Empowering SOC Analysts: Investigating Identity Threats with Microsoft Defender XDR
Identities have been a top threat vector forever. However, the rise of cloud identity attacks and an ever increasingly complex digital estate has made a tough problem even harder. Securing identities has always required a close partnership between two different functional teams – the identity and access management teams that are responsible for managing, authenticating, and authorizing user access to protected systems and data; and the security teams that detect and respond to threats across the entire digital estate. Nowhere is this more apparent than during a security incident. Let’s take a look at a common attack type like this phishing email example below: While this is a straightforward scenario, it’s still extremely effective as many organizations aren’t equipped to protect against it. The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigation report detailed how the median time for an attacker to access data from phishing is now just 60 seconds, giving the security team little time to triage alerts across email, identity, and endpoints, coordinate with the IAM team to disable the user and reset the password, and clean up any affected devices and inboxes. This is where implementing an integrated Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) solution comes in. Our solution breaks down the existing silos between your identity and security teams by natively integrating our IAM solution, Microsoft Entra ID, and our identity threat protection solution, Microsoft Defender for Identity into our Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform. Our ITDR offering is unique in that it delivers robust ITDR capabilities where your teams already work today. This means empowering the SOC to investigate identity alerts directly within Defender while also surfacing necessary insights from those investigations for Identity Admins directly within the Entra experience. Enhancing XDR with ITDR Identity is a core pillar of our XDR solution. Capitalizing on Microsoft’s leadership in both Identity and Access Management (IAM) and security, Defender correlates identity data and insights with Endpoint, Cloud, SaaS app and collaboration alerts to help security professionals better understand the full scope of security threats without spending hours triaging and correlating alerts. Customers benefit from the following within the Defender experience: 1. Enriched visibility across the identity fabric The ITDR dashboard provides the SOC with a single, prioritized view of Identity-specific security information and recommendations. Pulling relevant alerts and insights from across their identity footprint, this pane helps SOC teams better understand their identity posture and quickly manage potential identity-related security risks. Additionally, the recently updated identity inventory provides visibility into all the identities within their fabric including human and non-human, on-premises or in the cloud, from Microsoft or another provider. Each one of those identities also has a corresponding identity page which offers even more insights into the identity itself and allows the SOC to take action on that identity, right from the experience. 2. Proactive Identity posture and prevention The robust posture recommendations within Microsoft Security Exposure Management include Identity-specific posture recommendations (ISPM’s) that range from spotting common misconfigurations to helping customers address vulnerabilities across Active Directory, Entra ID and other common identity fabric elements, before they can be exploited. This is further enriched with attack path modeling, which provides a prioritized queue of possible attack paths that could be exploited by a threat actor. This helps the SOC and identity teams understand the entire scope of vulnerabilities—from initial access to reach critical data—and work together to prioritize the highest priority exposures. Again, because of the native integration between Entra ID and Defender the recommendations surfaced to identity admins and SOC professionals are consistent, helping the two teams work in unison to strengthen their overall identity. Defender for Identity provides dedicated sensors for Domain Controllers, Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) and Entra ID Connect to provide comprehensive visibility into on-premises identity environments while Entra ID does the same for cloud identities. 3. Incident-level visibility Microsoft Defender uses XDR-level detections to automatically correlate all related alerts into prioritized incidents – making it easy for analysts to see which alerts are tied to a broader incident and need to be addressed first. Incidents are automatically updated if new related alerts are triggered, so analysts can be confident they’re always looking at the latest info. Incidents are also automatically enriched with identity-related insights – like recently logged on users on an endpoint, recent activity, MFA type, open incidents, Entra ID risk level, and more—so the SOC team can quickly understand the full context of a user without needing to go hunting. All of this information is synced automatically with Microsoft Entra, ensuring both the identity and SOC teams are looking at the same data. This context is also showcased within the hunting experience. Customers can hunt for emerging threats across identity and other domains right from the same pane. 4. Automated Threats Response With attackers moving laterally in just minutes, even the best security teams will be challenged to respond in time with manual processes. Microsoft Defender utilizes AI to automatically take action on in-progress attacks and prevent lateral movement. This built-in, self-defense capability uses the correlated signals in XDR, the latest threat intelligence, and machine learning backed models to accurately predict the attack path used and block an attacker’s next move before it happens with above 99% confidence. Disruption attacks only take the minimum action necessary to stop the attacker – like disabling a compromise user or containing an affected endpoint – limiting the impact on the organization and leaving the SOC and identity teams in control to complete the investigation and bring assets back online. Security professionals can take direct action on identities right from the XDR experience through actions like “Confirm user as compromised” or “Disable user,” to mitigate an active threat. These updates are reflected automatically in the Entra portal, so they work in conjunction with Entra’s risk based conditional access. That way, when an identity is confirmed as compromised by the SOC, the risk level within Entra will automatically be raised and the relevant conditional access policies will be triggered at the next login to prevent future attacks. This signal loop protects customers both proactively through continuous monitoring and zero-trust policy engine , and reactively through real-time alerts and response from both Entra ID and Defender XDR. Conclusion In today's dynamic cyber landscape and with the complexity of modern identity environments, SOC analysts require a single pane of glass view into and the ability to effectively combat identity threats. Microsoft XDR, with its integration of Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Entra ID, provides a unified platform that enhances identity threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities, across on-prem and cloud. The seamless flow of data, alerts and workflows between IAM and Security teams created by this integration closes the loop between reactive and preventative identity protection helping organizations stay ahead of adversaries and ensure the security and integrity of their systems and data.Monthly news - July 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - July 2026 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from June 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: Redefining identity security for the modern enterprise One policy engine to govern them all: Securing agentic AI with Microsoft Purview Building a modern detection pipeline with ContentOps Securing local AI agents with Microsoft Defender Microsoft Defender: Extending critical protection for emerging threats in Team Weekly Security News: We publish a short 1ish minute video every week with updates across our Microsoft Security stack. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you don't miss the next episode. Actionable threat insights (find all of them here) Securing AI agents: When AI tools move from reading to acting Chromium extension uses AI‑related branding to redirect browser search Photo ZIP campaign targeting hospitality industry delivers Node.js implant for persistent access Microsoft Defender Two Workbooks capabilities in the unified Microsoft Defender portal moved to GA: Advanced Hunting connector - build custom dashboards directly on top of Advanced Hunting (XDR) dat. Query XDR tables and visualize them in Workbooks for richer investigations and reports. Workspace filter / multi-workspace experience - scope and filter workbooks by workspace, with workspace selection integrated into the workbook itself rather than relying on the global selector. MTO Tenant Groups let MSSPs and large enterprises organize their multitenant view in Microsoft Defender by grouping tenants logically (e.g., by region, business unit, or customer cohort). Learn more here. Custom Detections support in Microsoft Sentinel Repositories. Custom Detections can now be managed as code in Microsoft Sentinel Repositories, the same way customers already manage analytic rules, playbooks, parsers and workbooks. Detection engineers connect a GitHub or Azure DevOps repo to their workspace; Custom Detections placed in the repo are reconciled on every commit. A standalone Bicep path via the Microsoft Security Bicep extension lets teams deploy from any CI/CD pipeline (ADO Pipelines, GitHub Actions, custom runners). (General Availability) The following advanced hunting schema tables are now generally available: The CloudAuditEvents table contains information about cloud audit events for various cloud platforms protected by the organization's Defender for Cloud. The CloudDnsEvents table contains information about DNS activity events from cloud infrastructure environments. The CloudProcessEvents table contains information about process events in multicloud hosted environments. (Public Preview) The AgentsInfo table in advanced hunting is now available in preview. The AIAgentsInfo table is transitioning to this new table, which provides a unified schema that supports agent inventory and governance for all agent types, including Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft 365 Copilot, third-party, and endpoint-discovered agents. Microsoft Agent 365 customers should use the AgentsInfo table today. The AIAgentsInfo table remains accessible until July 1, 2026. Update your queries to use AgentsInfo before this date. For more information, see Advanced hunting schema - Naming changes. For all other Sentinel News, have a look at the "What's new in Microsoft Sentinel blog post - June edition" Identity Security (Public Preview) The Identity Security dashboard now includes a new Human identities card that shows your human identities by source (Entra ID, SaaS, and on-premises), giving you a single view of where your human identities live. For more information, see Identity Security dashboard. (Public Preview) On the Coverage and maturity page, the Review and improve coverage side panel for SaaS Identities now includes an Observed column and a Show Only Observed Applications toggle. By default, the panel shows only SaaS applications detected in your environment. Turn off the toggle to see other supported SaaS applications you can onboard to expand your identity coverage. For more information, see Coverage and maturity. New alerts were added to the Defender for Identity security alerts related to Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory as well as other identity providers. For a full list of those new alerts, check out our documentation. Recent ShinyHunters attacks on Salesforce show how OAuth tokens and connected apps are being weaponized to bypass MFA at scale. The upgraded Salesforce connector for Defender for Cloud Apps helps detect these attacks faster, with richer connected-app context and investigation-ready signals. Customers already using the connector are advised to enable the additional events in the Salesforce console for tighter protection, and eligible customers not yet using it are advised to connect Salesforce. Learn more. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint / Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) Local AI agent discovery: as part of the Defender AI agents experience, Microsoft Defender now automatically discovers supported local AI agents running on onboarded Windows & macOS devices. Discovered agents appear as assets in the AI agent inventory, exposure map, and advanced hunting, giving security teams visibility into local AI agent usage across the organization. For more information, see Discover local AI agents. (Preview) Local AI agent runtime protection on Windows endpoints is now available in public preview. Microsoft Defender inspects the agent loop (user prompts, tool calls, and tool responses) and can block risky activity before it executes, helping stop prompt injection and unsafe agent actions at the device level. Blocked and audited events appear as alerts in Microsoft Defender to support incident correlation and investigation workflows. The new version of the Defender deployment tool for Windows streamlines onboarding and enhances security by: Bundling the onboarding package directly into the tool's executable. Generating a key during deployment package creation that is required for running the tool. Enabling users to configure an expiry date for the package to reduce the risk of unauthorized use. In addition: You have the option of downloading the package as either an .exe or a .zip file, whichever best suits your organization's needs. A new Deployment packages page in the Defender portal facilitates management of downloaded packages by providing centralized visibility into all the packages and their current status. Now generally available: Selective Response Actions enables organizations to tailor high-impact security operations on devices during onboarding. It provides precise control over how response actions are applied on Tier-0 systems and other high-value assets, helping maintain operational stability while delivering strong protection. The new exposure score model in Defender Vulnerability Management is now generally available. This model improves risk prioritization and recommendation impact accuracy by incorporating exploit prediction data (EPSS) and asset context factors such as internet-facing status and criticality. More details here. Microsoft Secure Score now includes the Reduce unnecessary inbound internet exposure on internet-facing devices recommendation, which helps identify devices that are accessible from the public internet and may represent unnecessary attack surface. This recommendation provides centralized visibility into internet-facing devices across the environment. Many predefined SaaS application classification rules were added to the critical assets list. Have a look at our documentation for the full list. These classifications require onboarding to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.Ignite 2025: What's new in Microsoft Defender?
