Monthly News-August 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - August 2026 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 July 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: Redefining identity security for the modern enterprise One policy engine to govern them all: Securing agentic AI with Microsoft Purview Building a modern detection pipeline with ContentOps Securing local AI agents with Microsoft Defender Microsoft Defender: Extending critical protection for emerging threats in Team Actionable threat insights (find all of them here) Email threat landscape: Q2 2026 trends and insights Enhancing AI security through global AI red teaming Least privilege for AI agents: Identity, access, and tool binding Microsoft Defender (Public Preview) Microsoft Defender now assesses posture risk for AI agents, including enterprise agents and local agents discovered on endpoint devices. Risk levels are based on active risk indicators, such as configuration, access, runtime activity, endpoint and user context, and active alerts. Security teams can use posture risk and recommendations to prioritize risky agents and improve agent security posture. For more information, see AI agent posture risk in Microsoft Defender. (Generally available) The Domain investigation page allows you to investigate an Active Directory domain. It shows Active Directory domain security, including domain properties, deployment health, identity summary, service account breakdown, sensitive entities, active recommendations, group policies, and trust relationships. For more information, see Investigate a domain . (Generally available) With a Microsoft Agent 365 license, Microsoft Defender provides discovery, security posture, threat detection and investigation, and real-time protection for the AI agents in your tenant. Onboarding includes enabling data collection, connecting the Microsoft 365 app connector, and connecting Copilot Studio for real-time protection of Copilot Studio agents. For more information, see Protect AI agents using Microsoft Defender. (Generally available) Improved access to Playbook Generator: Following the GA release of Playbook Generator May 31st, the team focused on streamlining the onboarding experience and reducing friction related to Security Copilot wallet provisioning. Playbook Generator remains included with Microsoft Sentinel and does not consume SCUs for generating, testing, or running playbooks, yet customer feedback highlighted friction around Security Copilot wallet provisioning and initial setup requirements. The team worked on simplifying access and reducing onboarding barriers so organizations can more quickly take advantage of AI-assisted playbook creation, testing, and automation capabilities. For all other Sentinel News, have a look at the "What's new in Microsoft Sentinel blog post - July edition" Identity Security (Generally available) Migration of Defender for Identity sensors from v2.x to v3.x is now generally available. For more information, see Migrate to Defender for Identity sensor v3.x. Migration readiness reasons on the Sensors page: When a server is marked Not ready for migration on the Sensors page, you can now hover over the status to see a tooltip that lists the specific reasons the server doesn't meet the migration prerequisites. For more information, see Troubleshoot "Not ready for migration" status. (Public Preview) Expanded SaaS app support in Password protection. The Password protection page now includes password risks from SaaS apps connected through Defender for Cloud Apps, in addition to Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, and Okta. SaaS apps that support SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, appear on the Password Hygiene and Password Policies tabs. Each SaaS app requires a Defender for Cloud Apps app connector. For more information, see Investigate identity password protection. Automatic RPC auditing on domain controllers: Defender for Identity now automatically enables RPC auditing on domain controllers when you upgrade to sensor version 3.0.8 or later. You no longer need to apply a tag manually to enable RPC auditing. For more information, see Configure RPC auditing. Microsoft Defender Experts MDR General Availability of Microsoft Defender Experts MDR P2: Microsoft Defender Experts MDR (formerly Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR) is expanding with new third-party and multi-cloud coverage powered by Microsoft Sentinel, with the launch of Defender Experts MDR P2 service. Defender Experts MDR provides a 24/7 managed detection and response service that reduces noise, adds expert context, and drives action. In addition to the Microsoft Defender products, this new service supports key non-Microsoft sources across cloud (AWS), identity (Okta), email (Proofpoint), network (Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Fortinet, ZScaler), and endpoint (CrowdStrike) that are ingested in Microsoft Sentinel, providing E2E visibility and protection for customers operating heterogenous environments. Defender Experts will continue expanding our scope to other non-Microsoft products to deliver on this promise. For more information, see the Microsoft Defender Experts MDR documentation. Microsoft Security Exposure Management / Defender Vulnerability Management (Private Preview) Codename MDASH - Agentic code scanner is now available in private preview in Microsoft Security Exposure Management. Codename MDASH uses a multi-model agentic AI system to detect code vulnerabilities with greater depth and accuracy than traditional static analysis. Security teams can run scans from Defender CLI or through a GitHub connector, review findings in the Defender portal, and use results to help prioritize code security risks. For more information, see Agentic code security overview. (Private Preview) Codename MDASH - MAI-Augmented scan profile private preview. The MAI-Augmented scan profile is now available in preview as part of Codename MDASH. The MAI-Augmented profile can be used when triggering a scan through the Defender CLI. It includes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a new cyber-specialized model that extends the current agentic scanner in addition to the existing required models. Security teams can choose this profile when triggering a scan from Defender CLI or continue using a scan profile based on the existing models. For more information, see Scan with a scan profile. OT data connectors in Microsoft Security Exposure Management: Microsoft Security Exposure Management now supports operational technology (OT) data connectors for Armis, Dragos, and Forescout. OT data connectors bring OT asset and vulnerability data from supported third-party OT platforms into the Defender portal. This helps security teams view OT devices alongside other assets, enrich device inventory with OT context, and investigate vulnerabilities across IT and OT environments. For more information, see OT data connectors. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Public Preview) AI agent runtime protection includes these enhancements: - Vendor-supported agent event interfaces now work with standard platform and engine update channels, so no Beta channel configuration is required. Agent-native event inspection now supports Codex CLI and the GitHub Copilot app. - Network inspection is now supported for agents that don't expose vendor-supported event interfaces, including OpenClaw and similar Node.js-based Claw agents. For more information, see AI agent runtime protection with Defender for Endpoint. (Generally available) Available from Defender for Endpoint on Linux version 101.26042.0011 and later. The Defender Deployment Tool for Linux simplifies deployment by combining installation, onboarding, upgrades, and uninstallation into a single workflow. The tool automates prerequisite validation, supports custom installation paths, enables deployment of specific Defender versions from preferred update channels, and works seamlessly in environments that use local repositories. In addition to a simplified deployment experience, customers can now gain complete visibility into deployment progress through Device Timeline integration, providing step-by-step installation, upgrade, and onboarding status, Advanced Hunting queries for fleet-wide deployment monitoring, and detailed error reporting, including deployment stage, status, exit code, and failure reason to simplify troubleshooting. These capabilities help administrators quickly identify deployment issues, track onboarding progress, and understand deployment outcomes across their Linux estate. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Unified RBAC is the default permission model for new Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 organizations. Starting July 2026, new Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 organizations use the Microsoft Defender unified role-based access control (Unified RBAC) model by default. For more information, see Configure Unified RBAC for Defender for Office 365 and MC1246006. Microsoft 365 E3 now includes Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1. For more information about what's included in each plan, see Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 vs. Plan 2 cheat sheet. Prompt injection protection: Defender for Office 365 now detects prompt injection attacks hidden in inbound email. For more information, see Prompt injection protection in Defender for Office 365.Microsoft Defender now integrates with Dragos, Forescout, & Armis for OT Security
