Monthly news - December 2025
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - December 2025 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 October 2025. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. 😎 Microsoft Ignite 2025 - now on-demand! 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: Advancements in Attack Disruption Vulnerability Remediation Agent in Microsoft Intune Microsoft Defender Ignite 2025: What's new in Microsoft Defender? This blog summarizes our big announcements we made at Ignite. (Public Preview) Defender XDR now includes the predictive shielding capability, which uses predictive analytics and real-time insights to dynamically infer risk, anticipate attacker progression, and harden your environment before threats materialize. Learn more about predictive shielding. Security Copilot for SOC: bringing agentic AI to every defender. This blog post gives a great overview of the various agents supporting SOC teams. Account correlation links related accounts and corresponding insights to provide identity-level visibility and insights to the SOC. Coordinated response allows Defenders to take action comprehensively across connected accounts, accelerating response and minimizing the potential for lateral movement. Enhancing visibility into your identity fabric with Microsoft Defender. This blog describes new enhancements to the identity security experience within Defender that will help enrich your security team’s visibility and understanding into your unique identity fabric. (Public Preview) The IdentityAccountInfo table in advanced hunting is now available for preview. This table contains information about account information from various sources, including Microsoft Entra ID. It also includes information and link to the identity that owns the account. Microsoft Sentinel customers using the Defender portal, or the Azure portal with the Microsoft Sentinel Defender XDR data connector, now also benefit from Microsoft Threat Intelligence alerts that highlight activity from nation-state actors, major ransomware campaigns, and fraudulent operations. For more information, see Incidents and alerts in the Microsoft Defender portal. (Public Preview) New Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) experiences in the Defender portal! Microsoft Sentinel introduces new UEBA experiences in the Defender portal, bringing behavioral insights directly into key analyst workflows. These enhancements help analysts prioritize investigations and apply UEBA context more effectively. Learn more on our docs. (Public Preview) A new Restrict pod access response action is now available when investigating container threats in the Defender portal. This response action blocks sensitive interfaces that allow lateral movement and privilege escalation. (Public Preview) Threat analytics now has an Indicators tab that provides a list of all indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with a threat. Microsoft researchers update these IOCs in real time as they find new evidence related to the threat. This information helps your security operations center (SOC) and threat intelligence analysts with remediation and proactive hunting. Learn more. In addition the overview section of threat analytics now includes additional details about a threat, such as alias, origin, and related intelligence, providing you with more insights on what the threat is and how it might impact your organization. Microsoft Defender for Identity (Public Preview) In addition to the GA release of scoping by Active Directory domains a few months ago, you can now scope by Organizational Units (OUs) as part of XDR User Role-Based Access Control. This enhancement provides even more granular control over which entities and resources are included in security analysis. For more information, see Configure scoped access for Microsoft Defender for Identity. (Public Preview). New security posture assessment: Change password for on-prem account with potentially leaked credentials. The new security posture assessment lists users whose valid credentials have been leaked. For more information, see: Change password for on-prem account with potentially leaked credentials. Defender for Identity is slowly rolling out automatic Windows event auditing for sensors v3.x, streamlining deployment by applying required auditing settings to new sensors and fixing misconfigurations on existing ones. As it becomes available, you will be able to enable automatic Windows event-auditing in the Advanced settings section in the Defender portal, or using the Graph API. Identity Inventory enhancements: Accounts tab, manual account linking and unlinking, and expanded remediation actions are now available. Learn more in our docs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (Public Preview) Defender for Cloud Apps automatically discovers AI agents created in Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, collects audit logs, continuously monitors for suspicious activity, and integrates detections and alerts into the XDR Incidents and Alerts experience with a dedicated Agent entity. For more information, see Protect your AI agents. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Ignite 2025: Microsoft Defender now prevents threats on endpoints during an attack. This year at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Defender is announcing exciting innovations for endpoint protection that help security teams deploy faster, gain more visibility, and proactively block attackers during active attacks. (Public Preview) Defender for Endpoint now includes the GPO hardening and Safeboot hardening response actions. These actions are part of the predictive shielding feature, which anticipates and mitigates potential threats before they materialize. (Public Preview) Custom data collection enables organizations to expand and customize telemetry collection beyond default configurations to support specialized threat hunting and security monitoring needs. (Public Preview) Native root detection support for Microsoft Defender on Android. This enables proactive detection of rooted devices without requiring Intune policies, ensuring stronger security and validating that Defender is running on an uncompromised device, ensuring more reliable telemetry that is not vulnerable to attacker manipulation. (Public Preview) The new Defender deployment tool is a lightweight, self-updating application that streamlines onboarding devices to the Defender endpoint security solution. The tool takes care of prerequisites, automates migrations from older solutions, and removes the need for complex onboarding scripts, separate downloads, and manual installations. It currently supports Windows and Linux devices. Defender deployment tool: for Windows devices for Linux devices (Public Preview) Defender endpoint security solution for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. A Defender for endpoint security solution is now available for legacy Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 devices. The solution provides advanced protection capabilities and improved functionality for these devices compared to other solutions. The new solution is available using the new Defender deployment tool. Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) The Vulnerability Management section in the Microsoft Defender portal is now located under Exposure management. This change is part of the vulnerability management integration to Microsoft Security Exposure Management, which significantly expands the scope and capabilities of the platform. Learn more. (General Availability) Microsoft Secure Score now includes new recommendations to help organizations proactively prevent common endpoint attack techniques. Require LDAP client signing and Require LDAP server signing - help ensure integrity of directory requests so attackers can't tamper with or manipulate group memberships or permissions in transit. Encrypt LDAP client traffic - prevents exposure of credentials and sensitive user information by enforcing encrypted communication instead of clear-text LDAP. Enforce LDAP channel binding - prevents man-in-the-middle relay attacks by ensuring the authentication is cryptographically tied to the TLS session. If the TLS channel changes, the bind fails, stopping credential replay. (General Availability) These Microsoft Secure Score recommendations are now generally available: Block web shell creation on servers Block use of copied or impersonated system tools Block rebooting a machine in Safe Mode Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Microsoft Ignite 2025: Transforming Phishing Response with Agentic Innovation. This blog post summarizes the following announcements: General Availability of the Security Copilot Phishing Triage Agent Agentic Email Grading System in Microsoft Defender Cisco and VIPRE Security Group join the Microsoft Defender ICES ecosystem. A separate blog explains these best practices in more detail and outline three other routing techniques commonly used across ICES vendors. Blog series: Best practices from the Microsoft Community Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Fine-Tuning: This blog covers our top recommendations for fine-tuning Microsoft Defender for Office 365 configuration from hundreds of deployments and recovery engagements, by Microsoft MVP Joe Stocker. You may be right after all! Disputing Submission Responses in Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Microsoft MVP Mona Ghadiri spotlights a new place AI has been inserted into a workflow to make it better… a feature that elevates the transparency and responsiveness of threat management: the ability to dispute a submission response directly within Microsoft Defender for Office 365. Blog post: Strengthening calendar security through enhanced remediation.