This Ignite we are focused on giving security teams the edge they need to meet adversaries head on in the era of AI. The modern Security Operations Center (SOC) is undergoing a fundamental transformation, placing AI at the forefront of innovation - not just as an added feature, but as a driving force at every layer of the stack. While much attention is rightly focused on the development of security agents, we fundamentally believe that AI must also evolve the very foundation of our security solutions. This means building solutions that more effectively uncover novel threats, act dynamically to defend the organization during attacks, and reduce the workload for the security team. As organizations adopt AI at an unprecedented speed, we also want to make sure they can do so securely. To meet these security needs of the AI era, we are excited to announce a series of innovations that will help organizations shift to an autonomous defense and an agentic SOC. New agents to help scale and accelerate security operations Evolving Microsoft Defender’s autonomous defense capabilities for better protection Secure your low-code and pro-code AI agents with Microsoft Defender Today, we are taking the first step in shifting security operations from static controls to autonomous defense and from manual toil to agentic operations. But we have an ambitious vision to augment and evolve these AI capabilities and agents across the entire SOC lifecycle and are excited to share some of that vision, as shown in the below graphic, with you at Microsoft Ignite. The Agentic SOC: Scaling expertise and accelerating defense We are excited to introduce four new Security Copilot agents in Microsoft Defender that bring autonomous intelligence across different stages of the SOC lifecycle. These agents combine context, reasoning, and complex workflows to help defenders anticipate attacks sooner, detect smarter, and investigate faster than ever before. Security Alert Triage Agent: In March 2025, we introduced the Security Alert Triage Agent, built to autonomously handle user-submitted phishing reports at scale. The agent reviews and classifies incoming alerts, resolves false positives and escalates only the malicious cases that require human expertise. Early data shows that analysts working with the agent caught up to 6.5x more malicious emails compared to professional graders. Today, we’re excited to announce that the agent’s triage capabilities will soon extend beyond phishing to cover identity and cloud alerts. Secondly, we are also improving our phish admin reporting process with a new agentic email grading system. It replaces a manual review process with advanced large language models and agentic workflows to deliver rapid, transparent verdicts and clear explanations to customers for every reported email. Learn more about the agentic email grading system. Threat Hunting Agent – this agent reimagines the investigation process. Instead of requiring analysts to master complex query languages or sift through mountains of data, the Threat Hunting Agent enables natural language investigations with contextual insight. Analysts can vibe with the agent by asking questions in plain English, receive direct answers, and be guided through comprehensive hunting sessions. This levels up the current NL2KQL experience by enabling analysts to explore patterns, pivot intuitively and uncover hidden signals in real time for a fluid, context-aware experience. This not only accelerates investigations but makes advanced threat hunting accessible to every member of the SOC, regardless of experience level. Dynamic Threat Detection Agent – One of the hardest challenges in detection engineering is finding and fixing false negatives. The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent proactively hunts for false negatives and blind spots that traditional alerting might miss. When a critical incident happens, Copilot will kick off an automated hunt to uncover undetected threats—like unusual residual activity around a sensitive identity. This agent turns ‘probably fine’ into proven secure—hunting the quiet persistence that slips past alerts and closing the gap before it becomes tomorrow’s breach. Threat Intelligence (TI) Briefing Agent – Now native in the Defender portal. Generate tailored, AI‑authored threat briefings in minutes—synthesizing global intel with your environment’s context—without leaving the incident pane. Figure 1. The Threat Hunting Agent showing insights on an incident that contained a high risk binary To make the agents easily accessible and help security teams get started more quickly, we are excited to announce that Security Copilot will be available to all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Rollout starts today for existing Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue in the upcoming months for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Customers will receive 30-day advanced notification before activation. Learn more. Autonomous Defense at Platform Scale Threat actors are automating everything. Ransomware campaigns can encrypt an entire environment in under an hour. Adversaries evade detection and pivot across identities, endpoints, and cloud resources faster than human teams can triage alerts. Traditional SOC models—built on manual workflows and fragmented tools—simply can’t keep pace. Every second of delay gives attackers an advantage. Microsoft Defender now counters that speed by delivering autonomous defense at scale. Defender shifts security from reactive firefighting to proactive protection, embedding AI into the foundation of our protection solutions for instant detection, disruption, and containment—before threats escalate. In 2023, we introduced automatic attack disruption, which autonomously stops attacks in progress—like ransomware or business email compromise—with policy-bound actions that isolate endpoints, disable compromised accounts, and block malicious IPs at machine speed. Today, we’re taking the next step. New capabilities show how AI and agentic technology are transforming security to better protect customers: Unleash automatic attack disruption across your SIEM data: We are expanding the disruption capabilities of Microsoft Defender to some of the most critical data sources customer connect via Microsoft Sentinel including AWS, Proofpoint and Okta. This enables real-time detection and automatic containment of threats like phishing and identity compromise on top of your log data, fundamentally turning your SIEM into a threat protection solution. While these capabilities leverage the power of our platform, Defender is not a requirement for customers to realize this value in Microsoft Sentinel. Figure 2. Attack disruption initiated on an AWS attack Predictive shielding – This brand-new automatic attack disruption capability activates immediately after an attack is first contained. Our first of its kind capability combines graph insights, AI, and threat intelligence to predict potential attack paths for where the adversary might go next. It then applies just-in-time hardening techniques that proactively block the attacker from pivoting. Some of the hardening tactics that will automatically be applied by Microsoft Defender include disabling SafeBoot and enforcing Group Policy Objects, putting a hard stop to the attacker’s movements and ability to execute common techniques for compromise. Learn more about predictive shielding and other endpoint security news. Protect your low-code and pro-code AI agents Generative AI and agents are rapidly transforming how we work, but these powerful new tools also introduce new risks. And with the democratization of agent creation across pro-code, low-code, and no-code building platforms, building agents is now accessible to everyone, many