Co-author(s): Amit Cohen and Hadar Shindler Operational technology (OT) environments are unlike anything else in cybersecurity. The systems that run our factories, power grids, water treatment plants, pipelines, and transportation networks weren’t built with modern threats in mind — and they can’t simply be patched, rebooted, or scanned the way IT systems can. A misstep doesn’t just create an alert backlog; it can stop a production line, disrupt critical services, or put physical safety at risk. To support customers in bringing their OT security solutions into their Security Operation (SOC) platform, we’re excited to announce an expansion of the Microsoft ecosystem with new OT security integrations from Dragos, Forescout, and Armis from ServiceNow. This gives customers greater flexibility to use the OT security solutions that best fit their environments. Expanding OT coverage in Defender with new partner integrations We’ve built new connectors for Dragos, Forescout and Armis that are now ready for customers to start using. Dragos "Strong OT defense starts with knowing what is running in your operational environment, the vulnerabilities those assets carry, the threats targeting your systems, and the data to determine root cause. That kind of intelligence comes from years of operating inside OT environments and tracking the groups behind those threats. As OT threats continue to grow and AI accelerates how quickly adversaries can approach the OT boundary, integrating Dragos into Microsoft Defender strengthens how organizations see, understand, and defend their OT environments." -Robert M. Lee, CEO and Co-Founder, Dragos, Inc. Forescout "Our integration with Microsoft Defender represents a significant step forward in helping organizations defend their most critical operations against today's rapidly evolving cyber threats. By combining Forescout's industry-leading visibility and protection for IoT, OT, and network-connected assets with Microsoft's leadership in endpoint, identity, cloud, and security operations, we're delivering a more unified approach to cyber defense. Together, we're enabling healthcare providers, government agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and enterprises comprehensive visibility across IT and OT environments while empowering security teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats faster and with greater confidence." -Robert McNutt, Chief Strategy Officer, Forescout Armis “Fragmented security is no longer an option as threats to critical infrastructure evolve at machine speed. By deepening our integration with Microsoft, we are unifying visibility and context in complex OT and IoT environments. Integrating Armis Centrix™ with Microsoft Defender equips security teams with real-time, actionable insights to identify and mitigate risks across their entire operational footprint.” -Nadir Izrael, Group Vice President, Armis from ServiceNow Bringing OT and IT Security Together With these new integrations, signals, asset inventory and vulnerabilities from Dragos, Forescout, and Armis from ServiceNow flow directly into Microsoft Defender — giving security operations teams a single, unified view across IT, OT, and IoT. What this means for customers: Unified visibility across IT and OT. OT assets and vulnerabilities surface alongside IT signals in Defender, so the SOC can see and reason about them in one place. Cross-domain correlation. Identity, endpoint, cloud, and OT signals are correlated automatically. Streamlined investigation and response. Analysts can pivot from an OT detection to related IT activity (and back) without switching tools or losing context. Specialized depth, unified breadth. Customers keep the deep OT expertise of their chosen partner platform and gain the enterprise-wide coverage of Defender. Let’s take a look at some of new the user experience updates that showcase these integrations. Figure 1. Discovered devices by OT partner in device inventory The Device Inventory now will show OT devices discovered through a new partner integration (see Figure 1). Industrial assets like substation relays and switches from vendors are automatically surfaced with rich context, criticality, vendor, model, firmware, and discovery source alongside built-in recommendations to classify critical assets and protect unmanaged OT devices. The result: unified visibility across IT and OT from a single view, so security teams can find, prioritize, and protect previously unseen devices faster. Figure 2. Vulnerabilities and exposure across OT devices The Vulnerabilities view now includes a dedicated OT Partner CVEs tab, surfacing thousands of vulnerabilities on operational technology devices discovered through partner integrations. Every CVE is enriched with severity, CVSS score, age, active threats, and exposed device count, and the list is sorted by exposure so the most widespread, highest-impact risks rise to the top. Most importantly, security teams can now see OT vulnerabilities alongside IT in a single, prioritized view, making it faster to focus remediation where it matters most. Figure 3. Discovered devices exposed by OT integration Selecting a CVE opens a detail panel with a dedicated Exposed devices discovered by OT partner tab, listing every affected device along with its OS platform and last seen date. For CVE-2024-7264, that means a clear view of all 75 exposed devices in one place, from OT controllers to sales workstations. The benefit is that security teams can move from a single vulnerability straight to the exact devices at risk, making it easy to scope impact and drive targeted remediation without leaving the view. Figure 4. Discovered vulnerabilities by OT integration Drilling into a specific device, like the Substation-North-HMI2 shown here, reveals a dedicated Discovered vulnerabilities by OT partner tab alongside the standard device views such as incidents, timeline, and security recommendations. It lists every vulnerability found on that device by the OT partner, complete with severity, CVSS score, publication and detection dates, and active threats. The benefit is a complete, device-level picture of OT risk right where analysts investigate, so they can see exactly what a single asset is exposed to and prioritize remediation without switching tools or context. Built for customer choice and flexibility We’re excited to expand our integration ecosystem, giving customers the flexibility to work with the OT solutions they already trust. These integrations help bring specialized OT context into broader security workflows, enabling SOC teams, risk managers, and security leaders to collaborate more effectively while using the tools that best fit their environment. Get started The Dragos, Forescout, and Armis integrations are available in public preview starting today. Customers can enable them through the Defender portal and begin ingesting OT signals from their partner platform of choice. Integrate the Dragos OT data connector in Microsoft Security Exposure Management - Microsoft Security Exposure Management | Microsoft Learn Integrate the Forescout OT data connector in Microsoft Security Exposure Management - Microsoft Security Exposure Management | Microsoft Learn Integrate the Armis OT data connector in Microsoft Security Exposure Management - Microsoft Security Exposure Management | Microsoft LearnMonthly news - July 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - July 2026 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 June 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: Redefining identity security for the modern enterprise One policy engine to govern them all: Securing agentic AI with Microsoft Purview Building a modern detection pipeline with ContentOps Securing local AI agents with Microsoft Defender Microsoft Defender: Extending critical protection for emerging threats in Team Weekly Security News: We publish a short 1ish minute video every week with updates across our Microsoft Security stack. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you don't miss the next episode. Actionable threat insights (find all of them here) Securing AI agents: When AI tools move from reading to acting Chromium extension uses AI‑related branding to redirect browser search Photo ZIP campaign targeting hospitality industry delivers Node.js implant for persistent access Microsoft Defender Two Workbooks capabilities in the unified Microsoft Defender portal moved to GA: Advanced Hunting connector - build custom dashboards directly on top of Advanced Hunting (XDR) dat. Query XDR tables and visualize them in Workbooks for richer investigations and reports. Workspace filter / multi-workspace experience - scope and filter workbooks by workspace, with workspace selection integrated into the workbook itself rather than relying on the global selector. MTO Tenant Groups let MSSPs and large enterprises organize their multitenant view in Microsoft Defender by grouping tenants logically (e.g., by region, business unit, or customer cohort). Learn more here. Custom Detections support in Microsoft Sentinel Repositories. Custom Detections can now be managed as code in Microsoft Sentinel Repositories, the same way customers already manage analytic rules, playbooks, parsers and workbooks. Detection engineers connect a GitHub or Azure DevOps repo to their workspace; Custom Detections placed in the repo are reconciled on every commit. A standalone Bicep path via the Microsoft Security Bicep extension lets teams deploy from any CI/CD pipeline (ADO Pipelines, GitHub Actions, custom runners). (General Availability) The following advanced hunting schema tables are now generally available: The CloudAuditEvents table contains information about cloud audit events for various cloud platforms protected by the organization's Defender for Cloud. The CloudDnsEvents table contains information about DNS activity events from cloud infrastructure environments. The CloudProcessEvents table contains information about process events in multicloud hosted environments. (Public Preview) The AgentsInfo table in advanced hunting is now available in preview. The AIAgentsInfo table is transitioning to this new table, which provides a unified schema that supports agent inventory and governance for all agent types, including Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft 365 Copilot, third-party, and endpoint-discovered agents. Microsoft Agent 365 customers should use the AgentsInfo table today. The AIAgentsInfo table remains accessible until July 1, 2026. Update your queries to use AgentsInfo before this date. For more information, see Advanced hunting schema - Naming changes. For all other Sentinel News, have a look at the "What's new in Microsoft Sentinel blog post - June edition" Identity Security (Public Preview) The Identity Security dashboard now includes a new Human identities card that shows your human identities by source (Entra ID, SaaS, and on-premises), giving you a single view of where your human identities live. For more information, see Identity Security dashboard. (Public Preview) On the Coverage and maturity page, the Review and improve coverage side panel for SaaS Identities now includes an Observed column and a Show Only Observed Applications toggle. By default, the panel shows only SaaS applications detected in your environment. Turn off the toggle to see other supported SaaS applications you can onboard to expand your identity coverage. For more information, see Coverage and maturity. New alerts were added to the Defender for Identity security alerts related to Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory as well as other identity providers. For a full list of those new alerts, check out our documentation. Recent ShinyHunters attacks on Salesforce show how OAuth tokens and connected apps are being weaponized to bypass MFA at scale. The upgraded Salesforce connector for Defender for Cloud Apps helps detect these attacks faster, with richer connected-app context and investigation-ready signals. Customers already using the connector are advised to enable the additional events in the Salesforce console for tighter protection, and eligible customers not yet using it are advised to connect Salesforce. Learn more. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint / Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) Local AI agent discovery: as part of the Defender AI agents experience, Microsoft Defender now automatically discovers supported local AI agents running on onboarded Windows & macOS devices. Discovered agents appear as assets in the AI agent inventory, exposure map, and advanced hunting, giving security teams visibility into local AI agent usage across the organization. For more information, see Discover local AI agents. (Preview) Local AI agent runtime protection on Windows endpoints is now available in public preview. Microsoft Defender inspects the agent loop (user prompts, tool calls, and tool responses) and can block risky activity before it executes, helping stop prompt injection and unsafe agent actions at the device level. Blocked and audited events appear as alerts in Microsoft Defender to support incident correlation and investigation workflows. The new version of the Defender deployment tool for Windows streamlines onboarding and enhances security by: Bundling the onboarding package directly into the tool's executable. Generating a key during deployment package creation that is required for running the tool. Enabling users to configure an expiry date for the package to reduce the risk of unauthorized use. In addition: You have the option of downloading the package as either an .exe or a .zip file, whichever best suits your organization's needs. A new Deployment packages page in the Defender portal facilitates management of downloaded packages by providing centralized visibility into all the packages and their current status. Now generally available: Selective Response Actions enables organizations to tailor high-impact security operations on devices during onboarding. It provides precise control over how response actions are applied on Tier-0 systems and other high-value assets, helping maintain operational stability while delivering strong protection. The new exposure score model in Defender Vulnerability Management is now generally available. This model improves risk prioritization and recommendation impact accuracy by incorporating exploit prediction data (EPSS) and asset context factors such as internet-facing status and criticality. More details here. Microsoft Secure Score now includes the Reduce unnecessary inbound internet exposure on internet-facing devices recommendation, which helps identify devices that are accessible from the public internet and may represent unnecessary attack surface. This recommendation provides centralized visibility into internet-facing devices across the environment. Many predefined SaaS application classification rules were added to the critical assets list. Have a look at our documentation for the full list. These classifications require onboarding to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.Ignite 2025: What's new in Microsoft Defender?
This Ignite we are focused on giving security teams the edge they need to meet adversaries head on in the era of AI. The modern Security Operations Center (SOC) is undergoing a fundamental transformation, placing AI at the forefront of innovation - not just as an added feature, but as a driving force at every layer of the stack. While much attention is rightly focused on the development of security agents, we fundamentally believe that AI must also evolve the very foundation of our security solutions. This means building solutions that more effectively uncover novel threats, act dynamically to defend the organization during attacks, and reduce the workload for the security team. As organizations adopt AI at an unprecedented speed, we also want to make sure they can do so securely. To meet these security needs of the AI era, we are excited to announce a series of innovations that will help organizations shift to an autonomous defense and an agentic SOC. New agents to help scale and accelerate security operations Evolving Microsoft Defender’s autonomous defense capabilities for better protection Secure your low-code and pro-code AI agents with Microsoft Defender Today, we are taking the first step in shifting security operations from static controls to autonomous defense and from manual toil to agentic operations. But we have an ambitious vision to augment and evolve these AI capabilities and agents across the entire SOC lifecycle and are excited to share some of that vision, as shown in the below graphic, with you at Microsoft Ignite. The Agentic SOC: Scaling expertise and accelerating defense We are excited to introduce four new Security Copilot agents in Microsoft Defender that bring autonomous intelligence across different stages of the SOC lifecycle. These agents combine context, reasoning, and complex workflows to help defenders anticipate attacks sooner, detect smarter, and investigate faster than ever before. Security Alert Triage Agent: In March 2025, we introduced the Security Alert Triage Agent, built to autonomously handle user-submitted phishing reports at scale. The agent reviews and classifies incoming alerts, resolves false positives and escalates only the malicious cases that require human expertise. Early data shows that analysts working with the agent caught up to 6.5x more malicious emails compared to professional graders. Today, we’re excited to announce that the agent’s triage capabilities will soon extend beyond phishing to cover identity and cloud alerts. Secondly, we are also improving our phish admin reporting process with a new agentic email grading system. It replaces a manual review process with advanced large language models and agentic workflows to deliver rapid, transparent verdicts and clear explanations to customers for every reported email. Learn more about the agentic email grading system. Threat Hunting Agent – this agent reimagines the investigation process. Instead of requiring analysts to master complex query languages or sift through mountains of data, the Threat Hunting Agent enables natural language investigations with contextual insight. Analysts can vibe with the agent by asking questions in plain English, receive direct answers, and be guided through comprehensive hunting sessions. This levels up the current NL2KQL experience by enabling analysts to explore patterns, pivot intuitively and uncover hidden signals in real time for a fluid, context-aware experience. This not only accelerates investigations but makes advanced threat hunting accessible to every member of the SOC, regardless of experience level. Dynamic Threat Detection Agent – One of the hardest challenges in detection engineering is finding and fixing false negatives. The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent proactively hunts for false negatives and blind spots that traditional alerting might miss. When a critical incident happens, Copilot will kick off an automated hunt to uncover undetected threats—like unusual residual activity around a sensitive identity. This agent turns ‘probably fine’ into proven secure—hunting the quiet persistence that slips past alerts and closing the gap before it becomes tomorrow’s breach. Threat Intelligence (TI) Briefing Agent – Now native in the Defender portal. Generate tailored, AI‑authored threat briefings in minutes—synthesizing global intel with your environment’s context—without leaving the incident pane. Figure 1. The Threat Hunting Agent showing insights on an incident that contained a high risk binary To make the agents easily accessible and help security teams get started more quickly, we are excited to announce that Security Copilot will be available to all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Rollout starts today for existing Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue in the upcoming months for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Customers will receive 30-day advanced notification before activation. Learn more. Autonomous Defense at Platform Scale Threat actors are automating everything. Ransomware campaigns can encrypt an entire environment in under an hour. Adversaries evade detection and pivot across identities, endpoints, and cloud resources faster than human teams can triage alerts. Traditional SOC models—built on manual workflows and fragmented tools—simply can’t keep pace. Every second of delay gives attackers an advantage. Microsoft Defender now counters that speed by delivering autonomous defense at scale. Defender shifts security from reactive firefighting to proactive protection, embedding AI into the foundation of our protection solutions for instant detection, disruption, and containment—before threats escalate. In 2023, we introduced automatic attack disruption, which autonomously stops attacks in progress—like ransomware or business email compromise—with policy-bound actions that isolate endpoints, disable compromised accounts, and block malicious IPs at machine speed. Today, we’re taking the next step. New capabilities show how AI and agentic technology are transforming security to better protect customers: Unleash automatic attack disruption across your SIEM data: We are expanding the disruption capabilities of Microsoft Defender to some of the most critical data sources customer connect via Microsoft Sentinel including AWS, Proofpoint and Okta. This enables real-time detection and automatic containment of threats like phishing and identity compromise on top of your log data, fundamentally turning your SIEM into a threat protection solution. While these capabilities leverage the power of our platform, Defender is not a requirement for customers to realize this value in Microsoft Sentinel. Figure 2. Attack disruption initiated on an AWS attack Predictive shielding – This brand-new automatic attack disruption capability activates immediately after an attack is first contained. Our first of its kind capability combines graph insights, AI, and threat intelligence to predict potential attack paths for where the adversary might go next. It then applies just-in-time hardening techniques that proactively block the attacker from pivoting. Some of the hardening tactics that will automatically be applied by Microsoft Defender include disabling SafeBoot and enforcing Group Policy Objects, putting a hard stop to the attacker’s movements and ability to execute common techniques for compromise. Learn more about predictive shielding and other endpoint security news. Protect your low-code and pro-code AI agents Generative AI and agents are rapidly transforming how we work, but these powerful new tools also introduce new risks. And with the democratization of agent creation across pro-code, low-code, and no-code building platforms, building agents is now accessible to everyone, many without extensive developer or security knowledge. To help security teams better manage these risks we are excited to announce that we are extending the capabilities and experiences in Microsoft Defender to the protection of agents. From agent security posture management, to attack path analysis, and threat protection for Copilot Studio, Azure Foundry, and agents built and connected via the Microsoft Agent 365 SDK. Learn more about how Microsoft Defender can help protect your agents against threats like prompt injections and more. There is so much more innovation we are introducing in Microsoft Defender today, including expanded endpoint security coverage for legacy systems, improvements to how you can investigate identity-centric threats, and we are bringing cloud security posture management into the Defender portal. Check out the other Defender news blogs for more details. Join us in San Francisco, November 17–21, or online, November 18–20, for deep dives and practical labs to help you maximize your Microsoft Defender investments and to get more from the Microsoft capabilities you already use. Featured sessions: Microsoft Defender: Building the agentic SOC with guest Allie Mellen Blueprint for building the SOC of the future Empowering the SOC: Security Copilot and the rise of agentic defense Identity Under Siege: Modern ITDR from Microsoft AI vs AI: Protect email and collaboration tools with Microsoft Defender AI-powered defense for cloud workloads Endpoint security in the AI era: What's new in DefenderMonthly news - May 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - May 2026 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 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: The future of identity protection with Predictive Shielding Network-layer data protection with Microsoft Entra GSA and Purview DLP Data lake federation: hunt across external data without ingesting it Weekly Security News: We publish a short 1ish minute video every week with updates across our Microsoft Security stack. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you don't miss the next episode. Actionable threat insights CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vulnerability enables Linux root privilege escalation across cloud environments Email threat landscape: Q1 2026 trends and insights Cross‑tenant helpdesk impersonation to data exfiltration: A human-operated intrusion playbook Detection strategies across cloud and identities against infiltrating IT workers Dissecting Sapphire Sleet’s macOS intrusion from lure to compromise Microsoft Defender Blog post: Containing a domain compromise: How predictive shielding shut down lateral movement (Public Preview) You can now view the current status of automatic attack disruption and predictive shielding actions related to a specific incident. You view this data in the Activities tab of the incident page. Learn more We made several enhancements across the Advanced hunting experience, read this blog post for all the details. (Public Preview) The AIAgentsInfo table in advanced hunting now includes additional columns that provide deeper visibility into AI agents operating in your Microsoft 365 environment. These fields expand coverage beyond Copilot Studio to all agent types, including Microsoft Foundry, third-party marketplace, and custom line-of-business agents. (Generally Available) Built-in alert tuning rules are now generally available. Built-in alert tuning rules suppress alerts from common benign activity in Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Office 365 without affecting Automated Investigation and Response (AIR) investigations and email notifications. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR customers can now see Defender Experts as a distinct entry in the Microsoft Defender portal navigation menu. This feature adds to the existing home page status card as in-portal experiences that provide consistent and predictable access to the service. Learn more Blog post: Simplifying AWS defense with Microsoft Sentinel UEBA Call to action: update automation by July 1, 2026 - Account Name is now consistently the UPN prefix for analytics rule alerts! Microsoft Sentinel is updating how the account entity's Account Name value is populated for analytics rule alerts when the full UPN is mapped into Account Name. This change improves consistency for downstream automation rules and Logic Apps playbooks. For more information, including before and after examples, read the blog article Update: Changing the Account Name Entity Mapping in Microsoft Sentinel. For all other Sentinel News, have a look at the "What's new in Microsoft Sentinel blog post - April edition" Microsoft Defender for Endpoint / Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) You can now view the current status of automatic attack disruption and predictive shielding actions related to a specific incident. You view this data in the Activities tab of the incident page. Learn more Microsoft Secure Score now includes the Ensure devices are updated to Secure Boot 2023 certificates and boot manager, which helps identify devices that haven't yet transitioned to the new Secure Boot 2023 certificates required ahead of the June 2026 expiration. To learn more about the recommendation, see Assess Secure Boot status with Microsoft Defender (blog). Microsoft Defender for Identity (Public Preview) Custom account correlation rules. Custom account correlation rules let you link accounts that belong to the same identity, such as privileged accounts with unique naming conventions. You can correlate accounts that don't share strong identifiers such as account ID, SID, object ID, or UPN by defining rules based on UPN prefix, UPN suffix, domain UPN, or employee ID. For more information, see Create custom account correlation rules. (Generally Available) The Automatic Windows event-auditing configuration for sensors v3.x is now generally available. Automatic Windows event-auditing streamlines deployment by automatically applying the required auditing settings to new sensors and correcting misconfigurations on existing ones.Monthly news - April 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - April 2026 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 March 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: New skills in Microsoft Defender Autonomous AI Agents in Microsoft Defender Beyond KQL: Unlocking SOC Insights with Sentinel data lake Jupyter Notebooks Extending Attack Disruption beyond Microsoft: third‑party signals in action A new home for Microsoft Defender for Cloud RSA blog posts: Security Copilot in Defender: empowering the SOC with assistive and autonomous AI RSA 2026: What’s new in Microsoft Defender? Actionable threat insights Inside an AI‑enabled device code phishing campaign Storm-1175 focuses gaze on vulnerable web-facing assets in high-tempo Medusa ransomware operations Cookie-controlled PHP webshells: A stealthy tradecraft in Linux hosting environments Mitigating the Axios npm supply chain compromise Microsoft Defender We’re introducing a chat experience for Security Copilot directly within Microsoft Defender. Copilot is already embedded across Microsoft Defender experiences today, but now you can interact with it through an ongoing, two-way conversation. Ask questions, explore hypotheses, and follow your investigation threads across incidents, alerts, identities, devices, IPs, and other evidence. Read more about it in this blog post. We are expanding agentic triage to identity and cloud alerts - bringing triage for phish, identity and cloud together within a single agent. The Security Alert Triage Agent helps you autonomously determine whether these alerts represent real threats or false alarms, delivering natural language findings and transparent, step-by-step decision analysis. Read more about it in this blog post. Identity security enhancements: New identity security capabilities help you monitor and manage identity security for human and non-human identities: (Public Preview) Identity Security dashboard: The Identity Security dashboard provides summary cards for identity providers, on-premises identities, SaaS identities, PAM and IGA integrations, and non-human identities. For more information, see The Identity Security dashboard. The Identity Security dashboard is being rolled out gradually to customers, and might not yet be available in your organization. (Public Preview) Coverage and maturity page: The Coverage and maturity page shows your organization's identity security coverage with maturity levels, including Connected, Protected, Fortified, and Resilient, and prioritized setup tasks. For more information, see Coverage and maturity. The Coverage and maturity page is being rolled out gradually to customers, and might not yet be available in your organization. If you don't see this feature in your environment yet, check back soon. Identity inventory: The Identity inventory page now shows human and non-human identities in separate tabs. Insight cards help you classify critical assets, view highly privileged identities, identify critical Active Directory service accounts, and view cloud application accounts. For more information, see View the Identity inventory. (Preview) Non-human identities: The Non-human identities tab shows non-human identities, including Microsoft Entra ID apps, Active Directory service accounts, Google Workspace apps, and Salesforce apps. For more information, see Identity inventory and Investigate non-human identities. (Public Preview) Identity risk score: A new risk score for identities, ranging from 0 to 100, that indicates the likelihood of compromise and the potential impact based on criticality and privileged roles. The risk score is available in Microsoft Entra ID, where it can be used to inform conditional access policies and identity protection workflows. A new Risk score tab on the Identity page provides a detailed breakdown of the risk factors, including percentile comparison and risk trends. For more information, see Investigate an identity. (Public Preview) Domain investigation page: The Domain investigation page shows Active Directory domain security, including domain properties, deployment health, identity summary, service account breakdown, sensitive entities, active recommendations, group policies, and trust relationships. For more information, see Investigate a domain. (Public Preview)Identity