How to generate a monthly Defender ATP Threat and Vulnerability Report

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Just recently Microsoft announced that the Defender ATP advanced hunting schema was extended with the following tables: DeviceTvmSoftwareInventoryVulnerabilities DeviceTvmSoftwareVulnerabilitiesKB DeviceTvmSecureConfigurationAssessment DeviceTvmSecureConfigurationAssessmentKB This allows us to run advanced hunting queries to find and extract Defender ATP TVM data. View the code on Gist. Now the people in your organization who are responsible for threat and vulnerability management might not necessarily have the knowledge of using the advanced hunting query language or are provided access to the Read More …

Windows Defender, More than just Antivirus – Part 2

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In the previous post I provided an overview of the history of Windows Defender and an overview of the various features that have the name Windows Defender in them. When then looked at Windows Defender SmartScreen and Windows Defender Cloud based protection. Today I’d like to continue with my notes from the field and personal experiences and take a look at Windows Defender Exploit guard. Again, the objective of this blog post is to inspire Read More …

Microsoft Defender ATP Advanced Hunting – Who’s logging on with local admin rights?

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If you’re among those administrators that use Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, here’s a handy tip how to find out who’s logging on with local administrators’ rights. But first when would you want to run this? Well here are some scenarios I can think of: You want to find users that have local administrator rights on their devices. You introduced LAPS and instructed your IT support to no longer use their own credentials but use Read More …

Windows Defender, More than just Antivirus – Part 1

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Due to my professional activity as a Cyber Security Consultant, I regularly speak with customers about Windows Defender and find that many are not fully aware of all the features and capabilities that Windows Defender offers. Also, when reviewing existing implementations, I’ve noticed a pattern of some common issues. I guess the blog post title ‘Windows Defender, more than just Antivirus’ says it all. The objective of today’s blog post is to provide you with Read More …

Importing GPO Security Baselines with PowerShell

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Okay there’s this rule , if you do something manually for the third time, it’s about time to think of automating it. Here’s a script that I created to create Group Policy Objects and import the security baseline settings. The script will work with any security baseline that is provided with Group Policy backups e.g. Microsoft Security baseline, CIS, NSA. Let me show you this with an example: First download the latest Microsoft Security baseline Read More …

Extract ConfigMgr Script Status Results with PowerShell

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During a recent customer engagement I had to collect the size of user profiles across a large number of devices. I was first thinking of using a script that would collect the information we need, store it into a custom WMI table and then collect the data using ConfigMgr hardware inventory, but since we only needed a one time snapshot of this information I decided against that idea. The next option would be to go Read More …

How to accelerate your Microsoft Defender ATP Evaluation

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As with almost any solution, one of the time consuming activities is to get the prerequisites in place until you get things up and running, this is no different with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection. Although the solution itself is entirely hosted in the cloud, there are a few prerequisites on the client side that must be put in place before you can get your hands on MDATP. Getting these prerequisites in place is no Read More …

ConfigMgr CMPivot , the PowerShell Script, the Events…

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While working with CMPivot this week, I wanted to find out how locally on the client the data is collected, I already knew that when you execute a CMPivot query from the ConfigMgr console, it will run the query on the target device and returns the result back to ConfigMgr. While investigating I also came across this blog post CM Pivot Internals that describes how things work, nevertheless I wanted to dig a bit deeper. Read More …

Monitoring Windows Defender Cloud Protection Service connectivity with ConfigMgr

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Hello everyone, earlier this week I wrote a blog post how to test Microsoft Defender Cloud Protection Service (MAPS) with PowerShell. Today I would like to share a possible approach how to actively monitor MAPS Connectivity across all your devices using ConfigMgr configuration baselines. As mentioned in my earlier blogpost in order to take full advantage of Microsoft Defender protection capabilities, it’s important that clients can communicate with MAPS, if the client cannot communicate with Read More …

Testing Windows Defender MAPS Connectivity with PowerShell

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Whenever I work with customers on Windows Defender or Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, one of the first things I usually review are the current Windows Defender settings. Having Windows Defender properly configured is key, because otherwise you might not be able to make use of all the capabilities Defender and Defender ATP provides. One of them is MAPS (Microsoft Active Protection Service) or also known as Windows Defender Antivirus cloud-delivered protection service. Quite often Read More …