Az - Defender

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Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security management solution that spans Azure, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments. It is categorized as a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), combining Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP) capabilities​. Its purpose is to help organizations find misconfigurations and weak spots in cloud resources, strengthen overall security posture, and protect workloads from evolving threats across Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), hybrid on-premises setups​ and more.

In practical terms, Defender for Cloud continuously assesses your resources against security best practices and standards, provides a unified dashboard for visibility, and uses advanced threat detection to alert you of attacks. Key benefits include a unified view of security across clouds, actionable recommendations to prevent breaches, and integrated threat protection that can reduce the risk of security incidents​. By supporting AWS and GCP and other SaaS platforms natively and using Azure Arc for on-premises servers, it ensures you can manage security in one place for all environments​.

Key Features

• Recommendations: This section presents a list of actionable security recommendations based on continuous assessments. Each recommendation explains identified misconfigurations or vulnerabilities and provides remediation steps, so you know exactly what to fix to improve your secure score.
• Attack Path Analysis: Attack Path Analysis visually maps potential attack routes across your cloud resources. By showing how vulnerabilities connect and could be exploited, it helps you understand and break these paths to prevent breaches.
• Security Alerts: The Security Alerts page notifies you of real-time threats and suspicious activities. Each alert includes details such as severity, affected resources, and recommended actions, ensuring you can respond quickly to emerging issues.
  • Detection techniques are based on threat intelligence, behavioral analytics and anomaly detection.
  • It’s possible to find all the possible alerts in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/defender-for-cloud/alerts-reference. Based on the name and description it’s possible to know what is the alert looking for (to bypass it).
• Inventory: In the Inventory section, you find a comprehensive list of all monitored assets across your environments. It provides an at-a-glance view of each resource’s security status, helping you quickly spot unprotected or risky assets that need remediation.
• Cloud Security Explorer: Cloud Security Explorer offers a query-based interface to search and analyze your cloud environment. It allows you to uncover hidden security risks and explore complex relationships between resources, enhancing your overall threat-hunting capabilities.
• Workbooks: Workbooks are interactive reports that visualize your security data. Using pre-built or custom templates, they help you monitor trends, track compliance, and review changes in your secure score over time, making data-driven security decisions easier.
• Community: The Community section connects you with peers, expert forums, and best practice guides. It’s a valuable resource for learning from others’ experiences, finding troubleshooting tips, and staying updated on the latest Defender for Cloud developments.
• Diagnose and Solve Problems: This troubleshooting hub helps you quickly identify and resolve issues related to Defender for Cloud’s configuration or data collection. It provides guided diagnostics and solutions to ensure the platform operates effectively.
• Security Posture: The Security Posture page aggregates your overall security status into a single secure score. It provides insights into which areas of your cloud are strong and where improvements are needed, serving as a quick health check of your environment.
• Regulatory Compliance: This dashboard evaluates how well your resources adhere to industry standards and regulatory requirements. It shows compliance scores against benchmarks like PCI DSS or ISO 27001, helping you pinpoint gaps and track remediation for audits.
• Workload Protections: Workload Protections focuses on securing specific resource types (like servers, databases, and containers). It indicates which Defender plans are active and provides tailored alerts and recommendations for each workload to enhance their protection. It’s able to find malicious behaviours in specific resources.
  • This is also the option to Enable Microsoft Defender for X you can find in certain services.
• Data and AI Security (Preview): In this preview section, Defender for Cloud extends its protection to data stores and AI services. It highlights security gaps and monitors sensitive data, ensuring that both your data repositories and AI platforms are safeguarded against threats.
• Firewall Manager: The Firewall Manager integrates with Azure Firewall to give you a centralized view of your network security policies. It simplifies managing and monitoring firewall deployments, ensuring consistent application of security rules across your virtual networks.
• DevOps Security: DevOps Security integrates with your development pipelines and code repositories to embed security early in the software lifecycle. It helps identify vulnerabilities in code and configurations, ensuring that security is built into the development process.

Microsoft Defender EASM

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management (EASM) continuously scans and maps your organization’s internet-facing assets—including domains, subdomains, IP addresses, and web applications—to provide a comprehensive, real-time view of your external digital footprint. It leverages advanced crawling techniques, starting from known discovery seeds, to automatically uncover both managed and shadow IT assets that might otherwise remain hidden. EASM identifies risky configurations such as exposed administrative interfaces, publicly accessible storage buckets and services vulnerable to different CVEs, enabling your security team to address these issues before they are exploited. Moreover, the continuous monitoring can also show changes in the exposed infrastructure comparing different scan results so the admin can be aware of every change performed. By delivering real-time insights and detailed asset inventories, Defender EASM empowers organizations to continuously monitor and track changes to their external exposure. It uses risk-based analysis to prioritize findings based on severity and contextual factors, ensuring that remediation efforts are focused where they matter most. This proactive approach not only helps in uncovering hidden vulnerabilities but also supports the continuous improvement of your overall security posture by alerting you to any new exposures as they emerge.