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.Case management now supports multiple tenants in Microsoft Defender experience
If you're responsible for securing a large enterprise or operating as a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), you know how complex it can be to track and manage cases across multiple tenants. Visibility gaps and fragmented workflows often slow down response times and increase operational overhead. 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. This release marks a significant milestone in our mission to deliver a fully integrated, security-first case management system that spans all Security Operations (SecOps) workloads. By consolidating case handling into a native experience, we’re helping customers reduce their dependence on third-party Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Extended Detection and Response (XDR), and ticketing systems. Multi-tenant case management is available to all Microsoft Sentinel customers who have onboarded to the Defender portal. Whether you're managing internal security or delivering services to multiple clients, this enhancement simplifies operations and strengthens your ability to respond to threats quickly and effectively. Beyond complex incident response, use cases include centralized threat hunting across tenants, streamlined detection tuning to reduce noise and false positives, and aggregating threat intelligence (TI) related to specific threat actors. These workflows are now easier to execute and scale across environments. Want to learn more about how this feature works and how to get started? Visit the full announcement on the Sentinel Tech Community blog for in-depth details, use cases, and guidance on enabling multi-tenant case management in your environment.Introducing TITAN-Powered Recommendations in Security Copilot Guided Response
In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, speed and accuracy are paramount. At Microsoft, we’re continuously investing in ways to help analysts make informed decisions under pressure. One of the most powerful of these is Guided Response: a Security Copilot-powered capability in Microsoft Defender that walks analysts through step-by-step investigation and response flows. It provides context-aware recommendations tailored to each incident, enabling teams at all levels to respond with precision and scale. Now, with the integration of Threat Intelligence Tracking via Adaptive Networks (TITAN) recommendations, Guided Response is taking a leap forward. By bringing in real-time threat intelligence (TI) to prioritize and explain suggested actions, it enables analysts to surface, prioritize, and act on the most relevant threats with clarity and efficiency. What is TITAN? TITAN represents a new wave of innovation built on Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence capabilities, introducing a real-time, adaptive threat intelligence (TI) graph that integrates first and third-party telemetry from the unified security operations platform, Microsoft Defender for Threat Intelligence, Microsoft Defender for Experts, and customer feedback. This graph employs guilt-by-association techniques to propagate known TI labels to unknown neighboring entities (e.g., IP, file, email) at machine scale. By analyzing relationships between entities, TITAN can identify attacker infrastructure before it's leveraged in attacks, giving defenders a critical window to proactively disrupt threats. One of TITAN’s greatest strengths is its ability to learn from indicators of compromise (IOCs) observed throughout the global threat landscape. Microsoft Defender analyzes over 24 trillion security signals every day, across identities, endpoints, apps, and beyond. When a new IOC (such as an IP address, an IP range or an email sender) is identified in one environment, Microsoft Defender rapidly leverages that intelligence to protect other environments. These live, TI-based Guided Response recommendations help identify, manage and block threats before they impact your organization, turning every detection into a defense signal for the entire Microsoft ecosystem. Why bring TITAN into Security Copilot Guided Response? Security Copilot Guided Response already provides analysts with a curated set of recommendations. TITAN enhances this by introducing a new dimension: real-time, threat-intel-driven recommendations that are grounded in global telemetry and threat actor behavior. The integration improves Guided Response by: Expanding coverage to incidents that previously lacked actionable context. Prioritizing recommendations with higher confidence. Surfacing targeted triage and remediation actions based on live threat infrastructure. How it works TITAN suggestions are now integrated into Guided Response as both triage and containment recommendations. When an incident involves an entity with known malicious threat intelligence flagged by TITAN, Security Copilot automatically generates a Guided Response recommendation. Analysts receive prioritized, natural language guidance on how to triage the incident and contain specific threat entities, including: IP addresses IP ranges Internet Message-ID Email senders Real-world impact In early testing, TITAN-powered triage recommendations have shown promising results: Increased model accuracy: TITAN’s integration has helped improve the precision of Guided Response triage recommendations. Improved analyst trust: explainable, threat-intel-backed recommendations, have helped analysts gain more confidence in their response actions. Faster decision-making: TITAN’s real-time scoring and threat attribution have accelerated incident investigation and response times. Evolving Guided Response with threat intelligence TITAN recommendations mark a significant leap in our mission to empower defenders. By combining the scale of Microsoft’s Defender Threat Intelligence with the precision of Security Copilot’s Guided Response, we’re helping analysts move from reactive to proactive— responding faster, working smarter, and acting with greater confidence. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to evolve this capability. And if you’re already using TITAN recommendations in your environment, we’d love to hear your feedback. Join the Microsoft Customer Connection Program to share your insights and help shape future Microsoft Security products and features. Learn more Check out our resources to learn more about our new approach to AI-driven threat intelligence for Guided Response, and our recent security announcements: See TITAN in action in the session delivered at Ignite Read our blog and conference paper on the TITAN architecture, accepted to KDD 2025, the premier data-mining conference. Read the Security Copilot Guided Response paper & blogMicrosoft Defender for Identity extends ITDR capabilities to Okta identities
