability of on-demand scanning in Defender for Storage
When malware protection was initially introduced in Microsoft Defender for Storage, security administrators gained the ability to safeguard their storage accounts against malicious attacks during blob uploads. This means that any time a blob is uploaded—whether from a web application, server, or user—into an Azure Blob storage account, malware scanning powered by Microsoft Defender Antivirus examines the content for any malicious elements within the blob, including images, documents, zip files and more. 🎉In addition to on-upload malware protection, on-demand malware protection is now generally available in Defender for Storage. This article will focus on the recent general availability release of on-demand scanning, its benefits, and how security administrators can begin utilizing this feature today. 🐞What is on-demand scanning? Unlike on-upload scanning, which is a security feature that automatically scan blobs for malware when they are uploaded or modified in cloud storage environments, on-demand scanning enables security administrators to manually initiate scans of entire storage accounts for malware. This scanning method is particularly beneficial for targeted security inspections, incident response, creating security baselines for specific storage accounts and compliance with regulatory requirements. Scanning all existing blobs in a storage account can be performed via the API and Azure portal user interface. Let's explore some use case scenarios and reasons why an organization might need on-demand scanning. Contoso IT Department has received a budget to enhance the security of their organization following the acquisition of Company Z. Company Z possesses numerous storage accounts containing dormant data that have not undergone malware scanning. To integrate these data blobs into the parent organization, it is essential that they first be scanned for malware. Contoso Health Department is mandated by state law to conduct a scheduled quarterly audit of the storage accounts. This audit ensures data integrity and provides documented assurance of security controls for compliance. It involves verifying that important cloud-hosted documents are secure and free from malware. Contoso Legal Corporation experienced a recent breach where the attacker accessed several storage accounts. Post-breach, Contoso Legal Corporation must assure their stakeholders that the storage accounts are free of malware. 💪Benefits of on-demand scanning On-demand scanning offers numerous advantages that security administrators can leverage to safeguard their cloud storage. This section details some of the primary benefits associated with on-demand scanning. Native scan experience: Malware scanning within Defender for Storage is an agentless solution that requires no additional infrastructure. Security administrators can enable malware protection easily and observe its benefits immediately. Respond to security events: Immediately scan storage accounts when security alerts or suspicious activities are detected. Security audits and maintenance: Performing on-demand scans is crucial during security audits or routine system maintenance to ensure that all potential issues are identified and addressed. Latest malware signatures: On-demand scanning ensures that the most recent malware signatures are utilized. Blobs that may have previously evaded detection by previous malware scans can be identified during a manual scan. 🫰On-demand scanning cost estimation Organizations frequently possess extensive amounts of data and require scanning for malware due to various security considerations. A lack of understanding regarding the precise cost of this operation can hinder security leaders from effectively safeguarding their organization. To address this issue, Defender for Storage offers an integrated cost estimation tool within the Azure portal user interface for on-demand scanning. This new UI will display the size of the blob storage and provide estimated costs for scans based on the volume of data. Access to this crucial information facilitates budgeting processes. 🤔On-upload or on-demand scanning In the current configuration of malware protection within Defender for Storage, it is required to have on-upload malware scanning enabled to use the on-demand functionality. On-demand scanning is offered as an additional option. On-upload scanning ensures that incoming blobs are free from malware, while on-demand scanning provides malware baselines and verifies blob health using the latest malware signatures. On-upload and on-demand scanning have distinct triggers. On-upload scanning is automatically performed when new blobs are uploaded to a blob-based storage account, whereas on-demand scanning is manually triggered by a user or an API call. On-demand scanning can also be initiated by workflow automation, such as using a logic app within Azure for scheduled scans. 👟Start scanning your blobs with on-demand scanning Prerequisites Malware protection in Defender for Storage is exclusively available in the per-storage account plan. If your organization is still using the classic Defender for Storage plan, we highly recommend upgrading to take advantage of the full range of security benefits and the latest features. To get started with this agentless solution, please look at the prerequisites in our public documentation here. Test on-demand Malware Scanning Within the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Ninja Training available on GitHub, security administrators can utilize Exercise 12: Test On-demand Malware Scanning in Module 19. The exercise includes detailed instructions and screenshots for testing on-demand malware scanning. This test can be performed using the Azure Portal User Interface or API. Best Practices To maximize the effectiveness of on-demand malware scanning in Microsoft Defender for Storage, please take a look at the best practices that are outlined in our public documentation here. 