without extensive developer or security knowledge. To help security teams better manage these risks we are excited to announce that we are extending the capabilities and experiences in Microsoft Defender to the protection of agents. From agent security posture management, to attack path analysis, and threat protection for Copilot Studio, Azure Foundry, and agents built and connected via the Microsoft Agent 365 SDK. Learn more about how Microsoft Defender can help protect your agents against threats like prompt injections and more. There is so much more innovation we are introducing in Microsoft Defender today, including expanded endpoint security coverage for legacy systems, improvements to how you can investigate identity-centric threats, and we are bringing cloud security posture management into the Defender portal. Check out the other Defender news blogs for more details. Join us in San Francisco, November 17–21, or online, November 18–20, for deep dives and practical labs to help you maximize your Microsoft Defender investments and to get more from the Microsoft capabilities you already use. Featured sessions: Microsoft Defender: Building the agentic SOC with guest Allie Mellen Blueprint for building the SOC of the future Empowering the SOC: Security Copilot and the rise of agentic defense Identity Under Siege: Modern ITDR from Microsoft AI vs AI: Protect email and collaboration tools with Microsoft Defender AI-powered defense for cloud workloads Endpoint security in the AI era: What's new in DefenderMonthly news - May 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - May 2026 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from April 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News here. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: The future of identity protection with Predictive Shielding Network-layer data protection with Microsoft Entra GSA and Purview DLP Data lake federation: hunt across external data without ingesting it Weekly Security News: We publish a short 1ish minute video every week with updates across our Microsoft Security stack. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you don't miss the next episode. Actionable threat insights CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vulnerability enables Linux root privilege escalation across cloud environments Email threat landscape: Q1 2026 trends and insights Cross‑tenant helpdesk impersonation to data exfiltration: A human-operated intrusion playbook Detection strategies across cloud and identities against infiltrating IT workers Dissecting Sapphire Sleet’s macOS intrusion from lure to compromise Microsoft Defender Blog post: Containing a domain compromise: How predictive shielding shut down lateral movement (Public Preview) You can now view the current status of automatic attack disruption and predictive shielding actions related to a specific incident. You view this data in the Activities tab of the incident page. Learn more We made several enhancements across the Advanced hunting experience, read this blog post for all the details. (Public Preview) The AIAgentsInfo table in advanced hunting now includes additional columns that provide deeper visibility into AI agents operating in your Microsoft 365 environment. These fields expand coverage beyond Copilot Studio to all agent types, including Microsoft Foundry, third-party marketplace, and custom line-of-business agents. (Generally Available) Built-in alert tuning rules are now generally available. Built-in alert tuning rules suppress alerts from common benign activity in Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Office 365 without affecting Automated Investigation and Response (AIR) investigations and email notifications. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR customers can now see Defender Experts as a distinct entry in the Microsoft Defender portal navigation menu. This feature adds to the existing home page status card as in-portal experiences that provide consistent and predictable access to the service. Learn more Blog post: Simplifying AWS defense with Microsoft Sentinel UEBA Call to action: update automation by July 1, 2026 - Account Name is now consistently the UPN prefix for analytics rule alerts! Microsoft Sentinel is updating how the account entity's Account Name value is populated for analytics rule alerts when the full UPN is mapped into Account Name. This change improves consistency for downstream automation rules and Logic Apps playbooks. For more information, including before and after examples, read the blog article Update: Changing the Account Name Entity Mapping in Microsoft Sentinel. For all other Sentinel News, have a look at the "What's new in Microsoft Sentinel blog post - April edition" Microsoft Defender for Endpoint / Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (Public Preview) You can now view the current status of automatic attack disruption and predictive shielding actions related to a specific incident. You view this data in the Activities tab of the incident page. Learn more Microsoft Secure Score now includes the Ensure devices are updated to Secure Boot 2023 certificates and boot manager, which helps identify devices that haven't yet transitioned to the new Secure Boot 2023 certificates required ahead of the June 2026 expiration. To learn more about the recommendation, see Assess Secure Boot status with Microsoft Defender (blog). Microsoft Defender for Identity (Public Preview) Custom account correlation rules. Custom account correlation rules let you link accounts that belong to the same identity, such as privileged accounts with unique naming conventions. You can correlate accounts that don't share strong identifiers such as account ID, SID, object ID, or UPN by defining rules based on UPN prefix, UPN suffix, domain UPN, or employee ID. For more information, see Create custom account correlation rules. (Generally Available) The Automatic Windows event-auditing configuration for sensors v3.x is now generally available. Automatic Windows event-auditing streamlines deployment by automatically applying the required auditing settings to new sensors and correcting misconfigurations on existing ones.Monthly news - January 2026
Microsoft Defender Monthly news - January 2026 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from December 2025. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look at their blog space. 🚀 New Virtual Ninja Show episode: Advancements in Attack Disruption Vulnerability Remediation Agent in Microsoft Intune Microsoft Defender (Public Preview) The following advanced hunting schema tables are now available for preview: The CampaignInfo table contains contains information about email campaigns identified by Microsoft Defender for Office 365 The FileMaliciousContentInfo table contains information about files that were processed by Microsoft Defender for Office 365 in SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams General Availability of the Security Alert Triage Agent (previously named Phishing Triage Agent): this agent autonomously analyzes user‑reported phishing emails to determine whether they’re true threats or false positives, dramatically reducing manual triage workload. It continuously learns from analyst feedback and provides clear, natural‑language explanations for every verdict, giving SOC teams both speed and transparency. We're excited to share it is now generally available and, very soon, will expand to also triage cloud and identity alerts! Learn more on our docs. Public Preview of Dynamic Threat Detection Agent: Announced at Ignite, this always‑on agent hunts for unseen threats by continuously correlating telemetry and creating new, context‑aware detections on the fly—closing gaps traditional rules can’t see. We're