Demystify potential data leaks with Insider Risk Management insights in Defender XDR

In today’s complex security environment, understanding and mitigating data breach risks is more important than ever. Earlier this year we announced: integration Insider Risk Management (IRM) Provides insight into Defender XDR user pages, providing improved visibility into internal risk severity and breach activity. This integration allows SOC teams to more effectively detect and respond to insider threats, better distinguishing between external and internal attacks.

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management identifies and mitigates potential insider risks such as data breaches or intellectual property theft, detects unusual employee behavior, manages data leakage risk from insiders performing riskier activities, and distinguishes between external and internal. Covering scenarios adds significant value. attack.

Detecting Real Threats: Uncovering Internal Data Theft

Imagine a scenario where a series of alerts are triggered for a specific user. Defender XDR detects suspicious activity, including potential data leaks and unusual file access patterns, raising concerns about external breach attempts. XDR Automatically correlates these alerts. Breakdown into single incidents based on user and time period allows SOC teams to investigate broader patterns of activity rather than individual, isolated alerts.

Take advantage of newly integrated insider risk management (IRM) insights XDR User PageSOC analysts gain a deeper understanding of user behavior and risk profiles. Instead of focusing solely on alerts, IRM insights provide valuable context, revealing patterns such as frequent downloading of sensitive documents from SharePoint or sharing confidential data through Teams. At first glance, this activity may appear to be an insider threat.

However, IRM insights can also help SOC analysts consider alternative possibilities. This means that your user account may have been compromised and an external attacker is posing as an insider and exfiltrating your data. IRM’s comprehensive user risk profile, including a user’s typical activity patterns, access history, and work behavior, allows SOCs to more accurately assess whether this behavior is consistent with the user’s normal behavior or points to an external compromise.

Integration with deeper context for more informed decisions

This integration between XDR and IRM allows SOC teams to make more informed decisions. If IRM insights reveal that a user’s behavior deviates significantly from the typical profile, the team can lean on the theory that an external attacker is using the user’s credentials. On the other hand, if the behavior is consistent with previous insider risk indicators, the incident may be treated as malicious insider activity.

With XDR’s correlated alerts and incidents and IRM providing deeper context, SOC teams are equipped to investigate threats holistically. You can quickly escalate the incident to an IRM analyst or continue the investigation in the Purview portal to analyze the full scope of the data breach. This seamless integration allows you to respond faster and more accurately to threats, whether they come from insiders or external actors acting like insiders.

conclusion

The integration of IRM insights into the Defender This integration builds on previous efforts to: DLP integration into XDRImproves visibility into data breach risks and provides SOC analysts with the insight they need to effectively detect and respond to internal threats and compromised users.

This is an important step toward providing full data security context within XDR, and more exciting developments are underway. Learn more about IRMIRM Alerts, Insight Methods, Signals can transform data security operations and make IT and cloud environments more resilient to evolving threats.