Identities are the organization’s new security perimeter and are a prime target for cyber-criminals. However, with today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, security leaders often wrestle with a tapestry of different identity solutions spanning multiple environments and vendors, making identity protection more challenging than ever. Because of this, security professionals understand that identity threat detection and response (ITDR) is a fundamental piece of their security practice that helps them to comprehensively secure their unique identity fabric across identity solutions, environments, and vendors. What is changing? Today, I am excited to announce that Microsoft 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. As a leader in both Identity (IAM) and security, Microsoft provides comprehensive visibility, posture recommendations, and detection and response capabilities for our customer’s unique identity fabric - now including Okta. With these new protections from Defender, our customers will benefit from enhanced visibility and control for their Okta environments, including: Holistic identity visibility – A unified identity inventory with correlated view of accounts across Active Directory, Entra ID, and Okta. For instance, a user with an Entra ID and an Okta account would appear as one entity - meaning SOC professionals can easily zoom into a specific identity to see all their related accounts, their privileges, and any related security alerts. This holistic perspective is crucial for maintaining robust security postures and allows IT and security teams to identify potential vulnerabilities across different platforms seamlessly. Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) – Alert on identity threats in Okta and trigger corresponding response actions, including detection of lateral movement between on-premises and cloud environments. This capability is crucial for mitigating sophisticated attacks that seek to exploit the transition between different identity platforms. The integration will also surface Okta logs and data within the Advanced Hunting like we already do for Active Directory and Entra ID, allowing security teams to delve into threats across the different platforms in a single place. Identity-specific posture recommendations (ISPM) - Expand the already robust set of identity security posture recommendations to include recommendations for Okta identities (e.g. dormant Okta accounts), and map how those posture gaps can be leveraged into attack paths. Adhering to these posture recommendations enables organizations to proactively prevent threats, rather than responding reactively. How can I take advantage of these new capabilities? Defender for Identity customers looking to take advantage of these new capabilities can read more here. Be advised that to get the full potential of enhanced integration, make sure your organization has Okta for Workforce with Identity Enterprise license.NEW: Scope Identity Protection with Defender for Identity
I am excited to announce the public preview of domain-based scoping for Active Directory within Microsoft Defender for Identity. This is a foundational step in extending role-based access control (RBAC) as part of the broader XDR URBAC initiative. This new capability enables SOC analysts to define and refine the scope of Microsoft Defender for Identity monitoring, providing more granular control over which entities and resources are included in security analysis. What is “scoping” and why does it matter? As organizations grow, so does their identity fabric and as security professionals look to manage these increasingly complex identity environments, the ability to control who can access what -and where- is critical. Whether for legal or efficiency reasons many organizations need a way to delegate access based on responsibility or ownership. The new scoping capability is part of Microsoft Defender's unified role-based access control (URBAC) model which allows customers to refine investigation and administration experiences by Active Directory domains, providing: Optimize performance - improve efficiency by focusing analysts on critical assets without the noise of other non-essential alerts and data outside their purview. Enhance visibility control - visibility on specific Active Directory domains. Support operational boundaries - align access and responsibility across SOC analysts, identity admins, and regional teams. This enhancement is part of Microsoft Defender XDR’s unified role-based access control (URBAC) model and sets the foundation for even more granular controls in the future. What can be scoped? Users assigned to scoped roles will only see data, such as alerts, identities, and activities, related to the Active Directory domains included in the assignment in the XDR role. This ensures that security teams can focus on the assets they are responsible for, without being exposed to information from outside their organizational boundaries. Today this includes: Alerts and incidents: Analysts will only see alerts and incidents related to identities within the scoped Active Directory domains within their queue. Entity pages: Users can only access the account details of identities within the Active Directory domains they are scoped for. Advanced hunting and investigations: Data is automatically