Attack Path Analysis identifies and graphically represents the sequence of potential steps an attacker could take to breach critical resources. It helps prioritize alerts by showing which vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, if exploited, could lead to the most significant impact, allowing security teams to focus remediation efforts where they matter most.

Configuring incident grouping directly within an analytics rule allows you to define how alerts are aggregated. You can group alerts that are triggered by the same entity (like a user or host) within a specified time window, preventing alert fatigue and creating a consolidated incident that tells a more complete story for the analyst.

Defender for Cloud Apps uses session monitoring to analyze user activities in real-time. A custom detection policy can be built to identify anomalous behavior patterns, such as a ‘mass download’ by a single user, which is a key indicator of potential data exfiltration. This provides proactive detection rather than just logging or blocking.

The ‘Require device to be marked as compliant’ grant control checks if the device attempting access is reported as compliant by Intune (e.g., has encryption enabled, a PIN set, and is not jailbroken). This is a core component of a Zero Trust architecture, enforcing that access is granted only from secure and managed devices.

The Account entity, specifically the User Principal Name (UPN), is the consistent identifier for a user across Microsoft 365 services. Pivoting on the UPN allows a hunter to seamlessly query related data from multiple tables (like SigninLogs, OfficeActivity, or AlertInfo) to build a complete timeline of the user’s activities across the environment.

Configuring Continuous Export from the Sentinel workspace to an Azure Storage account allows you to move older data to a lower-cost storage tier (like Archive storage) for long-term retention, while maintaining the standard retention period (e.g., 90 days to 2 years) in the Log Analytics workspace for active querying and analysis. This balances cost with operational needs.

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) in block mode allows you to run Defender for Endpoint’s EDR sensor on a server while using a non-Microsoft antivirus as the primary active scanner. The EDR sensor runs in a passive monitoring state but can still block malicious artifacts, providing advanced threat protection without the performance footprint of a full primary AV scan.

The agentless scanning feature in Defender for Cloud’s vulnerability assessment for machines performs a host-level scan. It analyzes the server’s operating system and installed software packages for known vulnerabilities (CVEs) by using cloud-based queries, eliminating the need to deploy and manage a local agent on each Arc-enabled server.

The ‘matches regex’ operator allows for powerful pattern matching using regular expressions. A query like `DeviceProcessEvents | where FolderPath matches regex @”(?i).*\\temp\\.*” or FolderPath matches regex @”(?i).*\\tmp\\.*”` can effectively find paths containing ‘temp’ or ‘tmp’ regardless of case (the (?i) flag) and their position in the path, which is ideal for this hunting scenario.

Attack Path Analysis identifies and graphically represents the sequence of potential steps an attacker could take to breach critical resources. It helps prioritize alerts by showing which vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, if exploited, could lead to the most significant impact, allowing security teams to focus remediation efforts where they matter most.0