NEW Conditional Access Optimization Agent in Microsoft Entra + Security Copilot in Entra updates
Instead of switching between logs, PowerShell, and spreadsheets, Security Copilot centralizes insights for faster, more focused action. Resolve compromised accounts, uncover ownerless or high-risk apps, and tighten policy coverage with clear insights, actionable recommendations, and auto-generated policies. Strengthen security posture and reclaim time with a smarter, more efficient approach powered by Security Copilot. Diana Vicezar, Microsoft Entra Product Manager, shares how to streamline investigations and policy management using AI-driven insights and automation. Skip the scripting. Ask questions in plain language and get back policy and risk insights in seconds. Microsoft Entra now has built-in AI with Security Copilot. Stay ahead of threats. Use AI to track auth changes, elevated roles, and risky signals with Security Copilot in Entra. Start here. Improve your security posture. Receive personalized recommendations of policies and configurations to make using Microsoft Security Copilot in Microsoft Entra. Take a look. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Microsoft Entra with Security Copilot 01:26 — Conditional Access Optimization Agent 03:35 — Investigate risky users 05:49 — Investigate risky apps 07:34 — Personalized security posture recommendations 08:20 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/SecurityCopilotAgentsinMicrosoftEntra Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft’s official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Microsoft Entra has built-in AI with Security Copilot. In fact, if you are new to the experience or haven’t looked at it in a while, you’ll find that it is continuously being fine-tuned with skills to accelerate your daily troubleshooting and risk assessments, which means whether you’re a seasoned admin or just getting started, you don’t need deep expertise in filtering, PowerShell, or Graph API. You can just use natural language and have Security Copilot surface the information for you. Additionally, new specialized agents like the one for Conditional Access Optimization work with you to continuously look for misaligned policies along with gaps in coverage that could be putting your organization at risk. -Today, I’ll walk through examples of just how powerful Security Copilot in Microsoft Entra can be, starting with a pretty common challenge, policy coverage and conflicts, where right now, you might try to work through these issues by using filters to identify new users in the Entra audit logs or by using PowerShell with the Microsoft Graph module, then perhaps, you might export log outputs into a spreadsheet for manual analysis, and repeat the same process to identify new Enterprise apps, all with the goal of identifying coverage or gaps in policies. It’s a manual effort that can take hours from your day. And that’s where the Conditional Access Optimization Agent comes in. It can be accessed and enabled from the agents page in the Microsoft Entra admin center. From there, the Conditional Access agent works alongside you, proactively surfacing issues and suggestions like gaps in protection, users, or apps that should be added to an existing policy and policy overlaps. And you can track the status of agent suggestions as you work through them. -Clicking into a suggestion gives you the details. For this one about adding users, the agent has listed userIDs for the new users. And I can review the user impact of the suggested policy before I apply the changes. You can also dive into the agent’s activity to explore its path of analysis and the reasoning behind each suggestion to validate its logic, making sure its behaving in the way you want it to. Then moving back to the policy details, before you apply any changes, you can review the summary of changes and even the detailed JSON view if you want a deeper look, down to the individual configuration options for the policy. And at the tenant level, if you need to fine-tune the agent’s behavior, you can do so in the agent Settings tab using Custom Instructions. -For example, you can instruct the agent to make exceptions like excluding break-glass admin accounts, which the agent will take into account on its next run. And beyond just giving you suggestions and recommendations, the agent can go a step further and create a fully configured policy if no existing equivalent policy is found. By default, these are report-only policies. And from here, you can even turn it on to enable the policy directly. And from Edit, you can review the policy details. The Conditional Access Optimization Agent is great for consistently tracking your policy coverage as users, apps, and access policies evolve over time. Additionally, the specialized Microsoft Entra skills in Security Copilot will also help save you time and even help you add to your existing expertise. -For example, let me show you how Security Copilot helps automate the manual steps when investigating and fixing a known compromised user account. Typically, you would need to use sign-in logs to isolate what they are trying to access or audit the actions that they have taken with visibility into their sign-in events as well as any group memberships giving them access to resources or examine any current or recently elevated role assignments, which could increase the severity of the compromise. Already I’m jumping between tabs, and it’s time-consuming to collect all of that information to see