📖 Conclusion In this article we have explored the newly available on-demand scanning feature in Defender for Storage, which complements existing on-upload scanning capabilities by allowing security administrators to manually initiate malware scans for storage accounts. This feature is particularly useful for targeted security checks, incident response, creating security baseline for storage accounts and compliance audits. Additionally, Defender for Storage includes a built-in cost estimation tool to help organizations budget for on-demand scanning based on their data volume. ⚙️Additional Resources Defender for Storage Malware Protection Overview On-demand malware protection in Defender for Storage On-upload malware protection in Defender for Storage We want to hear from you! Please take a moment to fill out this survey to provide direct feedback to the Defender for Storage engineering team.Validating Microsoft Defender for Resource Manager Alerts
This document is provided “as is.” MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes. As announced at Ignite 2021, Microsoft Defender for Resource Manager plan provides threat detection against malicious usage of Azure Resource Management Layer (Portal, Rest, API, PowerShell). To learn more about Azure Defender for ARM, read our official documentation. You can enable Microsoft Defender for Resource Manager on your subscription via environment settings, select the subscription, change the plan to ON (as shown below) and click Save to commit the change. Now that you have this plan set to ON, you can use the steps below to validate this threat detection. First, make sure that you The script must be executed by a cloud user with read permissions on the subscription. You need to Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned before running the script You need to have the Az PowerShell module installed before running the script. It can be installed separately using: "Install-Module -Name Az -AllowClobber -Scope AllUsers". After ensuring those two items are done, run the script below: # Script to alert ARM_MicroBurst.AzDomainInfo alert Import-Module Az # Login to the Azure account and get a random Resource group $accountContext = Connect-AzAccount $subscriptionId = $accountContext.Context.Subscription.Name $resourceGroup = Get-AzResourceGroup | Get-Random $rg = $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName Write-Output "[*] Dumping information`nSubscription: $subscriptionId`nResource group: $rg." Write-Output "[*] Scanning Storage Accounts..." $storageAccountLists = Get-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $rg | select StorageAccountName,ResourceGroupName Write-Output "[*] Scanning Azure Resource Groups..." $resourceGroups = Get-AzResourceGroup Write-Output "[*] Scanning Azure Resources..." $resourceLists = Get-AzResource Write-Output "[*] Scanning AzureSQL Resources..." $azureSQLServers = Get-AzResource | where {$_.ResourceType -Like "Microsoft.Sql/servers"} Write-Output "[*] Scanning Azure App Services..." $appServs = Get-AzWebApp -ResourceGroupName $rg Write-Output "[*] Scanning Azure App Services #2..." $appServs = Get-AzWebApp -ResourceGroupName $rg Write-Output "[*] Scanning Azure Disks..." $disks = (Get-AzDisk | select ResourceGroupName, ManagedBy, Zones, TimeCreated, OsType, HyperVGeneration, DiskSizeGB, DiskSizeBytes, UniqueId, EncryptionSettingsCollection, ProvisioningState, DiskIOPSReadWrite, DiskMBpsReadWrite, DiskIOPSReadOnly, DiskMBpsReadOnly, DiskState, MaxShares, Id, Name, Location -ExpandProperty Encryption) Write-Output "[*] Scanning Azure Deployments and Parameters..." $idk = Get-AzResourceGroupDeployment -ResourceGroupName $rg Write-Output "[*] Scanning Virtual Machines..." $VMList = Get-AzVM Write-Output "[*] Scanning Virtual Machine Scale Sets..." $scaleSets = Get-AzVmss Write-Output "[*] Scanning Network Interfaces..." $NICList = Get-AzNetworkInterface Write-Output "[*] Scanning Public IPs for each Network Interface..." $pubIPs = Get-AzPublicIpAddress | select Name,IpAddress,PublicIpAllocationMethod,ResourceGroupName Write-Output "[*] Scanning Network Security Groups..." $NSGList = Get-AzNetworkSecurityGroup | select Name, ResourceGroupName, Location, SecurityRules, DefaultSecurityRules Write-Output "[*] Scanning RBAC Users and Roles..." $roleAssignment = Get-AzRoleAssignment Write-Output "[*] Scanning Roles Definitions..." $roles = Get-AzRoleDefinition Write-Output "[*] Scanning Automation Account Runbooks and Variables..." $autoAccounts = Get-AzAutomationAccount Write-Output "[*] Scanning Tenant Information..." $tenantID = Get-AzTenant | select TenantId Write-Output "[!] Done Running." There may be a delay of up to 60 minutes between script completion and the alert appearing in the client environment (With an average of 45 min). An example of this alert is shown below: Reviewers Dick Lake, Senior Product Manager Script by Yuval Barak, Security ResearcherProtect what matters to your organization using filtering in Defender for Storage
