Tutorial / Cram Notes
When a potential security threat is detected, it’s essential to assess, investigate, and respond swiftly to mitigate any potential damage. Microsoft Sentinel provides an integrated solution for security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR), which can be leveraged to enhance incident response activities.
Understanding Incidents in Microsoft Sentinel
An incident in Microsoft Sentinel is an aggregation of related alerts that may represent an attack or a security threat. These alerts are triggered by analytics rules that detect suspicious activities. The incident page in Sentinel provides a comprehensive overview, including the summary, alert details, and investigation insights.
Incident Creation and Severity Levels
Microsoft Sentinel creates incidents based on predefined or custom analytics rules. These rules have associated severities:
- High: Indicates a severe threat or breach.
- Medium: Potentially harmful activity that warrants investigation.
- Low: Activity is suspicious but not necessarily malicious.
- Informational: Log data that might be valuable for forensic or compliance purposes.
Incident Handling Process
- Initial Triage: Assess the incident’s severity, scope, and impact. Triage helps in prioritizing incidents based on their urgency and potential impact on the organization.
- Investigation: Use Microsoft Sentinel’s built-in investigation tools to examine the related alerts, entities, and evidence. This could involve analyzing user activities, host-level events, network traffic, and more.
- Containment: Implement immediate actions to prevent an incident from spreading or causing more damage. This might involve isolating affected systems or temporarily suspending user accounts.
- Remediation: Apply fixes to the affected systems to remove the security threat. Remediation could involve patching vulnerabilities, changing compromised credentials, or updating security policies.
- Recovery: Ensure that normal operations resume with minimal disruption, and affected systems are fully restored and secure.
- Post-Incident Review: Analyze the incident to improve future response and bolster defenses. It includes documenting lessons learned and adjusting rules and responses in Sentinel.
Automated Response with Playbooks
Playbooks in Microsoft Sentinel are collections of automated tasks or workflows that can respond to incidents. These tasks are powered by Azure Logic Apps and can range from simple actions like sending notifications to complex operations such as gathering data from other security tools, orchestrating changes across systems, and creating tickets in a third-party IT service management solution.
Example Playbook Scenarios
- User Account Investigation: If suspicious sign-in activity is detected for a user account, a playbook can:
- Send an email notification to the SOC team.
- Trigger an automatic disablement of the user account.
- Create an incident ticket in a management system.
- Phishing Email Response: When a potential phishing email is reported:
- A playbook can isolate the email.
- Notify the user with instructions on how to proceed.
- Begin an automated investigation to check for similar emails across the organization.
Leveraging Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence in Microsoft Sentinel helps enrich the incidents with context and indicators of compromise (IoCs). It allows analysts to better understand the threat actor’s motives, methods, and tactics.
Working with Incidents
The ‘Incidents’ blade in Sentinel includes multiple functionalities:
| Functionality | Description |
|---|---|
| List View | Provides a list of incidents ordered by severity or time. |
| Incident Details | Shows specific information such as alerts and entities. |
| Investigation | Graphical view to see relationships between entities. |
| Timeline | Chronological visualization of incident-related events. |
| Metrics | Insights into incident trends and patterns. |
| Assign to User | Incident assignment to team members for accountability. |
| Status Update | Update the status (Active, Closed, False Positive, etc.). |
Incident Closure
When an incident is resolved, it must be properly closed in Sentinel with a status that reflects the outcome (e.g., Resolved, False Positive). Documentation is key for accountability and future reference.
In summary, responding to incidents in Microsoft Sentinel involves a structured approach that encompasses triage, investigation, automated responses with playbooks, incident handling, leveraging threat intelligence, and closure documentation. Each step is crucial in ensuring that the security threat is addressed promptly and effectively to minimize the impact on the organization.
Practice Test with Explanation
True or False: Microsoft Sentinel allows you to automate responses to incidents without human intervention.
- True
Correct Answer: True
Explanation: Microsoft Sentinel supports automated responses using playbooks, which are collections of automated tasks or workflows.
When you are investigating an incident in Microsoft Sentinel, which feature should you use to gather data from various sources such as users, hosts, files, and IP addresses?
- A) Notebooks
- B) Analytics rules
- C) Hunting queries
- D) Entity behavior
Correct Answer: D) Entity behavior
Explanation: Entity behavior provides context by gathering related information from different data sources during incident investigation.
True or False: In Microsoft Sentinel, you can only run playbooks manually during incident response.
- False
Correct Answer: False
Explanation: In Microsoft Sentinel, playbooks can be triggered manually or automatically in response to specific alerts or incidents.
Which of the following is NOT an action that can be taken directly from within Microsoft Sentinel incident interface?
