The number of vulnerabilities exploited so far by attackers is enormous and shocking. The most common way for them to breach enterprise networks is by directing their attacks towards endpoints. Security teams have a tough job at hand in mitigating these attacks. Relying on antivirus alone won’t suffice. The number of connected devices is high, leading to increased exposure of endpoints to malware infections and complex exploits. Cybercriminals have more choices to attack, such as desktops, laptops, server workloads, cloud applications, smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, etc., making it even more difficult for the CISO to continuously monitor and secure them against cyber-attacks. The more startling fact is that most organizations are unaware that they have experienced an endpoint intrusion. Indeed, securing endpoints is a difficult task, with every endpoint posing a unique security challenge.
A disintegrated array of endpoint solutions is ineffective. A fully integrated automated Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution can enable a faster correlation of data from various endpoint solutions to overcome the inadequacies of legacy solutions driven by manual, repetitive tasks. Automated endpoint solutions prevent fileless malware from exfiltrating credentials and stop them from laterally moving across the network, saving it from future attacks.
EDR enables active threat monitoring of every asset and automates response, mitigating a possible breach. It also neutralizes false positive alerts and rapidly detects, investigates, and responds to complex threats.
Microsoft Defender is the most preferred Endpoint Detection and Response tool in terms of features and functionality. It is a unified endpoint security platform that offers Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) – A sophisticated feature for malware investigation, response, and mitigation. ATP seamlessly works with Microsoft’s threat protection suite, used to safeguard Azure and. Office 365.
MS Defender Technology Mix
Endpoint behavioral sensors
To collect and process endpoint behavioral signals from the Windows 10 operating system and send them to an isolated, private cloud instance of MS Defender.
Cloud security analytics
To transform behavioral signals from across the windows ecosystem, cloud assets such as Office 365 by leveraging Big Data, device learning, and Microsoft Optics while providing response recommendations to complex threats.
Threat intelligence
To identify attacker tools, techniques, procedures and generate alerts from collated sensor data with the help of threat intelligence generated by Microsoft threat hunters and partners.
MS Defender cloud-powered features
Threat & Vulnerability Management
A risk-based approach to mature vulnerability management programs through continuous real-time discovery, context-aware prioritization of threats, and end-to-end remediation process. Endpoint data is collected in real-time to detect, prioritize, mitigate vulnerabilities and identify missing patches.
Attack Surface Reduction
Attack surfaces are minimized by ensuring appropriate configuration settings, applying mitigation techniques, and isolating non-reliable files, hardware, and applications to prevent host intrusions, block traffic from low reputation destinations to mitigate exploits.
Next-Generation Protection
ML-driven protection capabilities continuously scan endpoints to stop threats quickly by detonating unknown files, analyzing metadata, monitor threats with process tress and suspicious behaviors, use paired client/cloud ML mode to detect complex attacks, detect new malware running multi-class, deep neural network classifiers, and block threats with smart rules.
Endpoint Detection and Response
Query-based threat hunting feature enables customized context-based breach detection, investigation, and response toward advanced threats. The ATP feature aggregates attacks into incidents making it easy for analysts to react to threats.
Automated Investigation and Remediation
This capability helps to manage a large volume of security alerts generated at network endpoints. MS Defender ATP removes unwanted alerts at scale and empowers the analyst to focus on the alerts that really matter.
Secure Score for Devices
The security score feature helps to assess the security status quo of the enterprise network, and recognize insecure assets, while rating the existing security configurations. It also provides recommendations to improve the score for enhancing the security posture.
Microsoft Threat Experts
MS Defender offers a robust managed threat hunting service to proactively hunt for threats, prioritize them, bringing in additional context and insights to power up Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to rapidly detect and respond to complex threats.
API for integration
APIs for seamless integration of MS Defender into existing organization's workflows.
Microsoft Defender ATP is not an antivirus solution. It a versatile, cloud-hosted, agent-less solution with anti-malware and anti-virus capabilities to quickly isolate and deal with a breach before it spreads across the network. MS Defender ATP offers an additional layer of security by identifying vulnerabilities and provides remediations to fix any gaps. With endpoint behavioural sensors it continuously collects and analyzes data to detect any forms of threats across the network.
To know more about MS Defender ATP capabilities, do get in touch with Aujas experts at contact@aujas.com.