excited to share it is now in Public Preview! Learn more on our docs. Public Preview of Threat Hunting Agent: Announced at Ignite, this agent gives every analyst the power to investigate like an expert by turning natural‑language questions into guided, real‑time hunts that surface hidden patterns, reveal meaningful pivots, and eliminate the need to write complex queries. We're excited to share it is now in Public Preview! Learn more on our docs. General Availability of the Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent: this agent delivers daily, tailored intelligence briefings directly in Microsoft Defender—automatically synthesizing Microsoft’s global threat insights with your organization’s context to surface prioritized risks, clear recommendations, and relevant assets so teams can shift from reactive research to proactive defense in minutes. We're excited to share it is now generally available! Learn more on our docs. (General Availability) The hunting graph in advanced hunting is now generally available. It also now has two new predefined threat scenarios that you can use to render your hunts as interactive graphs. (General Availability) Advanced hunting now supports custom functions that use tabular parameters. With tabular parameters, you can pass entire tables as inputs. This approach lets you build more modular, reusable, and expressive logic across your hunting queries. Learn more Note: The Phishing Triage Agent has since been expanded and is now called the Security Alert Triage Agent. Learn more at aka.ms/SATA Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Public Preview) Triage collection: Use triage collection to prioritize incidents and hunt threats with the Sentinel Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Microsoft Defender for Identity New ADWS LDAP search activity is now available in the 'IdentityQueryEvents' table in Advanced Hunting. This can provides visibility into directory queries performed through ADWS, helping customers track these operations and create custom detection based on this data. (Public Preview) New properties for 'sensorCandidate' resource type in Graph-API. Learn more here. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Integration of Defender for Cloud Apps permissions with Microsoft Defender XDR Unified RBAC is now available worldwide. For more information, see Map Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps permissions to the Microsoft Defender XDR Unified RBAC permissions. To activate the Defender for Cloud Apps workload, see Activate Microsoft Defender XDR Unified RBAC. (Public Preview) The Defender for Cloud Apps app governance unused app insights feature helps administrators identify and manage unused Microsoft 365-connected OAuth apps, enforce policy-based governance, and use advanced hunting queries for better security. This feature is now available for most commercial cloud customers. For more information, see Secure apps with app hygiene features.
Microsoft Defender: New Advanced hunting enhancements
Co-author: Jeremy Tan As a security analyst who actively hunts for critical threats, one of the most frustrating things that can happen is hitting a limit mid-query or encounter an experience that doesn’t behave as expected. The resulting friction and time spent troubleshooting or navigating takes valuable focus away from the investigation itself. To address this, we’ve made several enhancements across the experience to ensure investigations can scale seamlessly so analysts can stay focused on finding and stopping threats without interruption. These updates are based on your feedback and our commitment to continually improve the experience for analysts and customers alike. Scaling Investigations with Expanded Limits We’ve made several enhancements across the experience to expand limits and better support large-scale investigations so analysts can query, explore, and act on more data with fewer constraints. Results limitation increase (Preview) We have heard your feedback on the need for larger data sets and are excited to announce that the results limitation in advanced hunting has been raised from 30,000 to 100,000 records. Now, queries returning up to 100,000 results will display all available data. If a query exceeds this threshold, results are truncated as before, but the increase allows for more comprehensive analysis and improved incident response. Records limitation picker (Preview) One common challenge in advanced hunting has been the risk of running queries that return overwhelming result sets, consuming excessive resources and potentially hitting system limits. The new records limitation picker addresses this by allowing you to explicitly set how many rows a query should return, directly from the editor toolbar. Choose from predefined limits: 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000, 30,000 and 100,000 rows. Select the maximum system limit (currently 100,000 records). Define a custom value as needed. The selected limit applies alongside any KQL-defined row limitations, with the lower value always taking precedence. Your choice persists across page refreshes, navigation, and browser restarts. By default, tenants start at the maximum row limit, but you can tailor your selection via page preferences. This enhancement greatly improves performance and prevents unexpected limitations, making hunting safer and more efficient. Partial results on size limit (GA) Previously, queries that exceeded the 64 mb results size limit would fail outright, forcing analysts to modify their queries and rerun them. With the latest update, partial results are now provided when the size limit is reached: Queries return the maximum records that fit within the 64 MB cap. A clear message bar indicates when results are partial due to size constraints. This allows you to act on available data immediately, without repeating query adjustments. This improvement speeds up investigations and provides valuable data even in scenarios where limits are reached. Enhanced UI for Faster, More Intuitive Investigations We’ve made significant enhancements to the user experience delivering a more streamlined interface that helps analysts move through incidents with greater clarity, act with confidence, and spend less time searching and more time responding. Hear from one of our customers: “The recent updates to the Defender Advanced Hunting experience have gone a long way toward decluttering the interface and lowering the barrier for analysts and engineers who were previously more comfortable working exclusively in Microsoft Sentinel in the Azure portal. By simplifying navigation, reducing unnecessary visual noise, and adding pinnable tabs, the XDR portal now feels more familiar. This usability improvement has helped shift long-standing Sentinel users toward the XDR experience without forcing a change in how teams think about their data or workflows.” -Matt McCullogh, Senior SIEM Engineer, Best Buy Query details side pane: enhanced visibility and troubleshooting (GA) Understanding query execution and troubleshooting errors has often required tedious trial and error. The new query execution details side pane surfaces rich, actionable metadata for every query—successful or failed. With this feature, you can: View execution time breakdowns, data sources, scopes, and resource utilization. Examine response characteristics and detailed error information. Navigate tabs such as overview, raw statistics, and errors for comprehensive diagnostics. Access the side pane easily after running a query, or even from error messages in failure scenarios. This transparency makes it far easier to investigate issues and optimize your hunting experience. Improved error-handling for Advanced hunting queries (GA) Advanced hunting now provides improved