Determine Response Strategy
Implementation Effort: Medium
Security and IT teams must define incident response workflows, configure automation rules, and align remediation actions with organizational policies and threat severity.
User Impact: Low
Response strategies are executed by security operations teams; end users are not directly involved.
Overview
Determining a response strategy in Microsoft Defender for Servers involves planning how your organization will detect, investigate, contain, and recover from security incidents affecting server workloads. This strategy is implemented through the Microsoft Defender portal and integrates with Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel.
Key Components of a Response Strategy
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Incident Triage:
- Prioritize incidents based on severity, scope, and affected assets.
- Use filters and tags to manage the incident queue efficiently 1.
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Investigation:
- Analyze the attack story and alert story to understand the origin and impact.
- Use the graph view to explore affected users, devices, and entities.
- Leverage the Evidence and Response tab for forensic data 1.
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Containment & Eradication:
- Isolate compromised devices.
- Disable affected user accounts.
- Block malicious IPs or domains 1.
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Recovery:
- Restore affected systems to a known good state.
- Re-enable services and users after validation.
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Post-Incident Review:
- Document findings and update incident response playbooks.
- Use Threat Analytics to understand broader attack trends.
- Adjust security configurations and policies as needed 1.
Tools That Support Response Strategy
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Detects and surfaces alerts and recommendations for server workloads 2.
- Microsoft Defender XDR: Provides guided response actions and AI-driven remediation suggestions 3.
- Microsoft Sentinel: Enables automation of incident triage and response workflows.
Failing to define a clear response strategy can delay containment and increase the impact of security incidents. This capability supports the "Assume Breach" and "Verify Explicitly" principles of Zero Trust by ensuring rapid, informed, and consistent responses to threats.