why they’re showing up as risky. Security Copilot on the other hand can pull everything together in a fraction of the time. In this case, I know that a user, Michael, has had an account compromise. -So, I’ll ask Copilot if his account was recently flagged as risky, which even if he is low risk now, could be a sign of a persistence attack, where his account is compromised and the attacker is waiting for the right timing. The response from Copilot shows me that he is high risk with an at-risk state that started on May 19th. So, I’ll ask for the risk details for his account. Copilot spots an attempted Primary Refresh Token or PRT access. Threat Intelligence has flagged his account. There are sign-in attempts from a known malicious IP address and an anonymized IP address. So, the account was definitely compromised. I’ll ask Copilot if Michael’s authentication methods have changed. And it looks like he added a new phone on May 15th, then updated details again on the 19th. Finally, I’ll ask about Michael’s account type and whether he has privileged roles assigned. And it looks like he has Cloud Device and Device Join admin permissions. This would let him easily register and modify other managed devices, for example, to have them send file contents or sign-in tokens to other cloud storage locations. So very quickly, I was able to get the visibility I needed to decide what to do next. - Now let’s move from risky user accounts to risky apps, which can present a vulnerability. Normally, you’d spend a long time digging through app lists just to isolate which apps are even worth worrying about, trying to understand the overall risk to determine what apps are created by my organization or maybe a 3rd party that might require more scrutiny. Who owns the app, or does it no longer have an owner? What protocols are the apps using? And are they risky? And which applications are stale or unused that you may want to purge from the list. Investigations like this can take hours. Let’s use Copilot for this instead. I’ll start by asking it to list some external apps that are not owned by my tenant with verified publisher details for each app. And it pulls together a list of seven apps with additional details like the app name, App ID, and Verified Publisher, so I’m not wasting time on low-risk noise. That said, sometimes it’s the apps owned by at-risk users that can be the real problem. -So, I want to ask Copilot, do the risky users in my tenant own any applications? And it finds an app that is owned by a high-risk user. Another potential problem that presents a hidden risk are apps and service principals in your environment that are currently ownerless. I’ll ask Copilot, what proportion of apps and service principals are ownerless? And Copilot tells me that more than half or 55% of my apps are ownerless and 92% of our service principals are also ownerless. And beyond finding and pointing out problems with my policies and settings, Copilot can even give me detailed recommendations to improve identity posture. -In this case, I’ll ask, give me recommendations to improve the security posture of at-risk apps in my tenant. Show this as a bulleted list with impacted resources as applications. And Copilot gives me seven actionable recommendations of policies and configurations to make, including the removal of the unused service principals that I presented earlier, as well as outdated authentication protocols and more. So, with just a few simple prompts, I have achieved something that otherwise might have taken hours in just a few minutes. -As you’ve seen, Security Copilot in Microsoft Entra simplifies troubleshooting and risk assessments, with specialized skills and agents. And while I showed you the Conditional Access Optimization agent today, there are more on the way. To learn more, check out aka.ms/SecurityCopilotAgentsinMicrosoftEntra. Keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates and thanks for watching.Microsoft Copilot for Security and NIST 800-171: Access Control
The second blog in this series will dive into the very first requirement family - Access Control (3.1) - and how organizations may deploy Microsoft Copilot for Security (Security Copilot) to meet the requirements entailed. This requirement family is arguably one of the most paramount because of the remarkable growth in identity-based attacks and the need for identity architects and teams to work more closely with the Security Operations Center (SOC). Microsoft Entra data noted in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report shows the number of “attempted attacks increased more than tenfold compared to the same period in 2022, from around 3 billion per month to over 30 billion. This translates to an average of 4,000 password attacks per second targeting Microsoft cloud identities [2023]”.Microsoft Security Copilot and NIST 800-171
Microsoft Security Copilot can help commercial businesses in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) meet the security requirements of NIST 800-171r3 and prepare for CMMC 2.0. Features and benefits of Security Copilot, such as automated threat detection, real-time alerts, advanced analytics, attack path analysis, and natural language explanations can improve the productivity and accuracy of security analysts. Explore how companies in the DIB may use these AI-powered capabilities to meet NIST 800-171r3 security requirements, detect and respond to threats more efficiently, and ultimately defend against threats with finite or limited resources.