output messages, including clearer error messages that explain query failures and actionable suggestions for common issues. This update simplifies troubleshooting and helps reduce downtime with complex queries. Simpler Navigation, More Powerful Hunting Alongside these updates, the Advanced hunting UI has received several enhancements focused on usability and streamlined workflows. Users can now easily filter results with a single click, making data exploration more efficient and responsive and enhanced configuration of the schema tree now allows for collapsing or expanding all nodes with ease. Additionally, the page layout has been thoughtfully restructured, organizing components in a more intuitive manner for a modern, cohesive experience that makes advanced hunting both powerful and easy to use. Rename tabs (GA) Another notable usability enhancement is the ability for users to rename their working tabs within advanced hunting. This feature enables users to organize their work sessions more efficiently, allowing for clear identification of ongoing investigations and queries without requiring them to save their work as long-term functions or queries. By simply renaming tabs, users can quickly switch between tasks and keep their workspace well-structured, further improving workflow and productivity. Saving KQL functions to log analytics workspace (GA) In addition to the above enhancements, we are delighted to introduce the ability to save KQL functions directly from the advanced hunting page into your log analytics workspace. To utilize this feature: Pick a folder under shared functions → Sentinel workspace functions. Functions saved in this folder are available for use in workbooks, analytics rules, and for execution in advanced hunting. Note: functions saved here are not available in custom detection rules. This new capability empowers you to build reusable logic and streamline your security workflows across Microsoft Sentinel and advanced hunting. Conclusion These enhancements represent our continued commitment to supporting your security investigations with robust, flexible, and efficient tools. We look forward to your feedback and to bringing even more improvements in the future. Learn more about the new advanced hunting enhancements in our documentation.Security Copilot for SOC: bringing agentic AI to every defender
Cybersecurity has entered an era of relentless complexity. As threat actors increasingly leverage artificial intelligence to automate attacks, evade detection, and scale their tactics, defenders are challenged to keep up. In this new era, security operations centers (SOCs) must transform to not just react, but to anticipate, disrupt, and outpace the next wave of cyberthreats. Microsoft’s goal is to empower every organization to meet this challenge head-on by transforming how security operates. We believe the future of the SOC is more than just agentic: it’s predictive and proactive. This means moving beyond fragmented tools and manual processes, and instead embracing a unified, intelligent approach where AI-driven skills and agents work in concert with human expertise. To bring this vision to life, it’s essential to look at the SOC through the lens of its lifecycle—a dynamic continuum that spans from anticipation and prevention through to recovery and optimization—and to recognize the unique challenges and opportunities within each stage. With Security Copilot’s GenAI and agentic capabilities woven across this lifecycle, Microsoft is delivering an integrated defense platform that enables defenders to move faster, act smarter, and stay ahead of adversaries. Introducing agentic innovation across the SOC lifecycle At Ignite, our agentic innovations are concentrated in three of the five SOC lifecycle pillars, and each one represents a leap forward in how analysts anticipate, detect, triage and investigate threats. Predict and prevent Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent: Introduced in March, this agent has already helped security teams move from reactive to anticipatory defense. At Ignite, we’re announcing that the Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent is now fully embedded in the Microsoft Defender portal, delivering daily, tailored briefings that synthesize Microsoft’s unparalleled global intelligence with organization-specific context in just minutes. Teams no longer need to spend hours gathering TI from disparate sources—the agent automates this process, offering the most current and relevant insights. Analysts can reference the summary to prioritize action, using the agent’s risk assessments, clear recommendations, and links to vulnerable assets to proactively address exposures. Detect and disrupt Dynamic Threat Detection Agent: Detections have long been bottlenecked by the limitations of traditional alerting systems, which rely on predefined logic that can’t scale fast enough to match the speed and variability of modern attacks— resulting in blind spots and missed threats. The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent addresses this challenge head-on. Instead of depending on static rules or isolated input, it continuously analyzes incidents and telemetry, searching for gaps in coverage and correlating signals across the entire security stack. For example, this is how it surfaced a recent AWS attack: a threat actor used an EntraID account to federate into an AWS admin account to exfiltrate sensitive data. The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent generated an alert before the intruder even authenticated into the single sign-on flow, driven by a correlated signal from Sentinel. That alert didn’t exist beforehand; the agent created it on the fly to stop the attack. The result is an adaptive system that extends Microsoft’s industry-leading, research-based detections with context-aware alerts tailored to each organization, closing gaps and revealing threats that legacy systems miss. Triage and investigate Security Alert Triage Agent (previously named Phishing Triage Agent): In March 2025, we introduced the Security Alert Triage Agent, built to autonomously handle user-submitted phishing reports at scale. The agent classifies incoming alerts and resolves false positives, escalating only the malicious cases that require human expertise. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re announcing its general availability, backed by strong early results: the agent identifies 6.5 times more malicious alerts, improves verdict accuracy by 77%, and frees analysts to spend 53% more time investigating real threats. St. Luke’s even said it’s saving their team nearly 200 hours each month. Coming soon, we’ll be extending these autonomous triage capabilities beyond phishing to identity and cloud alerts, bringing the same precision and scale to more SOC workflows. Note: The Phishing Triage Agent has since been expanded and is now called the Security Alert Triage Agent. Learn more at aka.ms/SATA Threat Hunting Agent: this agent reimagines the investigation process. Instead of requiring analysts to master complex query languages or sift through mountains of data, Threat Hunting Agent enables natural language investigations with contextual insight. Analysts can vibe with the agent by asking questions in plain English, receive direct answers, and be guided through comprehensive hunting sessions. It levels up the existing Security Copilot NL2KQL capability by enabling teams to explore patterns, pivot intuitively and uncover hidden signals in real time for a fluid, context-aware experience. This not only accelerates investigations but makes advanced threat hunting accessible to every member of the SOC, regardless of experience level. Agents built into your workflows To make the agents easily accessible and help security