Tag: Azure ATP

Azure ATP: How to Remediate Enumeration activities or other attacks?

Hey every good evening, and hope you guys are having a nice day today. Just another topic about Azure ATP here, a.k.a Microsoft Defender for Identity.

If you come across this before and then you would already know what is it for. If you are new here, then let’s just have a brief explanation what is it about. Azure ATP is basically a cloud-service that leverages your on-premises to perform identifying, detection and monitoring of your domain controller’s user objects activities and behaviors.

Newly deploy Azure ATP in your environment would take 48 hours to 72 hours for the Azure ATP to study the behaviors of each accounts, but this is also depend how large is your objects in your environment.

Anyway, a bit of side track just now. This blog post objective here is that if you ever encounter the 5 types of attacks, Reconnaissance, Compromised credentials, lateral movements, domain dominance and exfiltration alerts from the Azure ATP.

You may refer to this link here to learn how to remediate and understand how to manage the alerts.

Azure ATP: Does Admin’s actions recorded by Office 365 Audit?

Hey everyone, hope you guys are having a nice evening. Today’s blog post is about Azure ATP and Office 365 audit.

So the situation is like this;

Majority Office 365 tenant has more then 1 global administrators. Whenever, a global administrator would like to capture other administrators actions, they would query those events from Office 365 audit. So for Azure ATP, I notice it is not available in Office 365 audit, but for Defender Endpoint it exist in the audit. Summary, you can’t audit actions being taken in Azure ATP portal.

Scenario: If a global administrator, deletes an alerts from Azure ATP, it would remain deleted and there is no recycle bin to restore the alert back unless you regenerate the same situation to trigger the detection. This delete action is not recorded into the Office 365 audit.

Office 365 audit
Azure ATP on deleted alerts

I do not see this as a show stopper, I am still testing other ways to get this working. Stay tune…

References:

  1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-for-identity/working-with-suspicious-activities
  2. Search the audit log in the Security & Compliance Center – Microsoft 365 Compliance | Microsoft Docs
  3. DefenderATP Audit logs – Microsoft Tech Community

Azure ATP: What is the Retention Period of Reports?

Hey Hey everyone, good morning, is Saturday here in Malaysia. Hope you guys are doing well. This week blog post is about another Microsoft Defender for Identity, a.k.a Azure ATP. The terms are up to your suit and understanding.

I think is very reasonable to know what is the retention period that the Azure ATP’s Reports. Why? Because of Auditors…

Upon researching to gather articles from Microsoft site and there weren’t an article talking about how long the reports store in Azure ATP. I do know that the reports in Microsoft security max are either 30, 60 or 90 days.

Thus, I had to raised a case to Microsoft Support and they return the answer that the retention period is 180 days. I did request whether they were able to locate any article from Microsoft that state it but none.

To locate Reports in Azure ATP, simply go to https://portal.atp.azure.com , select the 2nd Icon on the left taskbar.

Azure ATP: How to do exclusion detection?

Hi and good weekend to you. I haven’t been writing blog post for 1 week due to Chinese New Year holiday, 1 week off from doing YouTube videos and writing blog post, and spending quality time with my family. This is the first Chinese New Year celebration without visiting friends or other family members. E-angpao has become our replacement of physical AngPao. Seeing how this pandemic pushes technology forward and forcing people from all different generation to use technology, is amazing.

Anyway, this blog post I’m going to be talking about how you as administrator you can exclude certain situation from the Azure ATP detection. Azure ATP stands for Microsoft Defender for Identity. There are few situation you can exclude from Azure ATP detection such as Backup accounts and replication accounts. Take note this is only based on my experience or Microsoft recommendation but is not a MUST to exclude them.

How the alerts works in Azure ATP, is that when ever the account is behaving one of the detection it will notify an alert to the Azure ATP portal and to administrator’s email. So imagine if you have Azure AD Connect in your environment, your Azure AD Connect service account is notifying your administrator every 30 minutes, because the default replication time is every 30 minutes. Annoying right? Once you confirmed that this is the service account used only for replication, here is how you could whitelist it from the Azure ATP detection;

*This is for replication account, for others situation the exclude value may differ, these steps below is mainly to gain understanding how to exclude and where to locate the exclude.

  1. Login to https://portal.atp.azure.com
  2. Select Settings
  3. Under the Detection category
  4. Select Exclusion
  5. Locate the detection type and select it
  6. There you would see 3 sections for your choices on how you want to exclude it
  7. You can exclude based account name, hostname, IP addresses, subnets and etc..
  8. Key in the value and remember to save it
  9. This changes apply immediately

Recommended that you monitor 24 hours. For your information, email notification doesn’t have to be send to same tenant users, it could be external party domain but beware of your auditors.

The portal is a simple user interface, not as confusing as the Security and Protection portal.

References:

  1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-for-identity/configure-detection-exclusions

Azure ATP: gMSA limitation for single label domain

Good afternoon everyone, and Happy Holiday to you all. Today’s blog post is another Azure ATP, or you could say Microsoft Identity Defender or MDI for short.

As you might know that gMSA is a type of service account for Windows Server 2012 and above. For some reason it failed to establish authentication between a Windows Server 2016 and Azure ATP portal for this particular environment. This environment is running single label domain on a Windows Server 2016. It was migrate from Widows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2016.

To locate the logs in the server that you installed the sensor to further identify the cause and issue,

C:\ProgramFiles\Azure Advanced Threat Protection\<sensor version> \Logs

In the server where your sensor installed, if you notice the Azure ATP services keeps stopping and starting, from the services.msc, then it means there is problem with the sensor trying to establish the connection to the Azure ATP.

There wasn’t much article found to prove that gMSA limitation with single label domain, so I go ahead and proceed a testing. I created a managed service account with no special permission included, and add the credential to the Azure ATP > Directory Service. Upon monitoring, there wasn’t any alert prompt from Azure ATP, Azure ATP alert is pretty instant when detected failure on authentication.

So the resolution was to use managed service account instead of the gMSA account for this situation. The sensor start to working well with managed service account.