Monthly news - May 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news May 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from April 2024.Monthly news - May 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news May 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from April 2024.Monthly news - May 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news May 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from April 2024.The Best of Microsoft Sentinel — Now in Microsoft Defender
Just over a year ago, we introduced the unified security operations (SecOps) experience within Microsoft Defender, bringing together the full stack of threat protection capabilities across” Security Incident Event Management (SIEM), Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Extended Security Posture Management (XSPM), Cloud Security, Threat Intelligence (TI), and Security Copilot. Thousands of organizations have already embraced this unified SecOps experience to streamline analyst workflows, enhance operational efficiency, and accelerate incident response across their security environments. Today, we are proud to share that the most advanced and integrated SIEM experience from Microsoft Sentinel is now fully available within the Microsoft Defender portal as one unified experience. This experience encompasses all SIEM features and is accessible to every customer, including large-scale enterprises and partners with complex security environments. With the general availability of multi-tenant and multi-workspace capabilities, security teams can now seamlessly collaborate, investigate threats, and manage incidents across multiple Microsoft Sentinel tenants—all from a single, unified queue. This advancement empowers analysts to operate more efficiently and effectively in today’s dynamic threat landscape. Why Customers Are Making the Move Thousands of organizations have already made the move—and they’re seeing real results. Work smarter: Manage incidents, alerts, and investigations across tenants and workspaces in one unified view. Detect faster: AI-driven insights reduce false positives by 85%* and boost alert correlation speed by 50%*. Respond instantly: Security Copilot delivers guided investigations and automated summaries. Hunt deeper: Investigate threats across Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR—no switching, no silos. “The Defender portal is a game-changer. Our team is faster, more focused, and finally working in one place.” — Security Operations Lead, Global Financial Services What’s New—and Why it Matters Advanced Hunting Enhancements Unified queries across Microsoft Sentinel and Defender data, with Security Copilot-assisted KQL generation allows for threat hunting across all data sources from a single portal without context switching and delays. For more information, see Advanced hunting in the Microsoft Defender portal and Security Copilot in advanced hunting. Case Management Use native case workflows in Defender to manage complex investigations efficiently. Features include custom statuses, task assignments, due dates, and multi-incident linking, all while maintaining security context. For more information, see Manage cases natively in Microsoft Defender experience. SOC Optimization Tools Get actionable, tailored recommendations to reduce costs, close data gaps, improve coverage, strengthen your security posture, and maximize ROI. To learn more about the different types of recommendations, see SOC optimization reference. Expanded Threat Intelligence Import indicators in bulk, visualize data better, and map to MITRE ATT&CK. Enrich investigations with deeper context and better visibility into attacker behavior. For more information, see Threat detection features across the Microsoft unified security platform. Embedded Security Copilot The GenAI power of Security Copilot built to the experience. Utilize AI-powered tools to summarize incidents, analyze scripts/files, and generate incident reports directly within the portal. Accelerate response times and reduce analyst fatigue with intelligent automation. For more information, see Security Copilot in Defender. Seamless, Zero-Disruption Onboarding Connecting your Microsoft Sentinel workspace to Defender is fast, simple, and non-disruptive. Your data stays intact, and you can continue using the classic Azure experience while unlocking the full power of Defender. And going forward, all new features and innovations will be delivered exclusively through the Microsoft Defender portal—ensuring you always have access to the most advanced tools in the Microsoft Security ecosystem. Take Action Now Transform your SecOps with Microsoft Defender and take advantage of the latest innovations. Get started today: https://security.microsoft.com Begin the process of onboarding your Microsoft Sentinel workspaces to the Defender portal Transition Guide Pre-recorded webinar Register for upcoming webinars here. *Source: Microsoft internal researchMonthly news - June 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news June 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from May 2024.Security Copilot: A game changer for modern SOC