teams get started more quickly, we are excited to announce that Security Copilot will be available to all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Rollout starts today for existing Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue in the upcoming months for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Customers will receive 30-day advanced notice before activation. Learn more: https://aka.ms/SCP-Ignite25 Discover more: the Security Store The Security Store, now generally available, is the central hub for discovering, deploying, and managing first-party and third-party security agents. Today, it provides instant access to 20+ agents deployable directly in the Microsoft Defender portal, all within a broader ecosystem of 100+ trusted security solutions. Whether you're investigating incidents, hunting threats, or automating response, the Security Store extends Defender with vetted, scenario-aligned tools that can be set up in minutes. Learn more in this blog. Introducing new GenAI embedded capabilities Security Copilot isn’t just growing through agents—it’s also gaining new embedded capabilities: GenAI skills that help SOC teams work faster, operate at greater scale, and get upleveled directly inside Microsoft Defender. Today, we’re excited to introduce new innovations: Analyst Notes represent a meaningful shift in how investigation work is captured and shared. For organizations that choose to opt into this capability, Copilot automatically reconstructs an analyst’s investigation session—from the moment they open an incident to the moment they close it—and turns that activity into clear, structured notes. The system can even track multiple sessions in parallel and attribute actions to the right incident, and analysts can fully review and edit the generated notes before saving them. This not only saves teams valuable time and effort, it preserves the actual investigation path with far greater accuracy and consistency than manual documentation ever could. The result is a living, cumulative record of how the SOC investigates threats: easier handoffs, stronger auditability, faster onboarding, and a deeper shared understanding of how incidents unfold across multiple SecOps members and phases. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for guided response allows organizations to upload their own internal procedures so Security Copilot can align its recommendations with established guidebooks and compliance requirements. Guided response is one of the ways Copilot helps analysts navigate an incident: it offers one-click actions across triage, containment, investigation and remediation that teams can take immediately. With SOPs uploaded, these recommendations draw directly from organizational workflows and policy standards, ensuring they are contextually relevant and trusted. For defenders, this translates into greater confidence and faster, more consistent decision-making. We’re also eager to share that we’re introducing auto-generated content configuration for Security Copilot’s incident summaries. This new feature allows security admins to decide how and when summaries are produced, choosing between always auto-generating, manual trigger only, or auto-generating based on incident severity. The configuration is managed directly in the Microsoft Defender portal, giving organizations flexibility to fine-tune Copilot’s outputs to their operational needs. Join us at Ignite We invite you to learn more and see these innovations in action at Microsoft Ignite. Don’t miss our featured sessions: Microsoft Defender: Building the agentic SOC with guest Allie Mellen on Wednesday, November 19 th with Allie Mellen, Corina Feuerstein, and Rob Lefferts. Learn more. Empowering the SOC: Security Copilot and the rise of Agentic Defense on Friday, November 21 st with Corina Feuerstein and Cristina da Gama. Learn more. Join us to discover how Microsoft is shaping the future of cybersecurity—making intelligent, agentic defense accessible to every organization.What’s new in Microsoft Defender XDR at Secure 2025
Protecting your organization against cybersecurity threats is more challenging than ever before. As part of our 2025 Microsoft Secure cybersecurity conference announcements, we’re sharing new product features that spotlight our AI-first, end-to-end security innovations designed to help - including autonomous AI agents in the Security Operations Center (SOC), as well as automatic detection and response capabilities. We also share information on how you can expand your protection by bringing data security and collaboration tools closer to the SOC. Read on to learn more about how these capabilities can help your organization stay ahead of today’s advanced threat actors. Expanding AI-Driven Capabilities for Smarter SOC Operations Introducing Microsoft Security Copilot’s Security Alert Triage Agent (previously named Phishing Triage Agent) Today, we are excited to introduce Security Copilot agents, a major step in bringing AI-driven automation to Microsoft Security solutions. As part of this, we’re unveiling our newest innovation in Microsoft Defender: the Security Alert Triage Agent. Acting as a force multiplier for SOC analysts, it streamlines the triage of user-submitted phishing incidents by autonomously identifying and resolving false positives, typically cleaning out over 95% of submissions. This allows teams to focus on the remaining incidents – those that pose the most critical threats. Phishing submissions are among the highest-volume alerts that security teams handle daily, and our data shows that at least 9 in 10 reported emails turn out to be harmless bulk mail or spam. As a result, security teams must sift through hundreds of these incidents weekly, often spending up to 30 minutes per case determining whether it represents a real threat. This manual triage effort not only adds operational strain but also delays the response to actual phishing attacks, potentially impacting protection levels. The Security Alert Triage Agent transforms this process by leveraging advanced LLM-driven analysis to conduct sophisticated assessments –such as examining the semantic content of emails– to autonomously determine whether an incident is a genuine phishing attempt or a false alarm. By intelligently cutting through the noise, the agent alleviates the burden on SOC teams, allowing them to focus on high-priority threats. Figure 1. A phishing incident triaged by the Security Copilot Security Alert Triage Agent To help analysts gain trust in its decision-making, the agent provides natural language explanations for its classifications, along with a visual representation of its reasoning process. This transparency enables security teams to understand why an incident was classified in a certain way, making it easier to validate verdicts. Analysts can also provide feedback in plain language, allowing the agent to learn from these interactions, refine its accuracy, and adapt to the organization’s unique threat landscape. Over time, this continuous feedback loop fine-tunes the agent’s behavior, aligning it more closely with organizational nuances and reducing the need for manual verification. The Security Copilot Security Alert Triage Agent is designed to transform SOC operations with autonomous, AI-driven capabilities. As phishing threats grow increasingly sophisticated and SOC analysts face mounting demands, this agent alleviates the burden of repetitive tasks, allowing teams to shift their focus to proactive security measures that strengthen the organization’s overall defense. Note: The Phishing Triage Agent has since been expanded and is now called the Security Alert Triage Agent. Learn more at aka.ms/SATA Security Copilot Enriched Incident Summaries and Suggested Prompts Security Copilot Incident Summaries