- A) Assigning incidents to users
- B) Changing the status of incidents
- C) Executing automated playbooks
- D) Remotely wiping a compromised device
Correct Answer: D) Remotely wiping a compromised device
Explanation: Remotely wiping a device is not a native functionality within the Microsoft Sentinel incident interface.
True or False: In Microsoft Sentinel, you can perform cross-workspace queries when investigating incidents.
- True
Correct Answer: True
Explanation: Microsoft Sentinel allows you to run queries across multiple workspaces, which is useful in large or complex environments.
When triaging incidents in Microsoft Sentinel, which incident property is useful for prioritization based on potential impact?
- A) Incident ID
- B) Severity
- C) Tags
- D) Title
Correct Answer: B) Severity
Explanation: The severity level (Informational, Low, Medium, High) of an incident helps in prioritizing responses based on potential impact.
Microsoft Sentinel incidents can be classified into which of the following categories? (Select all that apply)
- A) True Positive
- B) False Positive
- C) Benign Positive
- D) Inconclusive
Correct Answer: A) True Positive, B) False Positive, C) Benign Positive, D) Inconclusive
Explanation: These classifications are used to categorize the nature of incidents once they have been investigated.
True or False: Bookmarks in Microsoft Sentinel can be used to save useful hunting queries or notable events for later review during an investigation.
- True
Correct Answer: True
Explanation: Bookmarks in Microsoft Sentinel are used to flag and add notes to hunting search results, making them easily accessible for later use or further investigation.
Which of the following is a capability of Microsoft Sentinel’s SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response)?
- A) Automatically applying security patches
- B) Creating tickets in ITSM tools
- C) Network intrusion prevention
- D) Performing antivirus scanning
Correct Answer: B) Creating tickets in ITSM tools
Explanation: Microsoft Sentinel’s SOAR capabilities include the ability to create tickets in ITSM tools as part of an orchestrated response to incidents.
True or False: You can integrate Microsoft Sentinel with Azure Defender for a unified security management experience.
- True
Correct Answer: True
Explanation: Microsoft Sentinel can be integrated with Azure Defender (now part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud) to correlate data and provide comprehensive security management.
In Microsoft Sentinel, what is the primary purpose of analytics rules?
- A) To define automated responses to incidents
- B) To search for indicators of compromise across your data
- C) To schedule queries to run at certain intervals and look for potential threats
- D) To create dashboards for data visualization
Correct Answer: C) To schedule queries to run at certain intervals and look for potential threats
Explanation: Analytics rules in Microsoft Sentinel are used to run scheduled queries against the data to identify threats and generate alerts or incidents.
True or False: When using Microsoft Sentinel, you need to manually update the threat intelligence indicators to stay current with emerging threats.
- False
Correct Answer: False
Explanation: Microsoft Sentinel integrates with threat intelligence providers and can automatically update indicators to help you stay current with emerging threats.
Interview Questions
What are automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel?
Automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel help automate incident handling by defining the actions to take based on the information in the incident.
How can you create an automation rule?
You can create an automation rule in Microsoft Sentinel by defining the trigger conditions, actions, and logic.
What is a trigger condition in an automation rule?
A trigger condition in an automation rule is the criteria that must be met for the rule to be triggered. For example, it could be a specific event ID or log entry.
What are the available actions in an automation rule?
The available actions in an automation rule include running a playbook, sending an email notification, creating a ticket, and updating a status field.
How can you configure the logic of an automation rule?
You can configure the logic of an automation rule by using logical operators such as AND, OR, and NOT to define the conditions for triggering the rule.
How can you test an automation rule before deploying it?
You can test an automation rule before deploying it by using the Test action to simulate the trigger conditions and verify that the actions are executed correctly.
Can you add multiple actions to an automation rule?
Yes, you can add multiple actions to an automation rule to define the steps that should be taken in response to the incident.
How can you view the status of automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel?
You can view the status of automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel by checking the Automation Rules blade in the Azure portal.
What is the benefit of using automation rules in incident response?
Using automation rules in incident response can help streamline the response process, reduce response times, and ensure that critical steps are not missed.
How can you monitor the effectiveness of automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel?
You can monitor the effectiveness of automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel by tracking the incident metrics such as Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
Great write-up on responding to incidents in Microsoft Sentinel!
Can anyone explain how to use the built-in playbooks for incident response in Microsoft Sentinel?
How do you integrate MS Sentinel with other security products?
Thanks for the detailed guide!
Might be helpful, but I felt it was missing some advanced response techniques.
Could someone point me to the best resources for preparing for the SC-200 exam, specifically focused on Microsoft Sentinel?
What are some best practices for creating custom analytics rules in Sentinel?
How does Microsoft Sentinel handle multi-cloud environments?