In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face relentless pressure to swiftly and accurately detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents. As frontline defenders of an organization’s cybersecurity, security analysts need real-time intelligent insights to boost investigation and response. Microsoft Security Copilot empowers security teams with gen AI-powered capabilities that streamline workflows, automate tasks and upskill teams, enhancing overall SOC efficiency. A recent study showed customers could achieve 30% reduction in MTTR for security incidents. We are committed to continuously improving our products based on valuable customer feedback. By listening to our users and understanding their needs, we have enhanced numerous features and introduced new skills that significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SOC teams. AI-powered insights to accelerate investigation and response When SOC analysts investigate and respond to incidents, Security Copilot offers a comprehensive description of the attack, affected systems, and event timelines, paired with clear, actionable steps for swift remediation and mitigation. Some of our recent innovations include: Enhancement! The Microsoft Sentinel Incident Summary, available in the Copilot standalone experience has been enhanced and now aligns with the Defender incident summaries, offering detailed, step-by-step descriptions of the attack. The summary includes key information such as the attack's start time, timelines, involved assets, indicators of compromise (IOCs), kill chain steps, and a direct link to the incident page. These improvements enable you to request a summary of a Microsoft Sentinel incident from either the standalone or the unified security operations platform embedded experience. Microsoft Sentinel incident summary in standalone experience Enhancement! Users can request Copilot to list incidents in Defender and/or Microsoft Sentinel through a prompt in the standalone portal, filtering by assignment, classification, creation time, determination, last update time, severity, and status. List of incidents In addition, users can also retrieve a list of entities for a specified incident. Figure 3: List of entities for an incident These enhancements allow analysts to efficiently retrieve incidents and entities on demand and apply additional filters for more targeted actions. Enhancement! A recent enhancement to Guided Response enables security analysts to easily communicate with end users, a common activity in the SOC that is particularly helpful for incident triage. Copilot now dynamically generates text for analysts to use, describing the observed user activity under investigation. Analysts can contact the user directly via Teams using the readily available Guided Response recommendation button or copy the generated text to their preferred communication tool. Dynamicallygenerated text for analysts to use This allows for quick and efficient communication with end users, accelerating the incident investigation process and saving the analyst from the tedious task of crafting the message with all the necessary information about the incident. New! During incident investigations, analysts commonly review details about participating assets and entities. In addition to the already available insightful Device Summary, the new Identity Summary provides a comprehensive overview of user identities, highlighting behavioral anomalies and potential misconfigurations. This feature is crucial for SOC analysts as it offers clear, contextual insights into identity-related activities, enabling quicker identification and resolution of security issues. By summarizing key information such as login locations, role changes, and authentication methods, the Identity Summary helps analysts understand the full scope of identity behaviors and risks Figure 5: Identity Summary Enhancement! The script and file analysis features in Security Copilot simplify complex investigations by translating what a script does into natural language and streamlining the analysis of multiple executable files. With the new addition of relevant MITRE ATT&CK techniques to the analysis, SOC analysts can quickly understand the attack tactics and techniques used by adversaries and provide faster and better response. Figure 6: MITRE techniques used Enhancement! The Security Copilot incident report compiles all response activities into a detailed report of the security incident. It includes what happened, the actions taken, by whom and when, and the reason for classification. Initially, the incident report gathered its data from Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, including incident management actions like status changes and assignments, comments from the activity log, actions and playbooks performed on entities within the incident, and more. To further streamline report sharing and provide a more holistic view, the incident report now also integrates with the third-party case management system ServiceNow to include in the report incident investigation and remediation steps logged in ServiceNow tickets. This integration requires the bidirectional connector between Microsoft Sentinel and ServiceNow to be installed. Strengthen your security with improved Threat Intelligence content Copilot integrated with Threat Intelligence empowers security teams with comprehensive information about threat actors, threat tools, indicators of compromise (IOCs) related to vulnerabilities and incidents, providing contextual threat intelligence directly from Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (Defender TI) to detect, analyze, and respond to threats more effectively. At Ignite, customers will see exciting enhancements to this experience, including: New! The ten new MDTI indicator skills can leverage the full corpus of raw and finished threat intelligence in MDTI to link any IoC (indicator of compromise) to all related data and content, providing critical context to attacks and enabling advanced research and preemptive hunting capabilities, including threat infrastructure chaining and analysis, offering defenders a head start on adversaries. Gain critical context with MDTI Enhancement! Copilot can now leverage vulnerability and asset intelligence from Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management (MDEASM), Defender Vulnerability Management (MDVM), and Threat Analytics for a more complete view of vulnerabilities and a better understanding of how known threats covered in Microsoft threat intelligence impact the organization. This capability helps customers prioritize vulnerabilities and have an in-depth understanding of the impact of this vulnerability on the organization. Overview of vulnerability Improved Copilot sidecar with better user control The recent updates to the Copilot side panel in the embedded experience provide more flexibility, allowing you to open or close Copilot based on your preference. This helps optimize screen space while investigating incidents or entities, using Advanced Hunting, or navigating the Threat Intelligence pages. Once you close the Copilot side panel in any of these scenarios, it will remember your preference and stay closed. gure 9: Close Copilot based on preference You can reopen the Copilot panel anytime for AI-powered insights to aid your SOC workflows. Microsoft recommends keeping the Copilot panel open to ensure you are receiving real time insights to stay ahead of threats. Reopen Copilot panel Looking forward Security Copilot is revolutionizing the way security teams operate by providing advanced AI-driven capabilities that not only enhance their efficiency and effectiveness but also empowers them to stay ahead of threats and protect their organizations at the speed and scale of AI. Microsoft is committed to delivering industry-leading innovation with precise insights for faster and more effective threat detection and response. We are working closely with our customers to collect feedback and will continue to add more functionality. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts. Resources Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Defender - Microsoft Defender XDR | Microsoft Learn Microsoft Copilot for Security | Microsoft Security Microsoft Copilot for Security - Pricing | Microsoft Azure What’s new in Defender: How Copilot for Security can transform your SOC | Microsoft Community Hub Operationalizing Microsoft Security Copilot to Reinvent SOC Productivity What’s New at Ignite: Unified Threat Intelligence Experience in CopilotAzure Firewall integration in Security Copilot: protect networks at machine speed with gen AI
Today, at Microsoft Build, we are excited to announce the availability of the Azure Firewall integration in Security Copilot. It helps analysts perform detailed investigations of the malicious traffic intercepted by the IDPS feature of their firewalls across their entire fleet using natural language questions in the Security Copilot portal. Azure Firewall is a cloud-native and intelligent network firewall security service that provides best of breed threat protection for your cloud workloads running in Azure. It's a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. In this blog we will walk through the newly announced Azure Firewall integration in Security Copilot. gin enabled in the Security Copilot portal These capabilities were announced at RSA. Take a look at this blog to learn more about the user journey and value that Copilot can deliver: Bringing generative AI to Azure network security with new Microsoft Copilot integrations. There are four primary capabilities now in preview which are outlined below. Get top IDPS signature hits This capability retrieves the top IDPS signature hits for an Azure Firewall. It helps the user get information about the traffic intercepted by the IDPS feature by simply asking natural language questions instead of the user having to construct KQL queries manually. Get details on an IDPS signature This capability enriches the threat profile of an IDPS signature beyond the information found in logs. It helps the user get additional details about an IDPS signature instead of requiring them to manually source this information. Search across firewalls for an IDPS signature This capability looks for a given IDPS signature across your tenant, subscription or resource group. It helps users perform a fleet-wide search (over any scope) for a threat across all their Firewalls instead of searching for the threat manually. Secure your environment using IDPS This capability generates recommendations to secure your environment using Azure Firewall’s IDPS feature. It helps users get information from documentation about using Azure Firewall’s IDPS feature to secure their environment instead of having to look up this information manually. Get started Learn more in our documentation about these capabilities and how to access them today!Monthly news - May 2024
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news May 2024 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from April 2024.
