Microsoft is making its Office 365 security better for businesses

In an effort to help security teams deal with the barrage of critical alerts they receive daily, Microsoft has made its Automated Incident Response in Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) available to all enterprise customers.

The software giant’s automation feature is designed to aid security analysts in responding to alerts faster and more systemically.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced that it is making two categories of automated incident response available to its enterprise customers. The first category deals with automatic investigations that are triggered in response to new alerts that occur when users report phishing emails, click on a malicious link or when malware or a phishing emails are found in their mailboxes.

The second category consists of investigations that are initiated manually and use Microsoft’s own ‘automated playbook’ sequences to get to the bottom of different scenarios and attack types.

Rich security playbooks

Microsoft’s automation follows its rich security playbooks which are essentially a series of carefully logged steps that security teams can use to comprehensively investigate an alert. They also offer a set of recommended actions for containment and mitigation when dealing with an alert.

The company’s playbooks correlate similar emails that have been sent or received within an organization to detect any suspicious activities for relevant users. Microsoft gives a few examples of flagged activities in its blog post citing mail forwarding, mail delegation, Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) violations and suspicious email sending patterns.

As part of the Microsoft Threat Protection promise, these playbooks also integrate with signals and detections from Microsoft Cloud App Security and Microsoft Defender ATP.

Organizations that have either an Office 365 ATP Plan 2 or Office 365 Enterprise E5 tier plan can take advantage of the company’s automated incident response features beginning today.

Source: TechRadar