Author: Emily Young

Sentinel Phantom Fields: Understanding and Managing Inaccessible Data

Microsoft has transitioned to a DCR-based log ingestion and manual schema management for tables. Many organizations are adopting this modern approach to parse, filter, and enrich logs during ingestion. While effective, this system can incur unnecessary expenses if not used properly, leading to billable fields that remain inaccessible when querying events. We refer to these […]

Defender for Cloud and Defender XDR Connectors in Sentinel

Over the past few weeks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud has received multiple updates. Microsoft has introduced a new tenant-level Defender for Cloud connector, replacing the old subscription-level one. Additionally, they have implemented a new functionality, allowing detections from Defender for Cloud to be integrated into Defender XDR, along with detections from other Defender solutions.  There are […]

Complex Sentinel Deployments Using ARC and AMA Over Private Links and Private Endpoints

Large organizations sometimes opt for an architectural choice to use private links and private endpoints in the context of ingesting data from on-premise servers into Microsoft Sentinel. The typical reasons for this choice includes: Alignment with existing Azure architecture where solutions connecting datacenter to cloud such as ExpressRoute, or Azure VPN gateways are already adopted […]

Log Splitting with Data Collection Rules

In a recent article, Microsoft discussed log splitting in Data Collection Rules (DCRs), also known as Multi-Destination Data Collection Rules. Microsoft mentioned a few uses for this capability. I’ve worked with numerous clients in the past who had certain needs that log splitting would have made much simpler to fulfill. In this blog post, I’ll […]

From Noise to Action: Analyzing Activity Alerts and Preventing Genuine Threats with Defender for Cloud Apps

If you worked in a SOC, you know that during an analysis, correlating sessions to ide­ntify malicious activity or compromise is necessary, yet hard or impossible to perform, based on the available logs from activity-based alerts from Defender for Cloud Apps. In this blog post, we will go over the following topics: What are the […]

Maximizing the Value of Azure Automation for SOCs

A BlueVoyant Custom Levenshtein Detection What Does This Detection Mitigate?  This use case has been designed to capture email spoofing attempts from an external attacker where the attacker impersonates an internal user or trusted supplier. As domain verification is not built into the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), attackers can counterfeit email addresses with the […]

Microsoft Sentinel Design – Updated One-Page Diagram

Microsoft Sentinel has introduced a significant number of new features and improvement of existing ones since our last diagram update. Some notable ones are increased incident management options, addition of large number of solutions including data connectors, detection rules and workbooks, content management options such as Workspace Manager, centralized data collection rules via the Azure […]

Defender for IoT Raw Log Integration into Sentinel

Microsoft Defender for IoT sensors have limited out-of-the-box capabilities to integrate their data into Azure Sentinel. Today the sensor platform supports only sending alerts to Sentinel, which is limiting since a modern SOC must have the ability to correlate any relevant sensor data that occurred around the alerts with other sources to form a complete […]

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