filtered to include only scoped data. For the full list of supported experiences, see our documentation. How to configure scoping rules: This release is part of our ongoing XDR URBAC effort, bringing consistent and unified role-based access control across Microsoft Defender products. Domain-based scoping is now available for public preview in Microsoft Defender for Identity and aligns with the same RBAC principles used across the XDR platform. To enable the feature, follow these steps: Navigate to XDR permissions page --> Microsoft Defender XDR --> Roles. You can edit existing roles or create a new custom role Add an assignment and create a scoping role with the same set of permissions Define Entra ID user or groups to be assigned to the role Choose Microsoft Defender for Identity as a data source and select User groups (AD domains) that will be scoped to the assignment. Once configured, customers can restrict SOC analysts to viewing only specific entities, ensuring they have access only to the data relevant to their responsibilities and improving security control. Before enabling scoping, ensure that: You have Microsoft Defender for Identity sensor installed. The Identity workload for URBAC is activated. To manage roles without Global Administrator or Security Administrator privileges, customers must configure Authorization permissions through URBAC. Learn more here. What’s next As this feature is in Public Preview, some experiences are still in progress and will be expanded over time. For setup guidance and more details, visit the Defender for Identity documentation. To stay informed about upcoming enhancements and expanded support for scoping experiences, follow our What’s New documentation page.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 stealers
Expanding the Identity perimeter: the rise of non-human identities
Expanding the Identity perimeter With the rise of cloud applications and AI, machine-to-machine access and authentication has become even more prevalent. From automating workflows, integrating applications, managing cloud services and even powering AI agents, non-human identity (NHI) has become vital to modern work. These digital constructs come in many different varieties, each with their own unique characteristics, but because they are foundational elements of many critical business processes, they represent a prime target for cyber-criminals. Not only do NHI greatly outnumber their human counterparts but they are also often highly privileged, eliminating the need for the attacker to elevate this status themselves. AI agents are expected to drive even faster growth machine identities. Copilot Studio alone has more than 230,000 organizations — including 90% of the Fortune 500- already using it to build AI agents and automations. What are non-human Identities? Non-human identities or machine identities like service accounts in Active Directory, Entra registered service principals and third-party OAuth apps, cloud workload identities, AI agents and Secrets each have their own unique roles, responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Despite their importance, there is no team dedicated to securing them holistically, leading to a lack of: Visibility: Different teams are often responsible for the creation of the various types of NHI. Due to this, organizations are often blind to what accounts exist, where, and who owns them. Governance and Management: Limited policies and regulations on how these accounts should be set up, used and managed can create situations where accounts are overprivileged or shared across multiple applications and even where their credentials are stored in plain text or their passwords become stale and susceptible to exploitation. Gaps like these in policy and the lifecycle management of NHI expose organizations to increased risk. Protection: Without dedicated security controls, non-human identities (NHIs) are often left exposed to threats such as credential theft, misuse, or unauthorized access. Many of these identities operate with elevated privileges, making them attractive targets for attackers. A lack of consistent monitoring, anomaly detection, and automated response mechanisms further increases the risk. Effective protection requires implementing least privilege access, rotating credentials regularly, encrypting secrets, and integrating NHIs into a broader identity threat detection and response strategy. How can Microsoft help protect your NHI? While NHIs are a recent term, they have been a critical focus area within Microsoft Security for a long time. Today, Microsoft Security delivers an end-to-end solution for monitoring, securing, and managing non-human identities across their entire lifecycle. Organizations benefit from a comprehensive set of unified capabilities, including: Full-spectrum discovery and visibility: Identify all non-human identities and secrets - including service principals, tokens, keys, and application credentials, across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enrichment and risk analysis: Gain deep insights into each identity’s privileges, activity patterns, ownership, and authentication methods to prioritize risks and streamline remediation. Secrets management: Detect secrets in insecure or inappropriate locations, validate their usage, and provide actionable recommendations for protection and remediation. Lifecycle and access governance: Monitor for stale or orphaned accounts, govern OAuth enabled and third-party connections, enforce credential rotation, manage ownership transfer, and ensure secure decommissioning of machine identities. Threat detection and response: Get alerts on suspicious activity or policy deviations, such as unusual privilege escalation, excessive app permissions, or risky machine-to-machine communications. Together, these integrated capabilities empower organizations to proactively identify and mitigate NHI risks, reduce attack surfaces, and strengthen access controls, no matter where identities live or how fast they change. Microsoft brings these protections together, so you can secure every identity -– human and non-human -– across your digital estate. For example, automatic classification rules help organizations quickly find and secure Service Accounts within their organization. 1: Service Account classification capabilities from Defender for Identity And the Microsoft's "Attack Paths" capabilities allow users to see all their NHIs, their connections, associated risks and context, as well as potential lateral movement paths. 2: Attack path mapping in Microsoft Defender illustrates a scenario where a resource contains a service principal certificate that can authenticate asa service principal with permissions to a sensitive database. This represents a risky lateral movement path — one that is now visible and can be proactively secured. What does this mean for you? Non-human identities (NHI) have become a critical yet overlooked component of modern security practices. While each type of NHI poses distinct challenges, they are tightly interconnected and require expertise across the security landscape. This is what makes Microsoft such a powerful partner. Our leadership in identity, security and now AI make us uniquely qualified to help your organization, and your machine identities, stay protected against threats. Our unified approach: consolidating visibility, control, and protection across AI, cloud, apps, data, devices and identities helps comprehensively secure all NHI and your organization. And this is only the beginning. Our team is already hard at work building the cohesive, intelligent defense layer our customers will need to remain protected today and, in the future, including leveraging our leadership in AI to help our customers secure their organizations, and their AI agents, against attacks.From on-premises to cloud: Graph-powered detection of hybrid attacks with Microsoft exposure graph
Enterprises face an ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats that require robust and adaptive defense strategies to protect multiple threat surfaces. Many organizations manage their resources across different realms, including on-premises and cloud environments, and create complex infrastructures, where interconnections between services, resources, and identities become vital. If not managed with caution and diligence, these interconnections can pose significant risks. Threat actors may exploit them to take over realms, conduct identity theft, exfiltrate data, engage in ransomware extortion, or engage in other malicious activities. Organizations deploy a variety of solutions to safeguard their workloads, whether they are on premises, or in the cloud. Many have adopted integrated platforms that offer a unified view of their security environment. Solutions like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) are now essential. However, a significant gap emerges when dealing with attacks that span multiple layers within the enterprise, crossing various realms, where each realm lacks the context of the others, and shared entities (IP Address, User, and more) are non-existent. This limitation prevents the SOC teams from identifying the comprehensive attack chain, where the contextual correlation of low-medium confidence signals across the realms is essential, and effectively responding to such complex, multi-faceted threats. 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. This contextual enrichment allows SOC teams to uncover and determine that the low-medium confidence signals across the realms are part of the same attack—from the earliest compromise of the first realm to the last. This is possible by correlating indicators of compromise with shared possible attack paths on the graph that cross the on-premises and move to the cloud, and vice-versa. We will emphasize on-hybrid attacks that move from on-premises environments to the cloud. Recognizing the Complexity of Hybrid Threats Exposure management solutions, such as Microsoft Exposure Management, have already identified the need to surface risks that cross these realms. These solutions are now exposing hybrid attack paths, providing the necessary context to understand and mitigate threats that span different layers and realms—in this case, on-premises and cloud—within the enterprise (read more). The exposure graph supercharges threat protection capabilities by focusing on a specific attack scenario that highlights this gap: a device compromise leading to an Azure environment takeover. In such scenarios, context is key to creating a holistic picture of the larger kill-chain. In this scenario, a device which isn’t joined to Entra is compromised using the threat actor’s payload delivery and an N-day exploit, allowing the threat actor to gain an initial foothold on the device. The threat actor then discovers an unexpired Entra session cookie residing in the browser. They perform credential theft and extract the cookie using known attack tools, with a goal to steal and assume the identity and permissions of the user that the cookie is tied to. After hijacking the cookie, the threat actor manages to compromise the user by replaying the cookie from their own device and pivoting to the cloud, successfully satisfying the multifactor authentication (MFA) requirement. The threat actor then discovers that this user is assigned with the Global Administrator Entra role, which results in a highly destructive on-premises to cloud privilege escalation. This might not be coincidental, as the user was targeted as part of a spear-phishing campaign, which resulted in the payload delivery and the initial access. The threat actor then shifts their focus to Azure, targeting the organization’s valuable data that resides in the cloud realm. They perform the elevate access operation within the Azure portal, thereby gaining privileged permissions over all Azure subscriptions in scope, allowing them to take over Azure. Finally, the threat actor commits mass data exfiltration from the discovered Azure storage accounts that reside in the Azure compromised subscriptions. This stolen data can later be sold on the dark web or used to commit ransomware