Manage Alerts & Incidents (part 3 of 3)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 


To read part 1 please click here
To read part 2 please click here


Perform Advanced Hunting

Advanced Hunting is a query-based threat-hunting tool that lets you explore up to 30 days of raw data while allowing you to proactively inspecting the events in your network to locate threat indicators as well as entities which enables unconstrained hunting for both the known and potential threats.

Data freshness and update frequency

Advanced hunting data can be categorized into two different types, each consolidated differently:

  • Event or activity data- it populates tables about alerts, security events, system events, and routine assessments. Advanced hunting receives this data almost immediately after the sensors that collects them successfully transfer them to the Defender for Endpoint.

  • Entity data- it populates tables with consolidated information about the users and the devices and to provide fresh data, tables are updated with any new information in every 15 minutes, adding rows that might not be fully populated. Every 24 hours, the data is consolidated ti insert a record that contains the latest, most comprehensive data set about each entity.    

Custom Detection

The custom detection helps you to proactively monitor for and respond to various events as well as system states, including suspected breach activity and misconfigured devices while working with the advanced hunting, which provides a powerful, flexible query language that covers a broad set of event and system information from your network. You can also set them to run at regular intervals, generate alerts, and take response actions whenever there are matches.

Custom detection provides:

  • Alerts for rule-based detection built from advanced hunting queries
  • Automatic response actions that apply to the files and devices

Consult Microsoft Threat Expert

Microsoft Threat Expert is a managed threat hunting service that provides Security Operations Center (SOCs) with expert level monitoring and analysis to ensure critical threats in their unique environments are not missed.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint need to apply for the Microsoft Threat Experts managed threat hunting service to get proactive Targeted Attack Notifications and to collaborate with the experts on demand. Experts on demand are an add-on service and Targeted Attack Notifications are always included after you have been accepted into Microsoft Threat Expert managed threat hunting service.

Targeted Attack Notification

Microsoft threat experts offers a proactive hunting for the most important threats to your network, including human adversary intrusion, hands-on-keyboard attacks, or advanced attacks like cyberespionage. The managed hunting service includes:

  • Threat monitoring and analysis, reducing dwell time and risk to the business.
  • Hunter-trained artificial intelligence to discover as well as prioritize both the known and unknown attacks.
  • Identifying the most important risks, helping SOCs to maximize the time and energy. 
  • Scope of compromise and as context as can be quickly delivered to enable fast SOC response.

Collaborate with experts, on demand

Experts provides the insights needed to better understand the complex threats affecting your organization, from alert inquiries, potentially compromised devices, root cause of a suspicious network connection, to more threat intelligence regarding ongoing advanced persistent threat campaigns. With this capability, you can:

  • Get more clarification on the alerts including the root cause or scope of the incident.
  • Gain clarity into the suspicious device behavior and next steps if faced with an advanced attacker.
  • Determine risk and protection regarding threat actors, campaigns, or emerging attacker techniques.
  • Seamlessly transition to Microsoft Incident Response (IR) or the other third-party Incident Response services when necessary.   

The option to consult with a threat expert is available with several places in the portal so that you can engage with the experts in the context of your investigation:

  • Help and support menu
  • Device page actions menu
  • Alerts page actions menu
  • File page actions menu 


To read part 1 please click here
To read part 2 please click here









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