security recommendations: View recommendations from Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, SaaS applications, and supported non-Microsoft identity providers. For more information, see Identity security recommendations. Call to action: update older Microsoft Sentinel content as code (Sentinel repositories) API versions before June 15, 2026 (Public Preview) The following advanced hunting schema tables are now available for preview: The CloudDnsEvents table contains information about DNS activity events from cloud infrastructure environments. The CloudPolicyEnforcementEvents table contains policy enforcement evaluation decisions and metadata of security gating events for various cloud platforms protected by the organization's Microsoft Defender for Cloud. To improve accuracy and better protect organizational identities, we've made updates to the Secure Score category calculations. Some security recommendations categorized as Cloud apps recommendations are now considered identity‑related and grouped under the Identity category. While the total Secure Score remains unchanged, individual identity and app scores may change. (Public Preview) Customers can now use filters on very large incidents with many alerts and entities or hide specific entities to simplify complex incident graphs. By simplifying the graphs, they can focus their investigations on what matters most. Learn more The proactive user containment (contain user) action as part of the predictive shielding feature is now generally available. This action infuses activity data with exposure data to identify exposed credentials at risk of being compromised and reused to conduct malicious activity. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint / Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Library management for live response is now generally available. This feature provides a centralized view for managing files and scripts used during live response sessions. Microsoft Secure Score now includes new recommendations: Block outbound network connections from Microsoft HTML Application Host (mshta.exe): Helps mitigate attacks that leverage mshta.exe (a trusted Windows binary) to execute malicious scripts and communicate with external command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. Blocking outbound connections from mshta.exe disrupts common attack chains, prevents payload download and data exfiltration, and reduces the risk of living-off-the-land attacks. This is relevant for emerging attack campaigns, for example, ClickFix campaigns, where attackers abuse legitimate tools like mshta.exe to execute malicious content delivered through user interaction. Block file transfer over RDP: Restricts file transfer capabilities in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) sessions. This helps prevent attackers from using RDP sessions to transfer malicious files into the environment or exfiltrate sensitive data. SMB server security hardening against authentication relay attacks: Helps protect servers from credential relay attacks by strengthening Server Message Block (SMB) authentication protections, including enforcing Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), SMB signing, and SMB encryption to ensure authentication integrity and protect SMB traffic from tampering or interception. The proactive user containment (contain user) action as part of the predictive shielding feature is now generally available. This action infuses activity data with exposure data to identify exposed credentials at risk of being compromised and reused to conduct malicious activity. Microsoft Defender for Identity New identity security capabilities help you monitor and manage identity security for human and non-human identities: (Public Preview) Identity Security dashboard: The Identity Security dashboard provides summary cards for identity providers, on-premises identities, SaaS identities, PAM and IGA integrations, and non-human identities. Widgets show deployment status, highly privileged identities, users at risk, and domains with unsecured configurations. For more information, see The Identity Security dashboard. The Identity Security dashboard is being rolled out gradually to customers, and might not yet be available in your organization. (Public Preview) The Coverage and maturity page shows your organization's identity security coverage for identity providers, on-premises identities, SaaS identities, and PAM and IGA integrations. Each source displays a maturity level, including Connected, Protected, Fortified, and Resilient, with identity counts, coverage scores, and prioritized setup tasks. For more information, see Coverage and maturity. The Coverage and maturity page is being rolled out gradually to customers, and might not yet be available in your organization. If you don't see this feature in your environment yet, check back soon. The Identity inventory page now shows human and non-human identities in separate tabs. Insight cards help you classify critical assets, view highly privileged identities, identify critical Active Directory service accounts, and view cloud application accounts. For more information, see View the Identity inventory. (Public Preview) The Non-human identities tab on the Identity inventory page shows non-human identities, including Microsoft Entra ID apps, Active Directory service accounts, Google Workspace apps, and Salesforce apps. The tab includes statistics for risky, highly privileged, overprivileged, unused, and externally published identities. A separate investigation page lets you view details for each identity. For more information, see Identity inventory and Investigate non-human identities. (Public Preview) A new risk score for identities, ranging from 0 to 100, that indicates the likelihood of compromise and the potential impact based on criticality and privileged roles. The risk score is available in Microsoft Entra ID, where it can be used to inform conditional access policies and identity protection workflows. A new Risk score tab on the Identity page provides a detailed breakdown of the risk factors, including percentile comparison and risk trends. For more information, see Investigate an identity. (Public Preview) Identity security recommendations: View recommendations for Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, and SaaS applications such as Microsoft, Atlassian, GitHub, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Recommendations are also available for non-Microsoft identity providers such as Okta, PingOne, CyberArk, and SailPoint. For more information, see Identity security recommendations. (Public Preview) Domain investigation page: The Domain investigation page shows Active Directory domain security, including domain properties, deployment health, identity summary, service account breakdown, sensitive entities, active recommendations, group policies, and trust relationships. For more information, see Investigate a domain. (Public Preview) Password protection page: The Password protection page shows identity password risk from Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, and Okta, with tabs for password hygiene, password policies, leaked credentials, and exposed passwords. For more information, see Password protection. To improve accuracy and better protect organizational identities, we've made updates to the Secure Score category calculations. Some security recommendations categorized as Cloud apps recommendations are now considered identity‑related and grouped under the Identity category. While the total Secure Score remains unchanged, individual identity and app scores may change. The Suspected pass-the-ticket attack alert is now generally available. This alert was previously available in public preview as Pass-the-Ticket (PtT) attack. For more information, see Lateral movement alerts. These new alerts were added to the Defender for Identity security alerts: New alerts related to Entra ID: Attempt to disable Defender for Identity service principal observed Suspicious Entra account enablement after disruption Suspicious Intune device registration activity Suspicious OS switch sign-in Suspicious shared client infrastructure activity Suspicious sign-in from unusual user agent and IP address using PowerShell Suspicious sign-in from unusual user agent and IP address using device code flow New alerts related to Active Directory: Suspicious on-premises account enablement after disruption Suspicious resource-based constrained delegation (RBCD) attribute change Suspicious resource-based constrained delegation (RBCD) authentication Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Expanding User reporting in Teams to include Calls: Users can reported completed or missed one-to-one Microsoft Teams calls from the call history as malicious (scam) or non malicious (non-scam) to the specified reporting mailbox, or Microsoft and the reporting mailbox via user reported settings. Added support for contextual Teams messages in User reported Teams Messages: When Users report Microsoft Teams messages from chats, channels (standard, shared, and private), and meeting conversations to Microsoft as malicious (security risk), up to fifteen messages before and after the reported message are shared for analysis. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps To improve accuracy and better protect organizational identities, some security recommendations categorized as Cloud apps recommendations are now considered identity‑related and grouped under the Identity category. While the total Secure Score remains unchanged, individual identity and app scores may change.Monthly news - January 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - January 2026 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 December 2025. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: Advancements in Attack Disruption Vulnerability Remediation Agent in Microsoft Intune Microsoft Defender (Public Preview) The following advanced hunting schema tables are now available for preview: The CampaignInfo table contains contains information about email campaigns identified by Microsoft Defender for Office 365 The FileMaliciousContentInfo table contains information about files that were processed by Microsoft Defender for Office 365 in SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams General Availability of the Security Alert Triage Agent (previously named Phishing Triage Agent): this agent autonomously analyzes user‑reported phishing emails to determine whether they’re true threats or false positives, dramatically reducing manual triage workload. It continuously learns from analyst feedback and provides clear, natural‑language explanations for every verdict, giving SOC teams both speed and transparency. We're excited to share it is now generally available and, very soon, will expand to also triage cloud and identity alerts! Learn more on our docs. Public Preview of Dynamic Threat Detection Agent: Announced at Ignite, this always‑on agent hunts for unseen threats by continuously correlating telemetry and creating new, context‑aware detections on the fly—closing gaps traditional rules can’t see. We're excited to share it is now in Public Preview! Learn more on our docs. Public Preview of Threat Hunting Agent: Announced at Ignite, this agent gives every analyst the power to investigate like an expert by turning natural‑language questions into guided, real‑time hunts that surface hidden patterns, reveal meaningful pivots, and eliminate the need to write complex queries. We're excited to share it is now in Public Preview! Learn more on our docs. General Availability of the Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent: this agent delivers daily, tailored intelligence briefings directly in Microsoft Defender—automatically synthesizing Microsoft’s global threat insights with your organization’s context to surface prioritized risks, clear recommendations, and relevant assets so teams can shift from reactive research to proactive defense in minutes. We're excited to share it is now generally available! Learn more on our docs. (General Availability) The hunting graph in advanced hunting is now generally available. It also now has two new predefined threat scenarios that you can use to render your hunts as interactive graphs. (General Availability) Advanced hunting now supports custom functions that use tabular parameters. With tabular parameters, you can pass entire tables as inputs. This approach lets you build more modular, reusable, and expressive logic across your hunting queries. Learn more Note: The Phishing Triage Agent has since been expanded and is now called the Security Alert Triage Agent. Learn more at aka.ms/SATA Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Public Preview) Triage collection: Use triage collection to prioritize incidents and hunt threats with the Sentinel Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Microsoft Defender for Identity New ADWS LDAP search activity is now available in the 'IdentityQueryEvents' table in Advanced Hunting. This can provides visibility into directory queries performed through ADWS, helping customers track these operations and create custom detection based on this data. (Public Preview) New properties for 'sensorCandidate' resource type in Graph-API. Learn more here. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Integration of Defender for Cloud Apps permissions with Microsoft Defender XDR Unified RBAC is now available worldwide. For more information, see Map Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps permissions to the Microsoft Defender XDR Unified RBAC permissions. To activate the Defender for Cloud Apps workload, see Activate Microsoft Defender XDR Unified RBAC. (Public Preview) The Defender for Cloud Apps app governance unused app insights feature helps administrators identify and manage unused Microsoft 365-connected OAuth apps, enforce policy-based governance, and use advanced hunting queries for better security. This feature is now available for most commercial cloud customers. For more information, see Secure apps with app hygiene features.Security Copilot for SOC: bringing agentic AI to every defender
Cybersecurity has entered an era of relentless complexity. As threat actors increasingly leverage artificial intelligence to automate attacks, evade detection, and scale their tactics, defenders are challenged to keep up. In this new era, security operations centers (SOCs) must transform to not just react, but to anticipate, disrupt, and outpace the next wave of cyberthreats. Microsoft’s goal is to empower every organization to meet this challenge head-on by transforming how security operates. We believe the future of the SOC is more than just agentic: it’s predictive and proactive. This means moving beyond fragmented tools and manual processes, and instead embracing a unified, intelligent approach where AI-driven skills and agents work in concert with human expertise. To bring this vision to life, it’s essential to look at the SOC through the lens of its lifecycle—a dynamic continuum that spans from anticipation and prevention through to recovery and optimization—and to recognize the unique challenges and opportunities within each stage. With Security Copilot’s GenAI and agentic capabilities woven across this lifecycle, Microsoft is delivering an integrated defense platform that enables defenders to move faster, act smarter, and stay ahead of adversaries. Introducing agentic innovation across the SOC lifecycle At Ignite, our agentic innovations are concentrated in three of the five SOC lifecycle pillars, and each one represents a leap forward in how analysts anticipate, detect, triage and investigate threats. Predict and prevent Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent: Introduced in March, this agent has already helped security teams move from reactive to anticipatory defense. At Ignite, we’re announcing that the Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent is now fully embedded in the Microsoft Defender portal, delivering daily, tailored briefings that synthesize Microsoft’s unparalleled global intelligence with organization-specific context in just minutes. Teams no longer need to spend hours gathering TI from disparate sources—the agent automates this process, offering the most current and relevant insights. Analysts can reference the summary to prioritize action, using the agent’s risk assessments, clear recommendations, and links to vulnerable assets to proactively address exposures. Detect and disrupt Dynamic Threat Detection Agent: Detections have long been bottlenecked by the limitations of traditional alerting systems, which rely on predefined logic that can’t scale fast enough to match the speed and variability of modern attacks— resulting in blind spots and missed threats. The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent addresses this challenge head-on. Instead of depending on static rules or isolated input, it continuously analyzes incidents and telemetry, searching for gaps in coverage and correlating signals across the entire security stack. For example, this is how it surfaced a recent AWS attack: a threat actor used an EntraID account to federate into an AWS admin account to exfiltrate sensitive data. The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent generated an alert before the intruder even authenticated into the single sign-on flow, driven by a correlated signal from Sentinel. That alert didn’t exist beforehand; the agent created it on the fly to stop the attack. The result is an adaptive system that extends Microsoft’s industry-leading, research-based detections with context-aware alerts tailored to each organization, closing gaps and revealing threats that legacy systems miss. Triage and investigate Security Alert Triage Agent (previously named Phishing Triage Agent): In March 2025, we introduced the Security Alert Triage Agent, built to autonomously handle user-submitted phishing reports at scale. The agent classifies incoming alerts and resolves false positives, escalating only the malicious cases that require human expertise. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re announcing its general availability, backed by strong early results: the agent identifies 6.5 times more malicious alerts, improves verdict accuracy by 77%, and frees analysts to spend 53% more time investigating real threats. St. Luke’s even said it’s saving their team nearly 200 hours each month. Coming soon, we’ll be extending these autonomous triage capabilities beyond phishing to identity and cloud alerts, bringing the same precision and scale to more SOC workflows. Note: The Phishing Triage Agent has since been expanded and is now called the Security Alert Triage Agent. Learn more at aka.ms/SATA Threat Hunting Agent: this agent reimagines the investigation process. Instead of requiring analysts to master complex query languages or sift through mountains of data, Threat Hunting Agent enables natural language investigations with contextual insight. Analysts can vibe with the agent by asking questions in plain English, receive direct answers, and be guided through comprehensive hunting sessions. It levels up the existing Security Copilot NL2KQL capability by enabling teams to explore patterns, pivot intuitively and uncover hidden signals in real time for a fluid, context-aware experience. This not only accelerates investigations but makes advanced threat hunting accessible to every member of the SOC, regardless of experience level. Agents built into your workflows To make the agents easily accessible and help security teams get started more quickly, we are excited to announce that Security Copilot will be available to all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Rollout starts today for existing Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue in the upcoming months for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Customers will receive 30-day advanced notice before activation. Learn more: https://aka.ms/SCP-Ignite25 Discover more: the Security Store The Security Store, now generally available, is the central hub for discovering, deploying, and managing first-party and third-party security agents. Today, it provides instant access to 20+ agents deployable directly in the Microsoft Defender portal, all within a broader ecosystem of 100+ trusted security solutions. Whether you're investigating incidents, hunting threats, or automating response, the Security Store extends Defender with vetted, scenario-aligned tools that can be set up in minutes. Learn more in this blog. Introducing new GenAI embedded capabilities Security Copilot isn’t just growing through agents—it’s also gaining new embedded capabilities: GenAI skills that help SOC teams work faster, operate at greater scale, and get upleveled directly inside Microsoft Defender. Today, we’re excited to introduce new innovations: Analyst Notes represent a meaningful shift in how investigation work is captured and shared. For organizations that choose to opt into this capability, Copilot automatically reconstructs an analyst’s investigation session—from the moment they open an incident to the moment they close it—and turns that activity into clear, structured notes. The system can even track multiple sessions in parallel and attribute actions to the right incident, and analysts can fully review and edit the generated notes before saving them. This not only saves teams valuable time and effort, it preserves the actual investigation path with far greater accuracy and consistency than manual documentation ever could. The result is a living, cumulative record of how the SOC investigates threats: easier handoffs, stronger auditability, faster onboarding, and a deeper shared understanding of how incidents unfold across multiple SecOps members and phases. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for guided response allows organizations to upload their own internal procedures so Security Copilot can align its recommendations with established guidebooks and compliance requirements. Guided response is one of the ways Copilot helps analysts navigate an incident: it offers one-click actions across triage, containment, investigation and remediation that teams can take immediately. With SOPs uploaded, these recommendations draw directly from organizational workflows and policy standards, ensuring they are contextually relevant and trusted. For defenders, this translates into greater confidence and faster, more consistent decision-making. We’re also eager to share that we’re introducing auto-generated content configuration for Security Copilot’s incident summaries. This new feature allows security admins to decide how and when summaries are produced, choosing between always auto-generating, manual trigger only, or auto-generating based on incident severity. The configuration is managed directly in the Microsoft Defender portal, giving organizations flexibility to fine-tune Copilot’s outputs to their operational needs. Join us at Ignite We invite you to learn more and see these innovations in action at Microsoft Ignite. Don’t miss our featured sessions: Microsoft Defender: Building the agentic SOC with guest Allie Mellen on Wednesday, November 19 th with Allie Mellen, Corina Feuerstein, and Rob Lefferts. Learn more. Empowering the SOC: Security Copilot and the rise of Agentic Defense on Friday, November 21 st with Corina Feuerstein and Cristina da Gama. Learn more. Join us to discover how Microsoft is shaping the future of cybersecurity—making intelligent, agentic defense accessible to every organization.What’s new in Microsoft Defender XDR at Secure 2025
Protecting your organization against cybersecurity threats is more challenging than ever before. As part of our 2025 Microsoft Secure cybersecurity conference announcements, we’re sharing new product features that spotlight our AI-first, end-to-end security innovations designed to help - including autonomous AI agents in the Security Operations Center (SOC), as well as automatic detection and response capabilities. We also share information on how you can expand your protection by bringing data security and collaboration tools closer to the SOC. Read on to learn more about how these capabilities can help your organization stay ahead of today’s advanced threat actors. Expanding AI-Driven Capabilities for Smarter SOC Operations Introducing Microsoft Security Copilot’s Security Alert Triage Agent (previously named Phishing Triage Agent) Today, we are excited to introduce Security Copilot agents, a major step in bringing AI-driven automation to Microsoft Security solutions. As part of this, we’re unveiling our newest innovation in Microsoft Defender: the Security Alert Triage Agent. Acting as a force multiplier for SOC analysts, it streamlines the triage of user-submitted phishing incidents by autonomously identifying and resolving false positives, typically cleaning out over 95% of submissions. This allows teams to focus on the remaining incidents – those that pose the most critical threats. Phishing submissions are among the highest-volume alerts that security teams handle daily, and our data shows that at least 9 in 10 reported emails turn out to be harmless bulk mail or spam. As a result, security teams must sift through hundreds of these incidents weekly, often spending up to 30 minutes per case determining whether it represents a real threat. This manual triage effort not only adds operational strain but also delays the response to actual phishing attacks, potentially impacting protection levels. The Security Alert Triage Agent transforms this process by leveraging advanced LLM-driven analysis to conduct sophisticated assessments –such as examining the semantic content of emails– to autonomously determine whether an incident is a genuine phishing attempt or a false alarm. By intelligently cutting through the noise, the agent alleviates the burden on SOC teams, allowing them to focus on high-priority threats. Figure 1. A phishing incident triaged by the Security Copilot Security Alert Triage Agent To help analysts gain trust in its decision-making, the agent provides natural language explanations for its classifications, along with a visual representation of its reasoning process. This transparency enables security teams to understand why an incident was classified in a certain way, making it easier to validate verdicts. Analysts can also provide feedback in plain language, allowing the agent to learn from these interactions, refine its accuracy, and adapt to the organization’s unique threat landscape. Over time, this continuous feedback loop fine-tunes the agent’s behavior, aligning it more closely with organizational nuances and reducing the need for manual verification. The Security Copilot Security Alert Triage Agent is designed to transform SOC operations with autonomous, AI-driven capabilities. As phishing threats grow increasingly sophisticated and SOC analysts face mounting demands, this agent alleviates the burden of repetitive tasks, allowing teams to shift their focus to proactive security measures that strengthen the organization’s overall defense. Note: The Phishing Triage Agent has since been expanded and is now called the Security Alert Triage Agent. Learn more at aka.ms/SATA Security Copilot Enriched Incident Summaries and Suggested Prompts Security Copilot Incident Summaries in Microsoft Defender now feature key enrichments, including related threat intelligence and asset risk –enhancements driven by customer feedback. Additionally, we are introducing suggested prompts following incident summaries, giving analysts quick access to common follow-up questions for deeper context on devices, users, threat intelligence, and more. This marks a step towards a more interactive experience, moving beyond predefined inputs to a more dynamic, conversational workflow. Read more about Microsoft Security Copilot agent announcements here. New protection across Microsoft Defender XDR workloads To strengthen core protection across Microsoft Defender XDR workloads, we're introducing new capabilities while building upon existing integrations for enhanced protection. This ensures a more comprehensive and seamless defense against evolving threats. Introducing collaboration security for Microsoft Teams Email remains a prevalent entry point for attackers. But the fast adoption of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams has opened new attack surfaces for cybercriminals. Our advancements within Defender for Office 365 allow organizations to continue to protect users in Microsoft Teams against phishing and other emerging cyberthreats with inline protection against malicious URLs, safe attachments, brand impersonation protection, and more. And to ensure seamless investigation and response at the incident level, everything is centralized across our SOC workflows in the unified security operations platform. Read the announcement here. Introducing Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations for the SOC Understanding the extent of the data that has been impacted to better prioritize incidents has been a challenge for security teams. As data remains the main target for attackers it’s critical to dismantle silos between security and data security teams to enhance response times. At Microsoft, we’ve made significant investments in bringing SOC and data security teams closer together by integrating Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Purview. We are continuing to build upon the rich set of capabilities and today, we are excited to announce that Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations (DSI) can be initiated from the incident graph in Defender XDR. Ensuring robust data security within the SOC has always been important, as it helps protect sensitive information from breaches and unauthorized access. Data Security Investigations significantly accelerates the process of analyzing incident related data such as emails, files, and messages. With AI-powered deep content analysis, DSI reveals the key security and sensitive data risks. This integration allows analysts to further analyze the data involved in the incident, learn which data is at risk of compromise, and take action to respond and mitigate the incident faster, to keep the organization’s data protected. Read the announcement here. Figure 2. An incident that shows the ability to launch a data security investigation. OAuth app insights are now available in Exposure Management In recent years, we’ve witnessed a substantial surge in attackers exploiting OAuth applications to gain access to critical data in business applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. To address this threat, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is now integrating OAuth apps and their connections into Microsoft Security Exposure Management, enhancing both attack path and attack surface map experiences. Additionally, we are introducing a unified application inventory to consolidate all app interactions into a single location. This will address the following use cases: Visualize and remediate attack paths that attackers could potentially exploit using high-privilege OAuth apps to access M365 SaaS applications or sensitive Azure resources. Investigate OAuth applications and their connections to the broader ecosystem in Attack Surface Map and Advanced Hunting. Explore OAuth application characteristics and actionable insights to reduce risk from our new unified application inventory. Figure 3. An attack path infused with OAuth app insights Read the latest announcement here AI & TI are critical for effective detection & response To effectively combat emerging threats, AI has become critical in enabling faster detection and response. By combining this with the latest threat analytics, security teams can quickly pinpoint emerging risks and respond in real-time, providing organizations with proactive protection against sophisticated attacks. Disrupt more attacks with automatic attack disruption In this era of multi-stage, multi-domain attacks, the SOC need solutions that enable both speed and scale when