Microsoft Defender for Storage is a cloud-native, agentless security solution within Microsoft Defender for Cloud, part of Microsoft’s CNAPP offering. With seamless onboarding, it helps safeguard your organization’s most valuable data by detecting and preventing malicious uploads, sensitive data exfiltration, and data corruption. Powered by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, it delivers advanced threat detection to enhance your storage security. Are all crown jewels made equally? Defender for Storage provides exclusive, agentless malware protection for Azure Blob Storage, helping detect and mitigate malware threats against your organization’s data. Powered by Microsoft Defender Antivirus, this solution ensures data compliance and offers flexible scanning options, including on-upload and on-demand protection. While maintaining visibility across all organizational data is crucial, some data requires higher scrutiny than others. Here are key use case scenarios: Contoso Financial Corporation prioritizes scanning high-risk files, such as external uploads, downloads, and files from untrusted sources. Contoso IT Department needs to filter out known internal files that typically generate false positives, reducing unnecessary security alerts and minimizing distractions from real malware threats. Contoso Health Department uses a trusted application that generates files and would like to optimize malware scanning for other, potentially riskier files. 🎉Introducing customizable on-upload scanning filters (Public Preview) Defender for Storage provides security administrators with granular controls, offering flexibility to tailor security and deployment settings to their organization’s needs. These include configuring malware scanning caps, setting exclusions at the resource level, and more. A recently introduced feature now allows customization of on-upload malware scanning filters, delivering key benefits such as reducing unnecessary scans and lowering costs—without compromising security. This new feature supports customizable filter such as: Exclude specific blob with prefix Exclude blobs with suffix Exclude blobs large (x) bytes Start filtering your files today Malware protection in Defender for Storage is exclusively available in the latest plan. If your organization is still using the classic Defender for Storage plan, we highly recommend upgrading to take advantage of the full range of security benefits and the latest features. Upgrading ensures access to enhanced threat detection, improved security controls, and ongoing feature updates that help protect your organization’s data more effectively. To begin your malware protection journey, review our documentation for detailed information on prerequisites and deployment guidelines. This will help you seamlessly integrate malware protection into your existing security strategy and maximize the value of Defender for Storage here. Once Defender for Storage is enabled, follow the instructions below to use the filtering configurations: Navigate to your storage account that you want to filter on-upload scans Under “Security + networking”, select Microsoft Defender for Cloud Select settings under Microsoft Defender for Storage Under “On-upload malware scanning”, select which filters to apply. Example: Conclusion The introduction of customizable on-upload scanning filters provides granular control for security administrators, allowing for more flexibility and efficiency in malware protection. This feature helps reduce unnecessary scans and costs without compromising security. For customers using the classic Defender for Storage plan, upgrading to the latest plan is highly recommended to fully benefit from these advanced features. For more information about Defender for Storage please visit our public document aka.ms/defenderforstorage Additional Resources We want to hear from you! Please take a moment to fill out this survey to provide direct feedback to the Defender for Storage engineering team.Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What’s new in Defender for Cloud? We're enhancing the severity levels of recommendations to improve risk assessment and prioritization. As part of this update, we reevaluated all severity classifications and introduced a new level — Critical. See this page for more info. General Availability of File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) based on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint in Azure Government File Integrity Monitoring based on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is now GA in Azure Government (GCCH) as part of Defender for Servers Plan 2. For more details, please refer to our documentation Blog(s) of the month In March, our team published the following blog posts we would like to share: Integrating Security into DevOps Workflows with Microsoft Defender CSPM New innovations to protect custom AI applications with Defender for Cloud All Key Vaults Are Critical, But Some Are More Critical Than Others: Finding the Crown Jewels GitHub Community Learn more about code reachability in Defender for Cloud: Module 26 - Defender for Cloud Code Reachability Vulnerabilities with Endor Labs Visit our GitHub page Defender for Cloud in the field Watch the latest Defender for Cloud in the Field YouTube episode here: Unveiling Kubernetes lateral movement in Defender for Cloud Manage cloud security posture with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Visit our new YouTube page Customer journey Discover how other