At #Ignite2020 (September 2020), Microsoft announced a change to their Security and threat protection with a new, unique approach designed to “empower security professionals to get ahead of today’s complex threat landscape” with fully integrated SIEM and XDR (eXtended Detect and Response) tools from a single vendor so you get the best of both worlds. – much of the summary below is taken from the wider Microsoft Blog.
As part of this, Microsoft are unifying their XDR tech under the Microsoft Defender brand.
“The new Microsoft Defender is now the most comprehensive XDR in the market and prevents, detects, and responds to threats across identities, endpoints, applications, email, IoT, infrastructure, and cloud platforms”.
With Microsoft Defender, Microsoft are both rebranding our existing threat protection portfolio and adding new capabilities, including additional multi-cloud (Google Cloud and AWS) and multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS) support.
Microsoft Defender is delivered in two main areas,
- Microsoft 365 Defender for end-user environments and
- Azure Defender for cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
Microsoft 365 Defender
This delivers XDR capabilities for identities, endpoints, cloud apps, email, and documents, using AI to reduce the SOC’s work items. Microsoft claims this can consolidated 1,000 alerts to just 40 high-priority incidents and that built-in self-healing technology fully automates remediation with a success rate of over 70%, ensuring the SOC can focus on “other tasks” that better leverage their knowledge and expertise.
As part of this, the following branding changes have also been made to the Microsoft 365 security services:
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Microsoft Threat Protection is now Microsoft 365 Defender
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Microsoft Defender ATP is now Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
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Office 365 ATP is now Microsoft Defender for Office 365
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Azure Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Azure
As well as the name change, several new features are now also available or coming:
- New mobile for Apple iOS (now in Preview) and Android support now released. As a result, Microsoft now delivers endpoint protection across all major OS platforms.
- Extension of the current macOS support with addition of threat and vulnerability management.
- Priority account protection in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 will help security teams focus on protection from phishing attacks for users who have access to the most critical and privileged information.
Azure Defender
Azure Defender is an evolution of the Azure Security Center threat protection capabilities and is accessed from within Azure Security Center and delivers XDR capabilities to protect multi-cloud and hybrid workloads, including VMs, databases, containers, IoT, and more.
Aligned with the Microsoft 365 brand changes, there are also new name changes as well as some new features naturally!
- Azure Security Centre Standard is now Azure Defender for Servers
- Azure Security Centre for IoT is now Azure Defender for IoT
- Advanced Threat Protection for SQL is now Azure Defender for SQL
Along with the name change, these new features were also announced:
- New unified experience for Azure Defender that makes it easy to see which resources are protected and which need protection.
- Added protection for SQL servers on-premises and in multi-cloud environments
- Added protection for virtual machines in multi-cloud
- Improved protections for containers, including Kubernetes-level policy management and continuous scanning of container images in container registries.
- Support for operational technology networks with the integration of CyberX into Azure Defender for IoT.
The video below from Microsoft shows how it all works
And finally…. let’s not forget Azure Sentinel
Whilst the XDR capabilities of Microsoft Defender delivered through Azure Defender and Microsoft 365 Defender provides rich insights and prioritised alerts, to gain visibility across your entire environment and include data from other security solutions such as firewalls and existing security tools, we connect Microsoft Defender to Azure Sentinel, Microsoft cloud-native SIEM.
Azure Sentinel is deeply integrated with Microsoft Defender so you can integrate your XDR data in only a few clicks and combine it with all your security data from across your entire enterprise.
You can read the full Microsoft Blog on this here: