Threat analytics and vulnerability management

Most of a security operations centre's day is reactive: alerts fire and analysts respond. Nadia's view is that the best shifts are the ones where nothing fires because the team removed the weakness first. On Monday, November 9, she gave Ama two hours with no queue at all, only two screens: threat analytics, which tells the team what attackers are doing in the world, and Defender Vulnerability Management, which tells them where the company is exposed to it. This lesson covers both and how they connect.

Threat analytics

Threat analytics is a set of reports written by Microsoft security researchers on active threat actors, campaigns, techniques, vulnerabilities and attack surfaces. Each report has an overview with the key points, an analyst report with technical detail, a list of related incidents and alerts in the tenant, a list of impacted assets, and an exposure and mitigations section that checks the tenant's own devices for the relevant vulnerabilities and settings. Reports are tagged by type, such as ransomware, phishing, vulnerability or activity group, and the dashboard highlights reports with active alerts in the tenant, reports with high impact, and the most recent ones.

The SC-200 outline asks candidates to interpret threat analytics, which in practice means answering three questions from a report: is this threat relevant to us, are we already affected, and are we protected? The overview answers the first. Related incidents and impacted assets answer the second. Exposure and mitigations answers the third, listing items such as the share of devices with a required update, the share with a recommended attack surface reduction rule in block mode, and the share with tamper protection or cloud protection on.

The report Ama read on November 9 described a ransomware operation that gains its first access through remote management software exposed to the internet and through phishing messages with malicious shortcuts in zip files, then disables security tools, steals credentials from memory and encrypts file servers. It had no related incidents at Harrow & Finch. Its exposure and mitigations section showed 97 in 100 devices with tamper protection on, but only 61 in 100 with the attack surface reduction rule that blocks credential theft from the Windows local security authority subsystem in block mode, and 22 devices missing a recent cumulative update the report listed.

The 61 in 100 was the useful finding. The credential theft rule had been left in audit on head office devices since the rollout because of one old backup agent that triggered it. Ama checked the audit events: the backup agent had been replaced in September, and since then the rule had logged nothing. Nadia approved moving it to block that afternoon. A threat that had not touched the company had still produced a concrete improvement, which is exactly what threat analytics is for.

Threat analytics can send email notifications when new reports are published or updated, filtered by report tags; Harrow & Finch sends ransomware and vulnerability reports to the security team mailbox. Nadia reads the overview of every new ransomware report within a day, and she asks the analyst on shift to fill in the relevance, impact and protection questions in a short note, which goes into the weekly security update for Sunil.

Defender Vulnerability Management

Defender Vulnerability Management uses the Defender for Endpoint sensor, with no extra agent or scan schedule, to build continuous inventories of software, vulnerabilities, browser extensions, certificates and hardware and firmware on onboarded devices, and to assess security configuration. Core capabilities come with Defender for Endpoint Plan 2; premium capabilities, such as security baselines assessment, browser extension and certificate inventory, network share analysis and blocking vulnerable applications, need the add-on or the standalone product. Microsoft has moved some features between tiers over time, so the team checks the current comparison page rather than relying on memory.

The main views are the dashboard, with the organization's exposure score and Microsoft Secure Score for Devices; the weaknesses page, which lists known vulnerabilities by their CVE identifiers with severity, exposed devices and whether exploits are known or verified; the software inventory, with versions, end-of-support status and weaknesses per product; and security recommendations, which group the fixes for the weaknesses and misconfigurations into actions such as update a product, change a setting, or uninstall end-of-support software, ranked by how much each reduces exposure.

Prioritizing what to fix

No team fixes everything at once, so prioritization is the core skill. Severity alone is a poor guide: a critical vulnerability on one isolated test device matters less than a high-severity one that attackers are actively exploiting on every till PC. Defender Vulnerability Management weighs threat context, such as known exploits and use in active campaigns, the number of exposed devices, and the criticality of those devices. Harrow & Finch marks its critical assets in exposure management's critical asset management: domain controllers, the StockLine database servers, the payment gateway servers and the executives' laptops.

# Four open weaknesses from the November 9 review (described, not real CVE numbers)
weaknesses = [
    # name, severity score, exploit in the wild, exposed devices, any critical asset exposed
    ("PDF reader remote code execution", 8.8, True, 388, True),
    ("Old VPN client privilege escalation", 7.8, False, 41, False),
    ("Till PC browser memory flaw", 7.5, True, 140, False),
    ("Print service flaw on servers", 9.8, False, 6, True),
]
def priority(w):
    name, sev, exploited, devices, critical = w
    p = sev * (2 if exploited else 1) * (devices ** 0.5)
    return p * (1.5 if critical else 1)

for w in sorted(weaknesses, key=priority, reverse=True):
    print(f"{priority(w):7.1f}  {w[0]}")

  520.0  PDF reader remote code execution
  177.5  Till PC browser memory flaw
   49.9  Old VPN client privilege escalation
   36.0  Print service flaw on servers

The order matched what Defender Vulnerability Management's recommendations showed, though its own calculation is more sophisticated and not published in detail. The print service flaw had the highest severity score of the four, but it affected six servers with no known exploit, and Renata's team had already disabled the print service on four of them. The PDF reader flaw was on almost every laptop and was being exploited in the phishing campaign the threat analytics report described. Ama raised a remediation request for it first.

Software inventory and end-of-support products

The software inventory deserves a separate look, because some exposures have no patch. End-of-support software, such as an old version of a runtime or a database engine that the vendor no longer updates, accumulates vulnerabilities that will never be fixed. Defender Vulnerability Management flags end-of-support versions and upcoming end-of-support dates. On November 9 Ama found 17 devices with an unsupported version of a Java runtime, all used by one supplier ordering tool, and opened a recommendation to uninstall it once the supplier's new web portal replaced the tool. She set the remediation due date for the portal's launch at the end of January 2027 and added an exception until then, with the 17 devices moved to a device group with stricter attack surface reduction rules as a compensating control.

Five days later the exposed count had fallen from 388 to 31, of which 26 were the Finance exception and five were laptops not used since the update. Nadia called that a good week.

Exposure management and attack paths

Microsoft Security Exposure Management, in the Defender portal, widens the view from single devices to the whole attack surface. It builds a graph of assets and their relationships across devices, identities, cloud resources and data, and shows attack paths: chains of exposures, such as a vulnerable device where an administrator has signed in, that would let an attacker reach a critical asset. It also lists initiatives, such as ransomware protection, with metrics that combine settings from several products. Defender for Identity's lateral movement paths in lesson 6 are one input to this graph; Defender for Cloud's cloud attack paths are another.

For SC-200, exposure management sits at the edge of the outline, which focuses on operations, but the hunting objectives now include creating hunting graphs with blast radius, and the graph that powers them is the same one. Ama used it once on November 9 to answer a question Sunil asked: if the PDF reader flaw were used against an executive's laptop, what could the attacker reach? The blast radius view showed the laptop, the executive's mailbox and OneDrive, two SharePoint sites with Confidential financial data, and no path to a domain controller, which gave Sunil a clear answer for the board.

Secure Score and the long view

Microsoft Secure Score measures the tenant's security posture across identity, devices, apps and data as points earned out of points possible, with recommended actions. It is useful for trends and for the board, less useful as a target: chasing points can lead to settings that look good and protect little. Nadia reports two numbers to Sunil monthly, the exposure score from Defender Vulnerability Management and the count of overdue remediation requests, because those reflect real risk being removed.