Mitigate Threats Using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

 

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint explained

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is known as a platform designed to help enterprise networks prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats on their endpoints and the following capabilities are enabled with the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint:

• Threat and vulnerability management provides real-time visibility and helps identify ways to improve your security posture.
• Attack surface reduction eliminates the risky or unnecessary surface areas and restricts any dangerous code from running.
• Advanced protection uses machine learning and deep analysis to protect against file-based malware.
• Endpoint detection and response monitors behaviors as well as attacker techniques to detect and respond to advanced attacks. 
• Leverage artificial intelligence to automatically investigate alerts and remediate complex threats in minutes.
• Microsoft threat experts bring deep knowledge and proactive threat hunting to your security operations center.    

Threat and vulnerability management

Threat and vulnerability management is built-in, real-time, cloud-powered, fully integrated with the Microsoft endpoint security stack, the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, and the application analytics knowledge base and it can easily create a security task or a ticket to the integration with the Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

It provides the following solutions to the gaps across the security operations, security administration, and IT administration:

• Real-time Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) insights correlated with the endpoint vulnerabilities.
• Linked machine vulnerability and security configuration assessment data in the context of the exposure discovery. 
• Built-in remediation processes through Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager.   

Attack surface reduction

The attack surface reduction set of capabilities provides the first line of defense in the stack by ensuring configuration settings are properly set and exploit mitigation techniques are applied. 

• Hardware-based isolation protects and maintains the integrity of the system as it starts and while it's running, it validates system integrity through as well as remote attestation. Container isolation for the Microsoft Edge helps protect the host operating system from malicious websites.

• Application control moves away from the traditional application trust model where all applications are assumed trustworthy by default to one where applications must earn trust in order to run.

• Exploit protection applies mitigation techniques to the apps your organization uses, both individually, and organization-wide. 

• Network protection extends the malware and social engineering protection offered by the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen in Microsoft Edge to cover the network traffic and connectivity on your organization's devices.

• Controlled folder access helps protect the files in the key system folders from changes made by the malicious and suspicious apps, including file-encrypting ransomware malware.

• Attack surface reduction reduces the attack surface of your applications with the intelligent rules that stop the vectors used by Office-, script-, and mail-based malware.

• Network firewall uses host-based, two-way network traffic filtering that blocks unauthorized network traffic flowing into or out of the network device.         

Next generation protection

Microsoft Defender Antivirus is a built-in antimalware solution that provides next generation protection for desktops, portable computers, and servers. Microsoft Defender Antivirus includes:

• Cloud-delivered protection for near-instant detection and blocking of new emerging threats. Along with the machine learning and the Intelligent Security Graph, cloud-delivered protection is a part of the next-gen technologies that powers the Microsoft Defender Antivirus. 

• Always-on scanning, using advanced file as well as process behavior monitoring and the other heuristics (also known as "real-time protection).

• Dedicated protection updates based on machine-learning, human and automated big-data analysis, and in-depth threat resistance research.   

Endpoint detection and response

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detection and response capabilities offers an advanced attacks detection that are near real-time as well as actionable and whenever a threat is detected, alerts are created in the system for an analyst to investigate. Aggregating alerts in this manner makes it easy for the analysts to collectively investigate and respond to threats. 

Inspired by the "assume breach" mindset, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint continuously collects behavioral cyber telemetry which includes process information, network activities, deep optics into the kernel, and memory manager, user login activities, registry and file system changes, and others. The information is stored for six months, enabling an analyst to travel back in time to the start of an attack. It provides a high-level overview of where detections were seen and the highlights where response actions are needed.

Automated investigation and remediation

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers a wide breadth of visibility on multiple machines. The volume of the alerts generated can be challenging for a typical security operations team to individually address. So. to address this challenge, it uses automated investigation and remediation capabilities to significantly reduce the volume of the alerts that must be investigated individually.

This feature uses automated various inspection algorithms, and processes used by the analysts to examine alerts as well as take immediate remediation action to resolve breaches which significantly reduces alert volume, allowing security operations experts to focus on more sophisticated threats and the other high value initiatives.