Azure AD Identity Protection (part 3 of 3)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 




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





Plan Your Investigation

Azure Identity Protection dashboard provides access to the following:
  1. Reports like Users flagged for risk, Risk events, and Vulnerabilities.
  2. Settings like the configuration of your Security Policies, Notifications, and Multi-factor Authentication registration.

It is the starting point to review the activities, logs, and other relevant information regarding a risk event which helps you to determine if remediation or mitigation steps are necessary and understand how the identity was compromised and used. 

Mitigation Sign-in Risk Events

Mitigation is termed as an action to restrict the ability of an attacker to exploit a compromised identity or device without restoring the identity or device to a safe state. If you want to mitigate the risky sign-ins automatically, then, you have to configure sign-in risk security policies that will allow to block risky sign ins or perform multi-factor authentication. All these actions will help you to prevent an attacker from exploiting a stolen identity to cause damage, providing some time to secure the identity.

Mitigation Best Practices

The following practices are recommended to follow while setting a policy:

  1. Exclude users who do not/cannot have multi-factor authentication.
  2. Exclude users in locales where enabling the policy is not practical like locales with no access to a helpdesk.
  3. Exclude users who are likely to generate a lot of false-positives like developers and security analysts.
  4. Use a High threshold during initial policy roll out, or if you must minimize challenges seen by end-users.
  5. Use a Low threshold if your organization requires greater security which introduces additional user sign-in challenges but increased security.   

However, it is recommended for the most organizations to configure rule for a Medium threshold to strike balance between usability and security. 

The sign-in risk policy is:

  1. Applied to all browser traffic and sign-ins using modern authentication. 
  2. Not applied to applications using older security protocols by disabling the WS-Trust endpoint at the federated IDP, like ADFS.  

User Risk

The user risk level is calculated using the following inputs:
  1. Active risk events impacting the user.
  2. Risk level of these events.
  3. Whether any remediation actions have been taken. 

The user risk levels can be used to create conditional access policies that can block risky users from signing in or force them to securely change their password. 

Closing Risk Events Manually

You can change the status of a risk event with the help of the following actions:

  • Resolve- Resolved events will set the risk event's status to Closed and the risk event will no longer contribute to user risk. If you believe the risk event should be considered closed, mark the event as Resolved.

  • Mark as false-positive- If you investigate and find that a risk event is mistakenly flagged as a risk, you can mark it as False-positive which will help the machine learning algorithms to improve the classification of similar events in the future. After that the status of false-positive will change to Closed and they will no longer contribute to user risk.

  • Ignore-  If you want a risk event to be removed from the active list without applying any remediation action, then, you can just mark it as Ignore and the event will be Closed i.e. the event will not contribute to any user risk. This option can only be used under unusual circumstances. 

  • Reactivate- The manually closed risk events can be reactivated by simply setting the event status back to Active. These events will contribute to the user risk level calculation, however, the risk events closed through remediation cannot be reactivated. 

Azure Identity Protection Notifications

Two types of automated notification emails are sent to help you manage user risk and risk events:
  1. Users at risk detected email
  2. Weekly digest email

If an account is detected to be at risk, then AIP will generate an email alert with Users at risk detected as the email subject which also include a link to the User flagged for risk report. It is recommended to immediately investigate the users at risk. 











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










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