organizations successfully use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect their cloud workloads. This month we are featuring Danfuss. Danfoss’s growth contrasted with inefficient manual, on-premises security solutions. It wanted a scalable security solution to defend its global data and SAP landscape while lifting security team effectiveness. Danfoss adopted Microsoft Sentinel and the Microsoft Sentinel solution for SAP applications. It ingests logs from 20 applications and thousands of devices with the connectors including Defender for Cloud. Show me more stories Security community webinars Join our experts in the upcoming webinars to learn what we are doing to secure your workloads running in Azure and other clouds. Check out our upcoming webinars this month! April 15 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Securing Custom Built AI Applications with Microsoft Defender for Cloud April 30 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Securing Custom Built AI Applications with Microsoft Defender for Cloud We offer several customer connection programs within our private communities. By signing up, you can help us shape our products through activities such as reviewing product roadmaps, participating in co-design, previewing features, and staying up-to-date with announcements. Sign up at aka.ms/JoinCCP. We greatly value your input on the types of content that enhance your understanding of our security products. Your insights are crucial in guiding the development of our future public content. We aim to deliver material that not only educates but also resonates with your daily security challenges. Whether it’s through in-depth live webinars, real-world case studies, comprehensive best practice guides through blogs, or the latest product updates, we want to ensure our content meets your needs. Please submit your feedback on which of these formats do you find most beneficial and are there any specific topics you’re interested in https://aka.ms/PublicContentFeedback. Note: If you want to stay current with Defender for Cloud and receive updates in your inbox, please consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter: https://aka.ms/MDCNewsSubscribeMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What's new in Defender for Cloud? On-demand malware scanning in Defender for Storage is now in GA! This feature also supports blobs up to 50 GB in size (previously limited to 2GB). See this page for more info. 31 new and enhanced Multicloud regulatory standards We’ve published enhanced and expanded support of over 31 security and regulatory frameworks in Defender for Cloud across Azure, AWS & GCP. For more details, please refer to our documentation. Blogs of the month In February, our team published the following blog posts we would like to share: Unveiling Kubernetes lateral movement and attack paths with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Protecting Azure AI Workloads using Threat Protection for AI in Defender for Cloud New and enhanced multicloud regulatory compliance standards in Defender for Cloud Strengthening Cloud Compliance and Governance with Microsoft Defender CSPM GitHub Community Learn more about Code Reachability Vulnerabilities with Endor Labs with Module 26 - Defender for Cloud Code Reachability Vulnerabilities with Endor Labs Defender for Cloud in the field Watch the latest Defender for Cloud in the Field YouTube episodes here: Integrate Defender for Cloud CLI with CI/CD pipelines Code Reachability Analysis Visit our YouTube page! Customer journeys Discover how other organizations successfully use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect their cloud workloads. This month we are featuring Kurita Water Industries, a water treatment solutions company, that leverages both Microsoft Entra Permissions Management and Defender for Cloud’s CSPM for resource statuses, vulnerabilities, state of access permissions, and risk prioritization and CWPP capabilities to continuously monitor and protect cloud workloads Security community webinars Join our experts in the upcoming webinars to learn what we are doing to secure your workloads running in Azure and other clouds. Check out our upcoming webinars this month in the link below! MAR 5 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | API Security Posture with Defender for Cloud We offer several customer connection programs within our private communities. By signing up, you can help us shape our products through activities such as reviewing product roadmaps, participating in co-design, previewing features, and staying up-to-date with announcements. Sign up at aka.ms/JoinCCP. We greatly value your input on the types of content that enhance your understanding of our security products. Your insights are crucial in guiding the development of our future public content. We aim to deliver material that not only educates but also resonates with your daily security challenges. Whether it’s through in-depth live webinars, real-world case studies, comprehensive best practice guides through blogs, or the latest product updates, we want to ensure our content meets your needs. Please submit your feedback on which of these formats do you find most beneficial and are there any specific topics you’re interested in https://aka.ms/PublicContentFeedback. Note: If you want to stay current with Defender for Cloud and receive updates in your inbox, please consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter: https://aka.ms/MDCNewsSubscribe