extortion. Graph-based contextual detection & response In the above scenario, the threat actor’s pivot from on-premises to the cloud may easily be a blind spot, as there is no shared indication that the device sequence of events is related to the cloud sequence of events, because the former occurs in the context of the local account while the latter occurs in the context of the Entra identity. This prevents SOC teams from correlating operations across different realms (on-premises and cloud), as there are no shared entities. In addition, each realm detection capability might have low-medium confidence individually, but with context enrichment and cross-realm signal correlation, the result can be a high confidence threat detection capability that SOC teams can respond to effectively. As suspicious operations are detected within the device during the attack, including reconnaissance and discovery, credential theft, execution, and more, these detections often lack the context of the cloud user with an active logon session inside the device. Conversely, suspicious activity detected within Azure also lacks the context of previous suspected operations that occurred on the device. To bridge the gap, we utilize the Enterprise Exposure Graph to integrate both contexts and formulate a comprehensive picture of the destructive campaign, with high confidence. By enriching the XDR capabilities, we can correlate events through shared paths in the graph, allowing us to consolidate the device compromise, credential theft, and the cloud compromise and operations into a single, cohesive incident. Hybrid attack detection and response: How does this all work? The Enterprise exposure graph collects information about assets, users, secrets, workloads, and more. Secrets can be in the form of user tokens and cookies, cloud resource access keys, and more. One of the unique features of the graph is its ability to connect users and devices, using secrets (user cookies and tokens). By leveraging the capabilities of secret scanning on both on-premises and cloud machines within Microsoft Security Exposure Management (MSEM), the exposure graph surfaces connections between a device and a user. In the above attack scenario, when the ‘device’ ‘contains’ an Entra session cookie (also known as ‘entra-userCookie’ in the Microsoft exposure graph) within the browser, where the cookie ‘can authenticate as’ the user, the connection appears in the graph. For more details, please refer to our previous blog. We use these graph-based connections and context enrichments within Microsoft Defender XDR to detect destructive cross-realm attacks. By correlating events based on the connections between the endpoint device and the user's identity, we can generate a high-confidence unified alert, or an incident that correlates different alerts. This provides a comprehensive description of the attack, showing how a single threat actor moved from the device to the cloud. New Exposure Graph-based detection & response Alerts with the following titles in Microsoft Defender XDR can indicate threat activity of a hybrid attack in progress. Microsoft Defender XDR detections Initial Access Suspicious Azure sign-in by user with active session on a device involved in a credential theft attempt Privilege Escalation Suspicious Azure elevate access operation by a user with an active session on a device involved in a credential theft attempt Credential Access Suspicious Azure Storage account keys access by a user with an active session on a device involved in a credential theft attempt Collection Suspicious Azure VM snapshot downloads by a user with an active session on a device involved in a credential theft attempt Impact Suspicious Azure data store resources deletion attempt by a user with an active session on a device involved in a credential theft attempt Learn more Microsoft Security Exposure Management (MSEM) Start with Exposure Management documentation, product website, blogs Microsoft Security Exposure Management what's new page Device and user connections using cloud credentials detection blog Exposure Graph tables in Advanced Hunting: ExposureGraphEdges, ExposureGraphNodes Query the exposure graph Mitigation and Protection guidance Principle of least privilege for identities What is Conditional Access in Microsoft Entra ID? Microsoft-managed Conditional Access policies Microsoft Entra Conditional Access token protection Turn on Microsoft Entra ID protection Understanding Tokens in Microsoft Entra ID Protecting Tokens in Microsoft Entra ID Token theft playbook Endpoint detection and response in block mode - Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Use automated investigations to investigate and remediate threats - Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Microsoft Defender for Cloud documentation Protect your Azure subscriptions with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Microsoft Defender for Cloud integration into Defender XDR CloudAuditEvents table in the advanced hunting - Microsoft Defender XDRAnnouncing File Attachments for Case Management
Staying informed with the most up to date information is critical to quickly taking appropriate action on a case. File Attachments for Case Management enables you to share reports, emails, screenshots, log files, and more, all in one centralized location within a case ensuring you have all the information you need. Key Benefits of Attachments for Case Management Centralized Information: File attachments ensure that all relevant documents, images, and data are stored in one place. No more hunting through emails or disparate systems—everything you need is right at your fingertips within the case. Comprehensive Documentation: From evidence to client communications and reports, file attachments provide a complete and organized record of all case-related materials. This comprehensive documentation is invaluable for audits, reviews, and future reference. More Accurate Response: Minimize errors and increase confidence in case outcomes by leveraging all relevant information related to a case. Learn more here
