Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is a new service that helps enterprise customers on Windows 10 to detect, investigate, and respond to advanced and targeted attacks on their networks.
Today, cyberattacks are getting more sophisticated as attackers are using social engineering, zero-day vulnerabilities, or even misconfiguration to break into corporate networks. In 2015 alone, thousands of such attacks were reported.
Microsoft’s Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) provides post-breach layer protection which enables organizations to mitigate and take prompt action with threats as they arrive.
As Microsoft continues to invest in delivering enhanced security to endpoints, here is what you need to know about the Windows Defender ATP Creators Update preview.
Detection
Windows Creators Update improves our OS memory and kernel sensors to enable detection of attackers who are employing in-memory and kernel-level attacks – shining a light into previously dark spaces where attackers hid from conventional detection tools. We’ve already successfully leveraged this new technology against zero-days attacks on Windows.
Figure 1 Shows the Alert Process Tree of a Token modification
We continue to upgrade our detections of ransomware and other advanced attacks, applying our behavioral and machine-learning detection library to counter changing attacks trends.
Our historical detection capability ensures new detection rules apply to up to six months of stored data to detect attacks that previously went unnoticed. Customers can also add customized detection rules or IOCs to augment the detection dictionary.
Investigation
Customers asked us for a single pane of glass across the entire Windows security stack. Windows Defender Antivirus detections and Device Guard blocks are the first to surface in the Windows Defender ATP portal interleaved with Windows Defender ATP detections. The new user entity adds identity as a pivot, providing insight into actions, relationships, and alerts that span machines and allow us to track attackers moving laterally across the network.
Figure 2 User Entity page, showing all insights related to a specific user.
Our alert page now includes a new process tree visualization that aggregates multiple detections and related events into a single view that helps security teams reduce the time to resolve cases by providing the information required to understand and resolve incidents without leaving the alert page.
SecOps can hunt for evidence of attacks, such as file names or hashes, IP addresses or URLs, behaviors, machines, or users. They can do this immediately by searching the organization’s cloud inventory, across all machines – and going back up to 6 months in time – even if machines are offline, have been reimaged, or no longer exist.
Response
When detecting an attack, security teams can now take immediate action: isolate machines, ban files from the network, kill and quarantine running processes or files, or retrieve an investigation package from a machine to provide forensic evidence – with a click of a button. Because while detecting advanced attacks is important – shutting them down is even more so.
Figure 3 Machine level response actions
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