Host Microsoft Defender data locally in the United Arab Emirates
We are pleased to announce that local data residency support in the UAE is now generally available for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Defender for Identity. This announcement reinforces our ongoing commitment to delivering secure, compliant services aligned with local data sovereignty requirements. Customers can now confidently onboard to Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity in the UAE, knowing that this Defender data will remain at rest within the UAE data boundary. This allows customers to meet their regulatory obligations and maintain control over their data. For more details on the Defender data storage and privacy policies, refer to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint data storage and privacy and Microsoft Defender for Identity data security and privacy. Note: Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity may potentially use other Microsoft services (i.e. Microsoft Intune for security settings management). Each Microsoft service is governed by its own data storage and privacy policies and may have varying regional availability. For more information, refer to our Online Product Terms. In addition to the UAE, Defender data residency capabilities are available in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland and India (see our recent announcement for local data hosting in India). Customers with Existing deployments for Defender for Endpoint and/or Defender for Identity Existing customers can check their deployment geo within the portal by going to Settings -> Microsoft Defender XDR-> Account; and see where the service is storing your data at rest. For example, in the image below, the service location for the Defender XDR tenant is UAE. ation information If you would like to update your service location, please reach out to Customer Service and Support for a tenant reset. Support can be accessed by clicking on the “?” icon in the top right corner of the portal when signed in as an Admin (see image below). If you are a Microsoft Unified support customer, please reach out to your Customer Success Account Manager for assistance with the migration process. More information: Ready to go local? Read our documentation for more information on how to get started. Microsoft Defender XDR data center location Not yet a customer? Take Defender XDR for a spin via a 90-day trial for Office 365 E5 or Defender for Endpoint via a 90-day trial for Defender for Endpoint Check out the Defender for Endpoint website to learn more about our industry leading Endpoint protection platform Check out the Defender for Identity website to learn how to keep your organization safe against rising identity threatsMonthly news - November 2025
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - November 2025 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 October 2025. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. ⏰ Microsoft Ignite 2025 November 18-20, register now! 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: What’s new for Microsoft Teams protection in Defender for Office 365 Microsoft Defender Custom detections are now the unified experience for creating detections in Microsoft Defender! Read this blog for all the details. How Microsoft Defender helps security teams detect prompt injection attacks in Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’re excited to share that Microsoft Defender now provides visibility into prompt injection attempts within Microsoft 365 Copilot and helps security teams detect and respond to prompt injection attacks more efficiently and at a broader context, with insights that go beyond individual interaction. Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting reports now include an Emerging threats section that details the proactive, hypothesis-based hunts we conducted in your environment. Each report also now includes investigation summaries for nearly every hunt that Defender Experts conduct in your environment, regardless of whether they identified a confirmed threat. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR reports now include a Trends tab provides you with the monthly volume of investigated and resolved incidents for the last six months, visualized according to the incidents' severity, MITRE tactic, and threat type. This section gives you insight into how Defender Experts are tangibly improving your security operations by showing important operational metrics on a month-over-month basis. Threat Intelligence Export is now available in Microsoft Sentinel. Traditionally, Microsoft Sentinel has supported importing threat intel from external sources (partners, governments, ISACs, or internal tenants) via Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX) via Trusted Automated eXchange of Intelligence Information (TAXII). With this new export feature, you can now share curated threat intel back to trusted destinations. This empowers security teams to contribute threat intel to other organizations in support of collective defense, or to their own central platform to add or enrich threat intelligence. Microsoft Defender for Identity We’re excited to announce that the Defender for Identity Unified Sensor (v3.x) is now generally available (GA). The unified sensor provides enhanced coverage, improved performance across your environment and offering easier deployment and management for domain controllers. Learn more on how to active it in our docs.. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 📘 Email Authentication SecOps Guide (New learn doc) - visit & bookmark our short link: https://aka.ms/authguide The following docs article has been updated with with Compauth Codes: Message Headers Reference New blog series: Best practices from the Microsoft Community Defender for Office 365: Migration & Onboarding Onboarding to Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is often treated as a quick setup task, but it should be seen as a critical opportunity to establish strong security foundations. In my roles supporting incident response and security operations in Microsoft 365, I have observed that onboarding is often underestimated. - Purav Desai, Dual Microsoft Security MVP (Most Valuable Professional) This blog covers four key areas that are frequently missed, but they are essential for a secure and auditable deployment of Defender for Office 365. Before diving into the technical details, it is important to clarify a common misconception about Defender for Office 365 protections. Safeguarding Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 As organizations rely more on Microsoft Teams for daily collaboration, securing this platform has become a top priority. Threat actors are increasingly targeting Teams chats and channels with phishing links and malicious files, making it critical for IT admins and security professionals to extend protection beyond email. Enter Microsoft Defender for Office 365, now armed with dedicated Teams protection capabilities. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 enables users to report suspicious messages, brings time-of-click scanning of URLs and files into Teams conversations, and provides rich alerts and hunting insights for SecOps teams. As a collaborative piece between Pierre Thoor, a Microsoft Security MVP, and the Defender for Office 365 Product Engineering Team, this guides with accompanying videos emphasize a proactive, user-driven approach to threat detection and response, turning everyday Teams interactions into actionable security signals for SecOps. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint End of Windows 10 Support: What Defender Customers Need to Know As of October 14, 2025, Microsoft officially ended support for Windows 10. This means that Windows 10 devices will no longer receive security or feature updates, nor technical support from Microsoft. While these devices will continue to operate, the lack of regular security updates increases vulnerability to cyber threats, including malware and viruses. Applications running on Windows 10 may also lose support as the platform stops receiving updates. Endpoint Security Policies can now be distributed via MTO's (Multi Tenant Organization) Content Distribution capability. This capability moved from Public Preview to General Availability (GA). With this capability, you can create content distribution profiles in the multi-tenant portal that allow you to seamlessly replicate existing content - such as custom detection rules and now, endpoint security policies - from a source tenant to designated target tenants. Once distributed, the content runs on the target tenant, enabling centralized control with localized execution. You can read the announcement blog for public preview, as the content shares valuable insights. (Public Preview) Streamlined connectivity support for US government environments (GCC, GCC High, DoD). Learn more in our docs. (General Availability) Isolation exclusions. The Isolation exclusions feature is now generally available. Isolation exclusions allow designated processes or endpoints to bypass the restrictions of network isolation, ensuring essential functions continue while limiting broader network exposure. Learn more in our docs. Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) Microsoft Secure Score now includes three new Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) based proactive recommendations that help organizations prevent common endpoint attack techniques including web-shell persistence, misuse of system tools, and Safe Mode based evasion. (Public Preview) You can now use CVE exceptions to exclude specific Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) from analysis in your environment. CVE exceptions allow you to control what type of data is relevant to your organization and to selectively exclude certain data from your remediation efforts. For more information, see Exceptions in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management and Create, view, and manage exceptions. For more information, see Exceptions in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management and Create, view, and manage exceptions. Microsoft Security Blogs The new Microsoft Security Store unites partners and innovation On September 30, 2025, Microsoft announced a bold new vision for security: a unified, AI-powered platform designed to help organizations defend against today’s most sophisticated cyberthreats. But an equally important story—one that’s just beginning to unfold—is how the Microsoft Security Store is bringing this vision to life through a vibrant ecosystem of partners, developers, and innovators—all contributing together to deliver more value and security to our customers. Security Store is the gateway for customers to easily discover, buy, and deploy trusted security solutions and AI agents from leading partners—all verified by Microsoft Security product teams to work seamlessly with Microsoft Security products. Inside the attack chain: Threat activity targeting Azure Blob Storage Azure Blob Storage is a high-value target for threat actors due to its critical role in storing and managing massive amounts of unstructured data at scale across diverse workloads and is increasingly targeted through sophisticated attack chains that exploit misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and evolving cloud tactics. Investigating targeted “payroll pirate” attacks affecting US universities Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified a financially motivated threat actor that we track as Storm-2657 compromising employee accounts to gain unauthorized access to employee profiles and divert salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts, attacks that have been dubbed “payroll pirate”. Disrupting threats targeting Microsoft Teams Threat actors seek to abuse Microsoft Teams features and capabilities across the attack chain, underscoring the importance for defenders to proactively monitor, detect, and respond effectively. Harden your identity defense with improved protection, deeper correlation, and richer context Expanded ITDR features—including the new Microsoft Defender for Identity sensor, now generally available—bring improved protection, correlation, and context to help customers modernize their identity defense.Monthly news - September 2025
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - September 2025 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 August 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. New Virtual Ninja Show episodes: Announcing Microsoft Sentinel data lake. Inside the new Phishing Triage Agent in Security Copilot. Microsoft Defender Public Preview items in advanced hunting: The new CloudStorageAggregatedEvents table is now available and brings aggregated storage activity logs, such as operations, authentication details, access sources, and success/failure counts, from Defender for Cloud into a single, queryable schema. You can now investigate Microsoft Defender for Cloud behaviors. For more information, see Investigate behaviors with advanced hunting. The IdentityEvents table contains information about identity events obtained from other cloud identity service providers. You can now enrich your custom detection rules in advanced hunting by creating dynamic alert titles and descriptions, select more impacted entities, and add custom details to display in the alert side panel. Microsoft Sentinel customers that are onboarded to Microsoft Defender also now have the option to customize the alert frequency when the rule is based only on data that is ingested to Sentinel. The number of query results displayed in the Microsoft Defender portal has been increased to 100,000. General Availability item in advanced hunting: you can now view all your user-defined rules - both custom detection rules and analytics rules - in the Detection rules page. This feature also brings the following improvements: You can now filter for every column (in addition to Frequency and Organizational scope). For multiworkspace organizations that have onboarded multiple workspaces to Microsoft Defender, you can now view the Workspace ID column and filter by workspace. You can now view the details pane even for analytics rules. You can now perform the following actions on analytics rules: Turn on/off, Delete, Edit. (General Availability) Defender Experts for XDR and Defender Experts for Hunting customers can now expand their service coverage to include server and cloud workloads protected by Defender for Cloud through the respective add-ons, Microsoft Defender Experts for Servers and Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting - Servers. Learn more (General Availability) Defender Experts for XDR customers can now incorporate third-party network signals for enrichment, which could allow our security analysts to not only gain a more comprehensive view of an attack's path that allows for faster and more thorough detection and response, but also provide customers with a more holistic view of the threat in their environments. (General Availability) The Sensitivity label filter is now available in the Incidents and Alerts queues in the Microsoft Defender portal. This filter lets you filter incidents and alerts based on the sensitivity label assigned to the affected resources. For more information, see Filters in the incident queue and Investigate alerts. (Public Preview) Suggested prompts for incident summaries. Suggested prompts enhance the incident summary experience by automatically surfacing relevant follow-up questions based on the most crucial information in a given incident. With a single click, you can request deeper insight (e.g. device details, identity information, threat intelligence) and obtain plain language summaries from Security Copilot. This intuitive, interactive experience simplifies investigations and speeds up access to critical insights, empowering you to focus on key priorities and accelerate threat response. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Public Preview) Multi-tenant endpoint security policies distribution is now in Public Preview. Defender for Endpoint security policies can now be distributed across multiple tenants from the Defender multi-tenant portal. (Public Preview) Custom installation path support for Defender for Endpoint on Linux is available in public preview. (Public Preview) Offline security intelligence update support for Defender for Endpoint on macOS is in public preview. Microsoft Defender for Identity (Public Preview) Entra ID risk level is now available on the Identity Inventory assets page, the identity details page, and in the IdentityInfo table in advanced hunting, and includes the Entra ID risk score. SOC analysts can use this data to correlate risky users with sensitive or highly privileged users, create custom detections based on current or historical user risk, and improve investigation context. (Public Preview) Defender for Identity now includes a new security assessment that helps you identify and remove inactive service accounts in your organization. This assessment lists Active Directory service accounts that have been inactive (stale) for the past 180 days, to help you mitigate security risks associated with unused accounts. For more information, see: Security Assessment: Remove Inactive Service Accounts (Public Preview) A new Graph-based API is now in preview for initiating and managing remediation actions in Defender for Identity. For more information, see Managing response actions through Graph API. (General Availability) Identity scoping is now generally available across all environments. Organizations can now define and refine the scope of Defender for Identity monitoring and gain granular control over which entities and resources are included in security analysis. For more information, see Configure scoped access for Microsoft Defender for Identity. (Public Preview) The new security posture assessment highlights unsecured Active Directory attributes that contain passwords or credential clues and recommends steps to remove them, helping reduce the risk of identity compromise. For more information, see: Security Assessment: Remove discoverable passwords in Active Directory account attributes. Detection update: Suspected Brute Force attack (Kerberos, NTLM). Improved detection logic to include scenarios where accounts were locked during attacks. As a result, the number of triggered alerts might increase. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 SecOps can now dispute Microsoft's verdict on previously submitted email or URLs when they believe the result is incorrect. Disputing an item links back to the original submission and triggers a reevaluation with full context and audit history. Learn more. Microsoft Security Blogs Dissecting PipeMagic: Inside the architecture of a modular backdoor framework A comprehensive technical deep dive on PipeMagic, a highly modular backdoor used by Storm-2460 masquerading as a legitimate open-source ChatGPT Desktop Application. Think before you Click(Fix): Analyzing the ClickFix social engineering technique The ClickFix social engineering technique has been growing in popularity, with campaigns targeting thousands of enterprise and end-user devices daily. Storm-0501’s evolving techniques lead to cloud-based ransomware Financially motivated threat actor Storm-0501 has continuously evolved their campaigns to achieve sharpened focus on cloud-based tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).Monthly news - August 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news - August 2025 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 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Microsoft Defender Microsoft Sentinel is moving to the Microsoft Defender portal to deliver a unified, AI-powered security operations experience. Many customers have already made the move. Learn how to plan your transition and take advantage of new capabilities in the this blog post. Introducing Microsoft Sentinel data lake. We announced a significant expansion of Microsoft Sentinel’s capabilities through the introduction of Sentinel data lake, now rolling out in public preview. Read this blog post for a look at some of Sentinel data lake’s core features. (Public Preview) The GraphApiAuditEvents table in advanced hunting is now available for preview. This table contains information about Microsoft Entra ID API requests made to Microsoft Graph API for resources in the tenant. (Public Preview) The DisruptionAndResponseEvents table, now available in advanced hunting, contains information about automatic attack disruption events in Microsoft Defender XDR. These events include both block and policy application events related to triggered attack disruption policies, and automatic actions that were taken across related workloads. Increase your visibility and awareness of active, complex attacks disrupted by attack disruption to understand the attacks' scope, context, impact, and actions taken. Introducing Summary Rules Templates: Streamlining Data Aggregation in Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft Sentinel’s new Summary Rules Templates offer a structured and efficient approach to aggregating verbose data - enabling security teams to extract meaningful insights while optimizing resource usage. Automating Microsoft Sentinel: Playbook Fundamentals. This is the third entry of the blog series on automating Microsoft Sentinel. In this post, we’re going to start talking about Playbooks which can be used for automating just about anything. Customer success story: Kuwait Credit Bank boosts threat detection and response with Microsoft Defender. To modernize its security posture, the bank unified its security operations under Microsoft Defender XDR, integrating Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Purview. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps App Governance is now also available in Brazil, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, South Africa, South Korea, Arab Emirates and Asia Pacific. For more details, see our documentation.. Updated network requirements for GCC and Gov customers. To support ongoing security enhancements and maintain service availability, Defender for Cloud Apps now requires updated firewall configurations for customers in GCC and Gov environments. To avoid service disruption, take action by August 25, 2025, and update your firewall configuration as described here. Discover and govern ChatGPT and other AI apps accessing Microsoft 365 with Defender for Cloud Apps. In this blog post, we’ll explore how Defender for Cloud Apps helps security teams gain enhanced visibility into the permissions granted to AI applications like ChatGPT as they access Microsoft 365 data. We’ll also share best practices for app governance to help security teams make informed decisions and take proactive steps to enable secure usage of AI apps accessing Microsoft 365 data. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (General Availability) Microsoft Defender Core service is now generally available on Windows Server 2019 or later which helps with the stability and performance of Microsoft Defender Antivirus. Microsoft Defender for Identity Expanded coverage in ITDR deployment health widget. With this update, the widget also includes deployment status for ADFS, ADCS, and Entra Connect servers - making it easier to track and ensure full sensor coverage across all supported identity infrastructure. Time limit added to Recommended test mode. Recommended test mode configuration on the Adjust alert thresholds page, now requires you to set an expiration time (up to 60 days) when enabling it. The end time is shown next to the toggle while test mode is active. For customers who already had Recommended test mode enabled, a 60-day expiration was automatically applied. Identity scoping is now available in Governance environments. Organizations can now define and refine the scope of Defender for Identity monitoring and gain granular control over which entities and resources are included in security analysis. For more information, see Configure scoped access for Microsoft Defender for Identity. New security posture assessments for unmonitored identity servers. Defender for Identity has three new security posture assessments that detect when Microsoft Entra Connect, Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), or Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) servers are present in your environment but aren't monitored. Learn more in our documentation. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Protection against multi-modal attacks with Microsoft Defender. This blog post showcases how Microsoft Defender can detect and correlate certain hybrid, multi-modal attacks that span across email, Teams, identity, and endpoint vectors; and how these insights surface in the Microsoft Defender portal. Users can report external and intra-org Microsoft Teams messages from chats, standard and private channels, meeting conversations to Microsoft, the specified reporting mailbox, or both via user reported settings. Microsoft Security Blogs Frozen in transit: Secret Blizzard’s AiTM campaign against diplomats. Microsoft Threat Intelligence has uncovered a cyberespionage campaign by the Russian state actor we track as Secret Blizzard that has been ongoing since at least 2024, targeting embassies in Moscow using an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) position to deploy their custom ApolloShadow malware. Sploitlight: Analyzing a Spotlight-based macOS TCC vulnerability. Microsoft Threat Intelligence has discovered a macOS vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-31199, that could allow attackers to steal private data of files normally protected by Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC), including the ability to extract and leak sensitive information cached by Apple Intelligence. Disrupting active exploitation of on-premises SharePoint vulnerabilities. Microsoft has observed two named Chinese nation-state actors, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, exploiting vulnerabilities targeting internet-facing SharePoint servers.Monthly news - July 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news - July 2025 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 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Microsoft Defender (General Availability) In advanced hunting, Microsoft Defender portal users can now use the adx() operator to query tables stored in Azure Data Explorer. You no longer need to go to log analytics in Microsoft Sentinel to use this operator if you're already in Microsoft Defender. Learn more on our docs. Introducing TITAN powered recommendations in Security Copilot guided response. This blog post explains the power of Guided Response with Security Copilot and and the integration of Threat Intelligence Tracking via Adaptive Networks (TITAN). (General Availability) Case management now supports multiple tenants in Microsoft Defender experience. We’re excited to share that multi-tenant support is now generally available in our case management experience. This new capability empowers security teams to view and manage incidents across all their tenants from a single, unified interface—directly within the Microsoft Defender Multi-Tenant (MTO) portal. You can read this blog for more information. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (General Availability) The Behaviors data type significantly enhances overall threat detection accuracy by reducing alerts on generic anomalies and surfacing alerts only when observed patterns align with real security scenarios. This data type is now generally available. Learn more on how to use Behaviors and new detections in this blog post. New Dynamic Threat Detection model. Defender for Cloud Apps new dynamic threat detection model continuously adapts to the ever-changing SaaS apps threat landscape. This approach ensures your organization remains protected with up-to-date detection logic without the need for manual policy updates or reconfiguration. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (General Availability) Global exclusions on Linux are now generally available. We just published a new blog post, that discussed how you can manage global exclusion policies for Linux across both AV and EDR. (General Availability) Support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux is now generally available for Linux. (General Availability) Behavior monitoring on macOS is now generally available. Read this blog post to learn more about it and how it improves the early detection and prevention of suspicious and malicious activities targeting macOS users. (Public Preview) Selective Isolation allows you to exclude specific devices, processes, IP addresses, or services from isolation actions. More details in this blog post "Maintain connectivity for essential services with selective network isolation" Microsoft Defender for Identity (Public Preview) Domain-based scoping for Active Directory is now available in public preview. This new capability enables SOC analysts to define and refine the scope of Defender for Identity monitoring, providing more granular control over which entities and resources are included in security analysis. Read this announcement blog for more details. (Public Preview) Defender for Identity is extending its identity protection to protect Okta identities, that’s in addition to the already robust protection for on-premises Active Directory and Entra ID identities. For more details, have a look at this announcement blog post. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Introducing the Defender for Office 365 ICES Vendor Ecosystem - a unified framework that enables seamless integration with trusted third-party vendors. Learn more about this exciting announcement in this blog post. (General Availability) Auto-Remediation of malicious messages in Automated Investigation and Response is now generally available. Have a look at this detailed blog post on how it works. Mail bombing is now an available Detection technology value in Threat Explorer, the Email entity page, and the Email summary panel. Mail bombing is also an available DetectionMethods value in Advanced Hunting. For more information, see MC1096885. AI-powered Submissions Response introduces generative AI explanations for admin email submissions to Microsoft. For more information, see Submission result definitions. Microsoft Security Exposure Management (Public Preview) Enhanced External Attack Surface Management integration with Exposure Management. This new integration allows you to incorporate detailed external attack surface data from Defender External Attack Surface Management into Exposure Management. Learn more on our docs. Microsoft Security Blogs Unveiling RIFT: Enhancing Rust malware analysis through pattern matching As threat actors are adopting Rust for malware development, RIFT, an open-source tool, helps reverse engineers analyze Rust malware, solving challenges in the security industry. Jasper Sleet: North Korean remote IT workers’ evolving tactics to infiltrate organizations Since 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed remote IT workers deployed by North Korea leveraging AI to improve the scale and sophistication of their operations, steal data, and generate revenue for the North Korean government. Threat Analytics (Access to the Defender Portal needed) Tool Profile: Qilin ransomware. Qilin (also called Agenda) is a ransomware as a service (RaaS) offering that was first observed in 2022. It has been used by multiple cybercriminal groups, including Pistachio Tempest, Octo Tempest, and most recently Moonstone Sleet. While the ransom attacks appear to be opportunistic rather than targeted, they have had notable impacts against healthcare and media companies. Activity Profile: Emerald Sleet using QR codes for credential harvesting. In May 2025, Microsoft Threat Intelligence observed the North Korean threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Emerald Sleet using QR (quick response) codes designed to lure recipients to credential-harvesting sites in phishing emails. Vulnerability profile: CVE-2025-34028 – Commvault Command Center Innovation Release. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “the Commvault Command Center Innovation Release allows an unauthenticated actor to upload ZIP files that represent install packages that, when expanded by the target server, are vulnerable to path traversal vulnerability that can result in Remote Code Execution via malicious JSP. This issue affects Command Center Innovation Release: 11.38.0 to 11.38.20. The vulnerability is fixed in 11.38.20 with SP38-CU20-433 and SP38-CU20-436 and also fixed in 11.38.25 with SP38-CU25-434 and SP38-CU25-438.” Activity Profile: Forest Blizzard trojanizes Ukraine software to deliver new variant of Blipslide downloader. Since March, Microsoft Threat intelligence observed the Russian military intelligence threat actor Forest Blizzard infect devices in Ukraine with a new variant of BlipSlide malware, a downloader that the threat actor uses for command and control (C2). Actor Profile: Storm-2416. The threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-2416 is a nation-state activity group based out of China. Storm-2416 is known to primarily target information technology (IT), government, and other business entities in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and South and North America. Activity Profile: Suspicious OAuth applications used to retrieve and send emails. In late February 2025, Microsoft discovered a set of malicious Open Authorization (OAuth) applications, including one that impersonated Outlook, that can retrieve and send emails. Actor Profile: Storm-0126. The threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-0126 is a nation-state activity group based out of China. Storm-0126 is known to primarily target defense industry enterprises, public institutions, research institutes, and military-industrial organizations worldwide. Actor Profile: Storm-2001. Microsoft assesses with high confidence that the threat actor Microsoft tracks as Storm-2001 is a Russian state-sponsored actor. It is known to primarily target defense organizations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance—specifically, member states that form NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) program, recent NATO members, and other related organizations that engage in NATO-related communications and planning. Activity profile: Storm-2561 distributes trojanized SonicWall NetExtender SilentRoute. In late May 2025, Storm-2561 began distributing malware that Microsoft detects as SilentRoute. The malware is a trojanized version of SonicWall’s SSL VPN NetExtender application that transmits the user’s VPN configuration data to a hardcoded IP address.Monthly news - June 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news - June 2025 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 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel From on-premises to cloud: Graph-powered detection of hybrid attacks with Microsoft exposure graph. In this blog, we explain how the exposure graph, an integral part of our pre-breach security exposure solution, supercharges our post-breach threat protection capabilities to detect and respond to such multi-faceted threats. (Public Preview) Unified detections rules list that includes both analytics rules and custom detections is in public preview. Learn more in our docs. The Best of Microsoft Sentinel — Now in Microsoft Defender. 