Enterprise Security with Microsoft 365 Defender

Enterprises are increasingly a target of cyberattacks, and security remains one of the biggest challenges organizations are facing today. With a rise in digital advancement and the use of Internet-connected devices, threats are becoming highly sophisticated and increasingly automated and indiscriminate while striking at a significantly higher rate. As organizations leverage advanced technologies for their operations, both companies and customers need to be aware of cyber risks and security protection to actively prevent them with appropriate solutions.

Today’s top security threats are disruption or extortion from various cyber attack vectors, such as malware and ransomware. Your enterprise needs increased protection against these threats effectively and efficiently. Microsoft Defender for businesses elevates security from conventional antivirus to next-gen protection, endpoint detection and response, Office protection, threat and vulnerability management, and more. It provides simplified configuration and security management with automated and intelligent investigation and remediation.

In this article, we are going to discuss how Microsoft 365 Defender provides enterprise security by providing endpoint protection, office protection, and threat and vulnerability management. Let’s get started.

Microsoft 365 Defender Overview

Microsoft 365 Defender is a unified enterprise defense system for pre-and post-breach events that natively coordinate identification, prevention, investigation, and response across identities, end-points, applications, and systems to give integrated protection against sophisticated cyber attacks.

With an integrated Microsoft 365 Defender solution, security experts can combine the threat signals received by each product and determine the entire scope and impact of the potential threat, how it infiltrated the system, what it is affected, and how it impacted the organization. Microsoft defender takes automatic action to stop or prevent attacks and self-heal affected end-points, user identities, and systems.

Microsoft 365 Defender

• Prevents cross-domain attacks and persistence
• Auto-heal affected assets
• Reduce signal noise
• Hunt threats across domain

Microsoft Defender’s unique cross-product layer builds up the individual services components to

• Help protect against cyber attacks and coordinate defensive responses across the services via automated actions and signal sharing.
• Automate response to the attack by triggering self-healing for affected assets using automated remediation.
• Narrate the attack story across product behavior, alerts, and context for security teams by combining data on alerts, impacted assets, and suspicious events.
• Allow security teams to perform effective and detailed threat hunting across endpoint and office data.

Features of Microsoft 365 Cross-Product

Here are the features of the Microsoft Defender cross-product.

1. Cross-product single pane of glass

The Microsoft 365 Defender Portal provides a central overview for all the information on threat detections, automated actions taken, impacted assets, and related evidence in a single pane of glass.

2. Combined incident queue

The automated actions are grouped together and surfaced promptly to help security experts focus on what is important by ensuring the full attack scope and impacted assets.

3. Self-healing for compromised assets

Microsoft Defender leverages AI-powered automatic actions to remediate affected assets back to a secure state. This product uses automatic remediation capabilities to ensure all compromised devices, mailboxes, and user identities related to an incident are remediated automatically.

4. Automatic threat response

Critical information is shared in real-time across the Microsoft Defender products to help prevent the progression of an attack. For instance, if a malicious file is detected on an endpoint protected by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, it will guide Defender for Office 365 to scan and delete the malicious file from all emails.

5. Cross-product threat hunting

Security teams can utilize their organizational knowledge to detect the signs of compromise by creating custom queries over the raw data collected by several protection products. Microsoft Defender offers query-based access to 30 days of historic raw signals and notif data across endpoint and Office 365 data.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoints

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an enterprise-level endpoint security platform designed to detect, prevent, investigate, and respond to potential cyber threats. It delivers industry-leading endpoint security for macOS, Windows, Android, Linux, iOS, and other network devices. Microsoft Defender for Endpoints helps organizations rapidly prevent attacks, evolve defenses, and scale security resources.

This comprehensive solution allows the discovery of all endpoints and network devices, such as routers, within your environment. It provides endpoint protection, vulnerability management, endpoint detection and response (EDR), threat defense, and managed hunting, all in a unified, single platform.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Capabilities

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has some impressive capabilities. These are as follows.

1. Threat and Vulnerability Management

This built-in capability leverages a game-changing risk-based approach to the identification, prioritization, and mitigation of endpoint misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.

2. Next-generation protection

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint leverages next-generation protection to reinforce the security perimeter of your network. It is designed to catch all types of emerging threats.

3. Attack surface reduction

The attack surface reduction provides the first line of defense. By ensuring exploit mitigation techniques are properly applied and configuration settings are properly set, the capability resists attacks and exploitation. It also includes web and network protection which can regulate access to malicious domains, URLs, and IP addresses.

4. Automated investigation and remediation

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides automatic investigation and remediation features that help reduce the volume of the alerts in minutes at scale.

5. Endpoint detection and response

These capabilities are put in place to identify, investigate and respond to advanced potential threats. Advanced hunting offers a query-based threat-hunting tool that enables you to proactively detect breaches and create custom detections.

6. The secure score for devices

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint includes a Secure Score for devices to help you evaluate the security state of your enterprise network, detect unprotected systems, and take appropriate actions to improve the overall security of your organization.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Security

Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions come with security capabilities. The actions you can take depend on the focus of these subscriptions. In Office 365 security, there are three security services or products tried to the subscription type,

• Exchange Online protection
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2

Microsoft Office 365 is built on the core protections provided by EOP, which is present in any subscription where Exchange Online mailboxes are present.

• Exchange Online Protection_ It prevents broad volume-based, known attacks.
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1_ It protects emails and collaborations from phishing, zero-day vulnerabilities, and business email compromise.
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2_ It adds post-breach investigation, detection, hunting, and response with automation and simulation.

The Office 365 Security Ladder from EOP to Defender for Office

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan adds an advantage to EOP threat management. However, it can be difficult to tell at first. To sort out if an upgrade plan is suitable for your organization, let’s have a look at the capabilities of each product while

• preventing and detecting threats
• Investigating
• responding

Exchange Online protection

Defender for Office 365 Plan 1

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 1 expands on the prevention side and adds extra forms of detection. It also adds real-time detections for investigation.

Defender for Office 365 Plan 2

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 2 expands on investigation and response and adds a new hunting capability, that is automation. Here the primary hunting tool is Threat Explorer instead of real-time detection. If you see Threat Explorer while navigating to Microsoft 365 Defender portal, it means you are in Defender for Office plan 2.

Defender for Office 365 specializes in protecting systems and users while using Office 365 programs. It’s better to have Microsoft Defender if your organization relies heavily on Office 365. As we have seen, Defender for Office focuses primarily on threat detection, prevention, automation, and response with two plans. Here you can choose the level of security based on your business requirements.

Final Words

Microsoft 365 Defender combines threat signals across endpoints, emails, applications, and identities to provide integrated protection against potential cyber-attacks. It is the central experience to investigate and respond to incidents and search for the ongoing malicious cyber activities proactively. Now that you hopefully have a better understanding of Microsoft 365 Defender for endpoint security and Office 365. You can appreciate how Microsoft 365 can benefit your security teams. Organizations can automatically prevent threats from infiltrating through endpoints and stop attacks before they cause serious damage.