responding to threats. That’s where automatic attack disruption comes in—a self-defense capability that dynamically pivots to anticipate and block an attacker’s next move using multi-domain signals, the latest TI, and AI models. We’ve made significant advancements in attack disruption, such as threat intelligence-based disruption announced at Ignite, expansion to OAuth apps, and more. Today, we are thrilled to share our next innovation in attack disruption—the ability to disrupt more attacks through a self-learning architecture that enables much earlier and much broader disruption. At its core, this technology monitors a vast array of signals, ranging from raw telemetry data to alerts and incidents across Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. This extensive range of data sources provides an unparalleled view of your security environment, helping to ensure potential threats do not go unnoticed. What sets this innovation apart is its ability learn from historical events and previously seen attack types to identify and disrupt new attacks. By recognizing similar patterns across data and stitching them together into a contextual sequence, it processes information through machine learning models and enables disruption to stop the attack much earlier in the attack sequence, stopping significantly more attacks in volume and variety. Comprehensive Threat Analytics are now available across all Threat Intelligence reports Organizations can now leverage the full suite of Threat Analytics features (related incidents, impacted assets, endpoints exposure, recommended actions) on all Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports. Previously only available for a limited set of threats, these features are now available for all threats Microsoft has published in Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (MDTI), offering comprehensive insights and actionable intelligence to help you ensure your security measures are robust and responsive. Some of these key features include: IOCs with historical hunting: Access IOCs after expiration to investigate past threats and aid in remediation and proactive hunting. MITRE TTPs: Build detections based on threat techniques, going beyond IOCs to block and alert on specific tactics. Targeted Industries: Filter threats by industry, aligning security efforts with sector-specific challenges. We’re proud of our new AI-first innovations that strengthen security protections for our customers and help us further our pledge to customers and our community to prioritize cyber safety above all else. Learn more about the innovations designed to help your organization protect data, defend against cyber threats, and stay compliant. Join Microsoft leaders online at Microsoft Secure on April 9. We hope you’ll also join us in San Francisco from April 27th-May 1 st 2025 at the RSA Conference 2025 to learn more. At the conference, we’ll share live, hands-on demos and theatre sessions all week at the Microsoft booth at Moscone Center. Secure your spot today.Monthly news - March 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - March 2026 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 February 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: New AI-powered SIEM migration experience Microsoft Defender (Public Preview) Microsoft Defender for Cloud is expanding to the Defender portal to provide a unified security experience across cloud and code environments. As part of this expansion, some features are now available in the Microsoft Defender Portal, and additional capabilities will be added to the Defender portal over time. Follow instructions provided here to enable Defender for Cloud experience in XDR. Learn more on how to enable preview features in the Defender portal. (Public Preview) Generate playbooks using AI in Microsoft Sentinel: The SOAR playbook generator creates python based automation workflows coauthored through a conversational experience with Cline, an AI coding agent. For more information, see the Playbook Generation blog post. (Public Preview) The Microsoft Copilot Data Connector for Microsoft Sentinel. This new connector allows for audit logs and activities generated by Copilot to be ingested into Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Sentinel data lake. The data can be used in analytic rules/custom detections, Workbooks, automation, and more. Update: We are extending the sunset date for managing Microsoft Sentinel in the Azure portal to March 31, 2027. The upcoming Sentinel update standardizes Account Name in analytics, incidents, and automation. Starting July 1, 2026 for UPN-based mappings, Account Name will show only the UPN prefix, with new fields for full UPN and UPN suffix. Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting customers can now set up Notification contacts. These contacts are the individuals or groups that Microsoft needs to notify if there are critical incidents or service updates. Learn more on our docs. The following advanced hunting schema tables are now generally available: IdentityAccountInfo EntraIdSignInEvents EntraIdSpnSignInEvents GraphApiAuditEvents Lake only ingestion for Microsoft Defender Advanced Hunting tables is now General Available. You can now ingest Advanced Hunting data into Sentinel Data lake without the need to ingest into the Microsoft Sentinel Analytics tier. Custom Guidebooks (SOP) for Copilot Guided Response is now Generally Available! Custom Guidebooks enable organizations to bring their own Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) directly into the Copilot Guided Response experience, helping ensure investigations and remediation steps align with internal processes and best practices. Please find more information in our documentation. Custom Guidebookssettings page in the portal, users can upload guidebooks and review the parsed tasks generated from their SOP files. (Public Preview) The Sentinel Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) Push feature. CCF addresses a critical need: enabling seamless, automated, and immediate delivery of security data to Microsoft Sentinel, so teams can respond to threats as they happen. The UEBA behaviors layer in Microsoft Sentinel is now generally available, summarizing clear, human‑readable behavioral insights from high-volume, raw security logs. The behaviors layer aggregates and sequences related events into normalized behaviors, helping analysts more quickly understand who did what to whom without manually correlating raw logs. For more information, see Translate raw security logs to behavioral insights using UEBA behaviors in Microsoft Sentinel. Watch the UEBA behaviors webinar for a full overview and demo of the UEBA behaviors layer. To help SOC teams get value from behaviors from day one, Microsoft Sentinel now provides the behaviors workbook as part of the UEBA essentials solution. The workbook offers guided views and prebuilt, customizable analytics that turn rich behavioral data into actionable insights across three core SOC workflows. For more information about the workbook, see the Microsoft Sentinel Behaviors Workbook blog post. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint / Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) Microsoft Defender now has a Library Management for live response! This is addressing a long standing pain point. You can now centrally manage Live Response scripts and files directly in the Defender portal, not just during a live response session. Read more details in this blog post. (General Availability) Effective Settings: Effective Settings Reporting for device security settings is now available in GA! This report presents the actual security settings enforced on a specific device, capturing the real configuration rather than just the admin’s intent. This visibility empowers admins to easily track applied configurations and swiftly identify discrepancies. A new tab, named "Effective Settings", is now enabled on the device page, under the "Configuration Management" section. This tab displays: The actual value of each security setting The configuring source for each setting Configuration attempts from other sources that were not effectively applied (General Availability) To reflect Defender Vulnerability Management's visibility into all software components identified in your organization, the Vulnerable components page is now named Software components. (General Availability) To provide comprehensive vulnerability management capabilities across all supported Windows versions, Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management now gathers software product vulnerability data on Windows 7 devices. The what's new and OS-specific release notes pages are now updated to provide better visibility and access to new features, improvements, and fixes: The what's new page is now named New features in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and includes both features and links to latest release notes. The Release notes page now consolidates release details for all supported operating systems, including Windows Antivirus. The new page groups updates by platform and date, making it easier to find specific information. All previous release notes pages redirect to the consolidated release notes page. Microsoft Defender for Identity Webinar recording: Identity Control Plane Under Attack: Consent Abuse and Hybrid Sync Risks (YouTube) A new wave of identity attacks abuses legitimate authentication flows, allowing attackers to gain access without stealing passwords or breaking MFA. In this webinar recording the team breaks down how attackers trick users into approving malicious apps, how this leads to silent account takeover, and why traditional phishing defenses often miss it. They also dive into the identity sync layer at the heart of hybrid environments. You’ll learn how Entra Connect Sync and Cloud Sync are protected as Tier-0 assets, how Microsoft Defender for Identity secures synchronization flows, and how the new application-based authentication model strengthens Entra Connect Sync against modern threats. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Expanding User reporting in Teams to Defender for Office 365 Plan 1: Users can report external and intra-org Microsoft Teams messages from chats, standard, shared, and private channels, meeting conversations to Microsoft as malicious (security risk) the specified reporting mailbox, or both via user reported settings. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps As part of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to increase accuracy in Secure Score, security recommendation categories will be updated in March 2026. As a result, identity and app Secure Scores may be impacted.