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. (General Available) Multi workspace for single and multi tenant is now in General Available. (Public Preview) Case management now available for the Defender multitenant portal. For more information, see View and manage cases across multiple tenants in the Microsoft Defender multitenant portal. (Public Preview) You can now highlight your security operations achievements and the impact of Microsoft Defender using the unified security summary. For more information, see Visualize security impact with the unified security summary. (Public Preview) New Microsoft Teams table: The MessageEvents table contains details about messages sent and received within your organization at the time of delivery (Public Preview) New Microsoft Teams table: The MessagePostDeliveryEvents table contains information about security events that occurred after the delivery of a Microsoft Teams message in your organization (Public Preview) New Microsoft Teams table: The MessageUrlInfo table contains information about URLs sent through Microsoft Teams messages in your organization Unified IdentityInfo table in advanced hunting now includes the largest possible set of fields common to both Defender and Azure portals. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Webinar - YouTube Link) Secure Your Servers with Microsoft's Server Protection Solution- This webinar offers an in-depth exploration of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux. Defender for Endpoint successfully passes the AV-Comparatives 2025 Anti-Tampering Test. Discover how automatic attack disruption protects critical assets while ensuring business continuity. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Part 2: Build custom email security reports and dashboards with workbooks in Microsoft Sentinel New deployment guide: Quickly configure Microsoft Teams protection in Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 New SecOps guide: Security Operations Guide for Teams protection in Defender for Office 365 Video - Ninja Show: Advanced Threat Detection with Defender XDR Community Queries Video- Mastering Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Configuration Best Practices Video - Ninja Show: Protecting Microsoft Teams with Defender for Office 365 This blog discussed the new Defender for Office 365 Language AI for Phish Model. SafeLinks Protection for Links Generated by M365 Copilot Chat and Office Apps. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps New Applications inventory page now available in Defender XDR. The new Applications page in Microsoft Defender XDR provides a unified inventory of all SaaS and connected OAuth applications across your environment. For more information, see Application inventory overview. The Cloud app catalog page has been revamped to meet security standards. The new design includes improved navigation, making it easier for you to discover and manage your cloud applications. Note: As part of our ongoing convergence process across Defender workloads, Defender for Cloud Apps SIEM agents will be deprecated starting November 2025. Learn more. Microsoft Defender for Identity (Public Preview) Expanded New Sensor Deployment Support for Domain Controllers. Learn more. Active Directory Service Accounts Discovery Dashboard. Learn more. Improved Visibility into Defender for Identity New Sensor Eligibility in the Activation page. The Activation Page now displays all servers from your device inventory, including those not currently eligible for the new Defender for Identity sensor. Note: Local administrators collection (using SAM-R queries) feature will be disabled. Microsoft Security Blogs Analyzing CVE-2025-31191: A macOS security-scoped bookmarks-based sandbox escape Marbled Dust leverages zero-day in Output Messenger for regional espionage Lumma Stealer: Breaking down the delivery techniques and capabilities of a prolific infostealer New Russia-affiliated actor Void Blizzard targets critical sectors for espionage Defending against evolving identity attack techniques Threat Analytics (Access to the Defender Portal needed) Activity profile - AITM campaign with brand impersonated OAUTH applications Threat overview: SharePoint Server and Exchange Server threats Vulnerability profile: CVE-2025-24813 – Apache Tomcat Path Equivalence Vulnerability Actor profile: Storm-0593 [TA update] Actor profile: Storm-0287 Activity Profile: Marbled Dust leverages zero-day to conduct regional espionage [TA update] Technique profile: ClickFix technique leverages clipboard to run malicious commands Technique profile: LNK file UI feature abuse Technique profile: Azure Blob Storage threats Activity profile: Lumma Stealer: Breaking down the delivery techniques and capabilities of a prolific infostealer Vulnerability profile - CVE-2025-30397 Activity profile: Recent OSINT trends in information stealersMonthly news - May 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news May 2025 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 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel What’s new in Microsoft Defender XDR at Secure 2025 New blog post: Empowering SOC Analysts: Investigating Identity Threats with Microsoft Defender XDR. (GA) Multi Tenant Organizations (MTO) expanded support for up to 100 tenants per view per user is now generally available! We are delighted to announce that Microsoft Defender MTO now supports the ability, for each user, to add up to 100 tenants to their view. We extended the number of tenants you can see in one single pane of glass – from 50 to 100. You can now view incidents, investigate, view device inventory and vulnerabilities on a larger number of tenants at the same time. Expanding Cross Cloud Multitenant Security Operations for Government Customers. This blog post summarizes a new capability that enhances multitenant security operations for government cloud customers, enabling cross-cloud visibility and centralized security management. We invite you to give this new capability a try! (Public Preview) The OAuthAppInfo table is now available for preview in advanced hunting. The table contains information about Microsoft 365-connected OAuth applications registered with Microsoft Entra ID and available in the Defender for Cloud Apps app governance capability. The OnboardingStatus and NetworkAdapterDnsSuffix columns are now available in the DeviceNetworkInfo table in advanced hunting. Automatic attack disruption: Enhanced containment for critical assets and shadow IT. This blog post introduces new, extended capabilities in automatic attack disruption. Announcing Rich Text for Case Management. In the dynamic world of SecOps, managing and communicating information efficiently is vital. Rich Text for Case Management introduces capabilities that allow you to enrich your case documentation with various formatting options, including bold, italics, underlining, code blocks, links, tables, and more. (Public Preview) You can now create data security investigations in the Microsoft Defender portal with the integration of Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations (preview) and Microsoft Defender XDR. This integration allows security operations center (SOC) teams to enhance their investigation and response to potential data security incidents like data breaches or data leaks. Learn more in our docs. (Public Preview) Containing IP addresses associated with devices that are undiscovered or are not onboarded to Defender for Endpoint is now in preview. Containing an IP address prevents attackers from spreading attacks to other non-compromised devices. Learn more in our docs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Updated documentation Schedule antivirus scans using Group Policy Schedule antivirus scans using PowerShell Two new ASR rules are now generally available: Block rebooting machine in Safe Mode: This rule prevents the execution of commands to restart machines in Safe Mode. Block use of copied or impersonated system tools: This rule blocks the use of executable files that are identified as copies of Windows system tools. These files are either duplicates or impostors of the original system tools. (General Available) Defender for Endpoint supports ARM64-based Linux servers across various Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, SUSE Linux, Amazon Linux, and Oracle Linux. All product capabilities that are supported on AMD64 devices are now supported