Identity Governance (part 4 of 6)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
To read part 3, please click here
To read part 5, please click here
To read part 6, please click here








Azure AD Security Defaults

Security defaults present in Azure AD readily provides security for the protection of your organization and as it consists of preconfigured security settings for common attacks, Microsoft is making it available to everyone ensuring a basic level of security enabled for all the organizations at no extra cost. When you turn on security defaults in the Azure portal, the following security configurations will be turned on in your tenant:

Unified Multi-Factor Authentication Registration

All the users must register for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in the form of the Azure Multi-Factor Authentication service within 14 days with the help of Microsoft Authenticator app. As every user might not have ample time to register for the same, the 14-day period provided is unique for each user which starts after a user's first successful interactive sign-in just after you enable security defaults. 

Multi-Factor Authentication Enforcement

Protecting administrators
All privileged accounts must require Multi-Factor Authentication which is a stronger form of account verification for sign-in, in order to improve their protection. After the successful registration with MFA, the following administrator roles will be needed to perform additional authentication during every sign-in:
  1. Global administrator
  2. SharePoint administrator     
  3. Exchange administrator
  4. Conditional Access administrator
  5. Security administrator
  6. Helpdesk administrator or password administrator
  7. Billing administrator
  8. User administrator
  9. Authentication administrator
Blocking legacy authentication
Legacy authentication refers to an authentication request made by:
  • Older office clients that don't use modern authentication (like an Office 2010 client).
  • Any client that uses older mail protocols like IMAP, SMTP, or POP3. 

Nowadays, majority of compromising sign-in attempts come from legacy authentication and as it doesn't support MFA, an attacker can easily authenticate with the help of an older protocol and bypass it (MFA).

If you enable security defaults in your tenant, then, all the authentication requests made by an older protocol will be blocked except for the Exchange ActiveSync.












To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
To read part 3, please click here
To read part 5, please click here
To read part 6, please click here








































 











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