Manage Alerts and Incidents (part 1 of 3)

 

To read part 2 please click here

To read part 3 please click here

Security Operations in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Defender for Endpoint detection and response capabilities offers advanced attack detection that are near real-time and actionable and whenever a threat is detected, alerts are created in the system for an analyst to investigate. Alerts with the same attack techniques or attributed to the same attacker are aggregated into an entity called an incident, which makes it easy for the analysts to investigate and respond to the threats collectively.

Inspired by the "assumed breach mindset", Defender for Endpoint continuously collects behavioral cyber telemetry which includes process information, network activities, deep optics into the kernel and memory manager, user sign in activities, registry and file system changes, and the others. The analyst can then pivot in various views and approach the investigation through multiple vectors. 

The response capabilities gives you the power to promptly remediate threats by acting on the affected entities.

Security operations Dashboard

It provides a higher-level overview of where detection were seen and highlights where response actions are needed and the dashboard displays a snapshot of:

• Active alerts
• Devices at risk
• Sensor health
• Service health
• Daily devices reporting
• Active automated investigations
• Automated investigations statistics
• Users at risk
• Suspicious activities  

Manage and Investigate Incidents

You can update incident management information, view all related information, or jump to the investigation pages for the associated data.

Incident management information

You can assign incidents to yourself, change the status and classification, rename, or comment on them to keep track of their progress and for the additional visibility at a glance, incident names are automatically generated based on alerts attributes such as the number of endpoints affected users affected, detection sources or categories which allows you to quickly understand the scope of the incident.

Assign incident

If an incident has not been assigned yet, you can select Assign to me to assign the incident to yourself. Doing so assumes ownership of not just the incident, but also all of the alerts associated to it.

Set status and classification

Incident status

You can categorize incidents as Active or Resolved by changing their status as your investigation progresses which helps you organize and manage how your team can respond to the incidents. For example, your security operations analyst can review the urgent Active incidents for the day, and decide to assign them to herself for investigation. Alternatively, your security operations analyst might set the incident as Resolved as the incident has been remediated.

Classification

You can choose not to set a classification, or decide to specify whether an incident is true or false. Doing so helps the team see patterns and learn from them.

You can also easily add comments and view historical events about an incident to see the previous changes made to it and whenever a change or comment is made to an alert, it is recorded in the comments and history section while added comments instantly appear on the pane.

Incident investigation

To analyze incident details, the investigation page includes the following tabs: 

• Alerts- You can investigate the alerts and see how they were linked together in an incident. Alerts are grouped into the incidents based on the following reasons:

1. Automated investigation- it triggers the linked alert while investigating the original alert
2. File characteristics- the files associated with the alert will have the similar characteristics 
3. Manual association- A user manually links the alerts 
4. Proximate time- the alerts were triggered on the same device within a certain time-frame
5. Same file- the files associated with the alert are exactly the same 
6. Same URL- the URL that triggered the alert is exactly the same

• Device- You can also investigate the devices that are the part of, or related to, a given incident.

• Investigations- Select the investigations to see all the automatic investigations launched by the system in response to the incident alerts. 

• Evidence- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint automatically investigate all the incidents' supported events and suspicious entities in the alerts, providing you with the auto-response and information about the important files, processes, services, and more while each of the analyzed entities will be marked as infected, remediated, or suspicious.

• Incident graph- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint aggregates the threat information into an incident so that you can easily see the patterns and correlations coming in from various data points. You can view such a correlation through the incident graph which tells the story of the cybersecurity attack. You can select the circles on the incident graph to view the details of the malicious files, associated file detections, how many instances have there been worldwide, whether its been observed in your organization, if so, how many instances.    

   

To read part 2 please click here

To read part 3 please click here