on ARM64-based Linux servers. For more information, see the following articles: Tech Community Blog: Defender for Endpoint extends support to ARM-based Linux servers Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Announcing the Public Preview of Auto-Remediation of Malicious Entity Clusters Identified in Automated Investigation and Response (AIR). Defender for Office 365 automated investigation and response is being enhanced to enable AIR to automatically remediate malicious entity clusters. AIR currently recommends actions for SecOps to approve or decline and this enhancement will allow customers the option to configure auto-remediation for AIR to automatically execute the soft deletion of messages included in malicious URL or malicious file clusters. Options to "tune" controls within Defender for Office 365 for an organization to maximize protection and efficacy. We are pleased to announce that if you are using third-party report message solutions in Microsoft Outlook, such as Knowbe4, Hoxhunt, and Cofense, you can now configure Defender for Office 365 to automatically forward these suspicious messages to Microsoft for analysis. The Outlook.com consumer email service will require compliance with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email authentication standards for domains sending more than 5000 messages to outlook.com, hotmail.com, and yahoo.com recipients as of 5 May, 2025. Learn more in this blog post.. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Enhanced alert source accuracy. This update, applicable to new alerts only, are reflected across various experiences and APIs, including the Defender XDR portal, Advanced hunting, and Graph API. (Public Preview) Investigate OAuth application attack paths in Defender for Cloud Apps Microsoft Defender for Identity (General available) Identities guided tour New attack paths tab on the Identity profile page New and updated events in the Advanced hunting IdentityDirectoryEvents table Identity page enhancements such as user timeline side panel, password last change field on the UI, devices tab filters and others. Deprecation of Defender for Identity alert email notifications (Public Preview) Defender for Identity integration with Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) Privileged Access Management (PAM) vendors integration with Defender for Identity – CyberArk, Delinea and BeyondTrust Microsoft Security Blogs Threat actors leverage tax season to deploy tax-themed phishing campaigns As Tax Day approaches in the United States on April 15, Microsoft has detected several tax-themed phishing campaigns employing various tactics. These campaigns use malicious hyperlinks and attachments to deliver credential phishing and malware including RaccoonO365, AHKBot, Latrodectus, BruteRatel C4 (BRc4), and Remcos. Exploitation of CLFS zero-day leads to ransomware activity Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) have discovered post-compromise exploitation of a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) against a small number of targets. Microsoft released security updates to address the vulnerability, tracked as CVE 2025-29824, on April 8, 2025. Stopping attacks against on-premises Exchange Server and SharePoint Server with AMSI Exchange Server and SharePoint Server are business-critical assets and considered crown-jewels for many organizations, making them attractive targets for attacks. Threat actors misuse Node.js to deliver malware and other malicious payloads Since October 2024, Microsoft Defender Experts has observed and helped multiple customers address campaigns leveraging Node.js to deliver malware and other payloads that ultimately lead to information theft and data exfiltration. Understanding the threat landscape for Kubernetes and containerized assets The dynamic nature of containers can make it challenging for security teams to detect runtime anomalies or pinpoint the source of a security incident, presenting an opportunity for attackers to stay undetected. Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed threat actors taking advantage of unsecured workload identities to gain access to resources, including containerized environments. Threat Analytics (Access to the Defender Portal needed) Activity profile: Tax and IRS-themed phishing campaigns [TA update] Tool profile: Grandoreiro banking trojan Activity profile - Threat actors using fake Chrome updates to deliver Lumma Stealer Actor profile: Storm-2256 Actor Profile - Storm-1877 [TA update] Vulnerability profile: CVE-2025-26633 Vulnerability profile - CVE-2025-29824 Activity profile: Cryptomining infection by malicious AutoIT scripts uses masqueraded Ncat for C2 communications Technique profile: ClickFix technique leverages clipboard to run malicious commands [TA update] Actor profile: Storm-1249 Tool profile - XCSSET Tool profile: ReedBed Quarterly cyber threat report: MITRE ATT&CK framework trends in OSINT (January to March 2025) Actor Profile - Storm-1125 Activity profile: Sapphire Sleet using GoLang files to download malware Technique Profile: Device Code Phishing
Automatic attack disruption: Enhanced containment for critical assets and shadow IT
Staying ahead of attackers is tough, as they constantly evolve and use advanced techniques like AI to exploit vulnerabilities. Protecting high-value assets is even harder, as these are prime targets. Security teams must constantly adapt to outpace attackers, balancing proactive measures with the need for speed and innovation. This is why Microsoft Defender XDR developed automatic attack disruption, a built-in self-defense capability that contains in-progress attacks to prevent further lateral movement & damage to an organization. We’re thrilled to introduce new, extended capabilities in automatic attack disruption, designed to further stop attackers and restrict them from moving laterally across the network by leveraging compromised devices. Specifically, within Microsoft Defender for Endpoint which disrupt ransomware on its own. With this expansion, we now offer: Granular containment of critical assets – Helping ensure essential infrastructure remains operational while blocking attacker activity. Containment of IP addresses linked to undiscovered devices – Helping to prevent attackers from exploiting shadow IT and unmanaged endpoints. Granular Containment of Critical Assets Critical assets—such as Domain Controllers, DNS, and DHCP servers—are prime targets for adversaries. These systems serve as strategic footholds for attackers to establish persistence, escalate privileges, and compromise further resources. However, containing these devices has traditionally been challenging, as full isolation could disrupt business operations. With this new capability, Defender for Endpoint applies intelligent, device role-based, granular containment to limit only specific network functionalities and interfaces used for malicious activity, while keeping essential functions running. This means: Attackers lose their ability to move laterally and escalate their attack. Key network functions are preserved, ensuring business continuity. Compromised critical assets remain operational while being protected. Containing IP addresses of undiscovered devices Shadow IT and unmanaged devices present a hidden security risk. Often unmonitored, these devices become easy targets for attackers to exploit for lateral movement. With the new IP address containment capability, Defender for Endpoint can now identify and incriminate malicious IP addresses linked to unmanaged or undiscovered devices and automatically contain those IPs, preventing attackers from getting their foot in the door through vulnerable, unmanaged devices before spreading to other non-compromised devices. Configuring IP containment Excluding assets from automatic attack disruption is not recommended as it can reduce the effectiveness of protecting your environment from sophisticated, high-impact attacks. If there is still a need to exclude an IP subnet or multiple IP addresses, this can be done within the Microsoft Defender XDR portal as follows: Under Automated responses, select Devices. In the IPs tab, select Exclude IP to exclude an IP address. In the flyout pane, enter the IP address/IP range/IP subnet you want to exclude. You can add multiple IP addresses and IP subnets by separating them with a comma. For full configuration options see the Defender XDR documentation. While security is undeniably challenging, security analysts should feel empowered by their tools to effectively combat against attacks. With continuous innovation and the ability to adapt to the latest threats, they can stay resilient and confident in their ability to protect valuable assets. The ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity is demanding, but with the right resources, analysts are well-equipped to tackle it head-on. Get started Make sure your organization fulfills the Microsoft Defender XDR pre-requisites. Deploy Defender for Endpoint. A free trial is available here. Learn more Read our latest security blog on how we protect against ransomware attacks using domain controllers Read our latest Defender for Endpoint e-book Check out our documentation to learn more about Microsoft Defender XDR's attack disruption prerequisites, available controls, and indications. Learn more about our Device Containment capabilities. Learn more about other scenarios supported by automatic attack disruption.Monthly news - April 2025
Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news April 2025 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 2025. Defender for Cloud has it's own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. ⏰ April 9th & 10th is Microsoft Secure! Make sure you join this virtual event to hear about our latest product announcements. Three broadcast times are available, offering opportunities to get your questions answered by subject matter experts at a time that suits you best. April 9, 2025 | 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM PT (UTC-7) | Americas broadcast April 10, 2025 | 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CET (UTC+1) | Europe, Middle East, Africa broadcast April 10, 2025 | 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM SGT (UTC+8) | Asia broadcast Microsoft Secure - Home - Microsoft Secure registration home page. New episodes of the Virtual Ninja Show has been published, covering various products and scenarios. Microsoft's Zero Trust approach Resolving high CPU utilization in Microsoft Defender Antivirus Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Client Analyzer overview Mastering onboarding issues with Defender for Endpoint Client Analyzer Mastering endpoint security settings issues with Defender for Endpoint Client Analyzer Connecting your Apps to Defender for Cloud Apps Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft Defender XDR & Microsoft Sentinel What’s new in Microsoft Defender XDR at Secure 2025 (Webinar) Microsoft Sentinel Repositories: Manage Your SIEM Content as code Like a Pro (GA Announcement) The content hub offers the best way to find new content or manage the solutions you already installed, now with granular AI search. (Public Preview) The Microsoft Sentinel agentless data connector for SAP and related security content is now included, as public preview, in the solution for SAP applications. Blog post: Transforming public sector security operations in the AI era Discover how Microsoft's AI-powered, unified SecOps can revolutionize public sector security operations and safeguard multiplatform, multi-cloud environments with industry-leading innovation and seamless integration. Ready to elevate your cyber defense? (Public Preview) The incident description has moved within the incident page. The incident description is now displayed after the incident details. For more information, see Incident details. The Microsoft 365 alert policies can now only be managed in the Microsoft Defender portal. For more information, see Alert policies in Microsoft 365. You can now link Threat analytics reports when setting up custom detections. Learn more Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Update to the Microsoft Defender Antivirus group policies documentation. Learn more Addition of the default settings for Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA) documentation. Learn more New video (9 mins): How Microsoft is redefining endpoint security New documentation: Troubleshoot Microsoft Defender Antivirus scan issues Microsoft Defender for Office 365 User reported messages by third-party add-ins can be sent to Microsoft for analysis: In user reported settings, admins can select Monitor reported messages in Outlook > Use a non-Microsoft add-in button. In the Reported message destination section, select Microsoft and my reporting mailbox, and then provide the email address of the internal Exchange Online mailbox where user-reported messages by the third-party add-in are routed to. Microsoft analyzea these reported messages and provides result on the User reported tab of Submissions page at https://security.microsoft.com/reportsubmission?viewid=user. Create allow entries directly in the Tenant Allow/Block List: You can now create allow entries for domains & addresses and URLs directly in the Tenant Allow/Block List. This capability is available in Microsoft 365 Worldwide, GCC, GCC High, DoD, and Office 365 operated by 21Vianet. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (GA) Unified Identity inventory now general available. Learn more Defending against OAuth based attacks with automatic attack disruption. Microsoft’s Automatic attack disruption capabilities disrupt sophisticated in-progress attacks and prevent them from spreading, now including OAuth app-based attacks. Attack disruption is an automated response capability that stops in-progress attacks by analyzing the attacker’s intent, identifying compromised assets, and containing them in real time. Level Up Your App Governance With Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Workshop Series. Join one of these workshops to learn: Real-world examples of OAuth attacks New pre-built templates and custom rules to simplify app governance How to quickly identify and mitigate risks from high-risk or suspicious apps Best practices for operationalizing app governance to improve your security posture These workshops are designed to accommodate global participation, with flexible date and time options. Protecting SaaS apps from OAuth threats with attack path, advanced hunting and more. Read this blog post to learn about various new capabilities rolling out over the next few weeks. Microsoft Defender for Identity Blog post: Discover and protect Service Accounts with Microsoft Defender for Identity Microsoft Defender for Identity now includes a Service Account Discovery capability, offering you centralized visibility into service accounts across your Active Directory environment. New health issue for cases where sensors running on VMware have network configuration mismatch. The Identities page under Assets has been updated to provide better visibility and management of identities across your environment. New LDAP query events were added to the IdentityQueryEvents table in Advanced Hunting to provide more visibility into additional LDAP search queries running in the customer environment. Microsoft Security Blogs Silk Typhoon targeting IT supply chain Malvertising campaign leads to info stealers hosted on GitHub New XCSSET malware adds new obfuscation, persistence techniques to infect Xcode projects Phishing campaign impersonates Booking .com, delivers a suite of credential-stealing malware StilachiRAT analysis: From system reconnaissance to cryptocurrency theft Analyzing open-source bootloaders: Finding vulnerabilities faster with AI Threat Analytics (Access to the Defender Portal needed) Vulnerability Profile: CVE-2024-40711 – Veeam Backup Activity profile: Moonstone Sleet using Qilin ransomware [TA update] Actor Profile: Secret Blizzard Actor profile: Berry Sandstorm Activity profile: DarkGate malware samples delivered through fake Notion websites followed by ClickFix technique Activity profile: Secret Blizzard and Aqua Blizzard collaborate to target Ukrainian military devices [TA update] Actor profile - Swirl Typhoon Vulnerability profile: CVE-2024-57726 Multiple vulnerabilities found in SimpleHelp Remote Support Software Activity profile: Lumma Stealer spreads via YouTube video descriptions [TA update] Actor profile: Aqua Blizzard Tool profile: Latrodectus Vulnerability profile: CVE-2025-26633 Tool profile: WinRing0 Activity profile: Storm-0485 phishing activity Activity profile: Silk Typhoon targeting IT supply chain Activity profile: Storm-1877 evolving tactics to target users with ClickFix attacks Threat overview: Business Email Compromise [Snapshot] Actor profile: Storm-2372 [TA update] Actor profile: ZigZag Hail Actor profile: Storm-0287 Activity profile: Secret Blizzard abusing Visual Studio Code tunneling service Activity Profile: Clickfix and Malvertising campaigns leveraging node.exe application Actor profile: Yulong Flood Vulnerability profile: CVE-2024-43451- NTLM Hash Disclosure Spoofing Vulnerability Tool profile: FrostyStash [TA update] Tool profile: Mimikatz Tool profile: Mamba 2FA Activity profile: Phishing campaign deploying PureLogStealer targets users in Central America [TA update] Vulnerability profile: CVE 2025-0282: Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA Gateway [TA update] Actor profile: Silk Typhoon Seamless SSO Abuse via AADInternals [TA update] SystemBC Tool Profile Vulnerability profile: CVE-2025-22224 – VMware