in Microsoft Defender now feature key enrichments, including related threat intelligence and asset risk –enhancements driven by customer feedback. Additionally, we are introducing suggested prompts following incident summaries, giving analysts quick access to common follow-up questions for deeper context on devices, users, threat intelligence, and more. This marks a step towards a more interactive experience, moving beyond predefined inputs to a more dynamic, conversational workflow. Read more about Microsoft Security Copilot agent announcements here. New protection across Microsoft Defender XDR workloads To strengthen core protection across Microsoft Defender XDR workloads, we're introducing new capabilities while building upon existing integrations for enhanced protection. This ensures a more comprehensive and seamless defense against evolving threats. Introducing collaboration security for Microsoft Teams Email remains a prevalent entry point for attackers. But the fast adoption of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams has opened new attack surfaces for cybercriminals. Our advancements within Defender for Office 365 allow organizations to continue to protect users in Microsoft Teams against phishing and other emerging cyberthreats with inline protection against malicious URLs, safe attachments, brand impersonation protection, and more. And to ensure seamless investigation and response at the incident level, everything is centralized across our SOC workflows in the unified security operations platform. Read the announcement here. Introducing Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations for the SOC Understanding the extent of the data that has been impacted to better prioritize incidents has been a challenge for security teams. As data remains the main target for attackers it’s critical to dismantle silos between security and data security teams to enhance response times. At Microsoft, we’ve made significant investments in bringing SOC and data security teams closer together by integrating Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Purview. We are continuing to build upon the rich set of capabilities and today, we are excited to announce that Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations (DSI) can be initiated from the incident graph in Defender XDR. Ensuring robust data security within the SOC has always been important, as it helps protect sensitive information from breaches and unauthorized access. Data Security Investigations significantly accelerates the process of analyzing incident related data such as emails, files, and messages. With AI-powered deep content analysis, DSI reveals the key security and sensitive data risks. This integration allows analysts to further analyze the data involved in the incident, learn which data is at risk of compromise, and take action to respond and mitigate the incident faster, to keep the organization’s data protected. Read the announcement here. Figure 2. An incident that shows the ability to launch a data security investigation. OAuth app insights are now available in Exposure Management In recent years, we’ve witnessed a substantial surge in attackers exploiting OAuth applications to gain access to critical data in business applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. To address this threat, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is now integrating OAuth apps and their connections into Microsoft Security Exposure Management, enhancing both attack path and attack surface map experiences. Additionally, we are introducing a unified application inventory to consolidate all app interactions into a single location. This will address the following use cases: Visualize and remediate attack paths that attackers could potentially exploit using high-privilege OAuth apps to access M365 SaaS applications or sensitive Azure resources. Investigate OAuth applications and their connections to the broader ecosystem in Attack Surface Map and Advanced Hunting. Explore OAuth application characteristics and actionable insights to reduce risk from our new unified application inventory. Figure 3. An attack path infused with OAuth app insights Read the latest announcement here AI & TI are critical for effective detection & response To effectively combat emerging threats, AI has become critical in enabling faster detection and response. By combining this with the latest threat analytics, security teams can quickly pinpoint emerging risks and respond in real-time, providing organizations with proactive protection against sophisticated attacks. Disrupt more attacks with automatic attack disruption In this era of multi-stage, multi-domain attacks, the SOC need solutions that enable both speed and scale when responding to threats. That’s where automatic attack disruption comes in—a self-defense capability that dynamically pivots to anticipate and block an attacker’s next move using multi-domain signals, the latest TI, and AI models. We’ve made significant advancements in attack disruption, such as threat intelligence-based disruption announced at Ignite, expansion to OAuth apps, and more. Today, we are thrilled to share our next innovation in attack disruption—the ability to disrupt more attacks through a self-learning architecture that enables much earlier and much broader disruption. At its core, this technology monitors a vast array of signals, ranging from raw telemetry data to alerts and incidents across Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. This extensive range of data sources provides an unparalleled view of your security environment, helping to ensure potential threats do not go unnoticed. What sets this innovation apart is its ability learn from historical events and previously seen attack types to identify and disrupt new attacks. By recognizing similar patterns across data and stitching them together into a contextual sequence, it processes information through machine learning models and enables disruption to stop the attack much earlier in the attack sequence, stopping significantly more attacks in volume and variety. Comprehensive Threat Analytics are now available across all Threat Intelligence reports Organizations can now leverage the full suite of Threat Analytics features (related incidents, impacted assets, endpoints exposure, recommended actions) on all Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports. Previously only available for a limited set of threats, these features are now available for all threats Microsoft has published in Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (MDTI), offering comprehensive insights and actionable intelligence to help you ensure your security measures are robust and responsive. Some of these key features include: IOCs with historical hunting: Access IOCs after expiration to investigate past threats and aid in remediation and proactive hunting. MITRE TTPs: Build detections based on threat techniques, going beyond IOCs to block and alert on specific tactics. Targeted Industries: Filter threats by industry, aligning security efforts with sector-specific challenges. We’re proud of our new AI-first innovations that strengthen security protections for our customers and help us further our pledge to customers and our community to prioritize cyber safety above all else. Learn more about the innovations designed to help your organization protect data, defend against cyber threats, and stay compliant. Join Microsoft leaders online at Microsoft Secure on April 9. We hope you’ll also join us in San Francisco from April 27th-May 1 st 2025 at the RSA Conference 2025 to learn more. At the conference, we’ll share live, hands-on demos and theatre sessions all week at the Microsoft booth at Moscone Center. Secure your spot today.
