Use Watchlists in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



Plan for Azure Sentinel Watchlists

Azure Sentinel watchlists are famous for collecting data from external data sources to promote the correlation with the events in your Azure Sentinel environment. Common scenarios for using watchlists includes:
  • Investigating threats and responding to incidents quickly with the rapid import of IP addresses, file hashes, and other data from CSV files. Once imported, you can use watchlist name- value pairs for joins and filters in alert rules, threat hunting, workbooks, notebooks, and general queries.

  • Importing business data as a watchlist. For example, import user lists with privileged system access, or terminated employees, and then use the watchlist to create allow as well as deny lists used to detect or prevent those users from logging in to the network.

  • Reducing alert fatigue. Create allow lists to suppress alerts from a group of users, such as users from authorized IP addresses that perform tasks that would normally trigger the alert, and prevent benign events from becoming alerts. 

  • Enriching event data. You can use watchlists to enrich your event data with name-value combinations derived from external sources. 

Creation and deletion of the  Watchlists can be done easily, but you can't update it. If you are working with more dynamic lists, you can use the KQL external data operators to create temporary virtual tables. 

Utilize Threat Intelligence in Azure Sentinel

Define threat intelligence

The information describing known existing or potential threats to systems and users are called as Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). Organizations always use CTI to provide essential context to unusual activity so that security personnel can quickly take action to protect their people and assets. Azure Sentinel allows you to use threat indicators to help in detecting malicious activities observed in your environment as well as offer context to security investigators to help inform response decisions. Threat Intelligence (TI) can be integrated into Azure Sentinel through the following activities:
  • Use data connectors to various TI platforms to import threat intelligence into Azure Sentinel.
  • View and manage the imported threat intelligence in Logs and the new Threat Intelligence area of Azure Sentinel. 
  • Use the built-in Analytics rule templates to generate security alerts and incidents using your imported threat intelligence.
  • Visualize critical information about your threat intelligence in Azure Sentinel with the Threat Intelligence workbook.
  • Perform threat hunting with your imported threat intelligence.   

Threat indicators are the data that can associate observations such as URLs, file hashes, or IP addresses with known threat activity such as phishing, botnets, or malware. As this form of threat intelligence can be applied to security products as well as automation on a large scale to protect and detect potential threats to an organization, it is often referred to as a tactical threat intelligence.





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