T1550 Use Alternate Authentication Material

This diagnostic statement implements security controls and restrictions for remote user access to systems. Remote user access control involves managing and securing how users remotely access systems, such as through encrypted connections and account use policies, which help prevent adversary access.

This diagnostic statement provides for the implementation of secure development practices, such as implementing token binding strategies which can help prevent malicious use of application access tokens.

This diagnostic statement protects against Use Alternate Authentication Material through the use of privileged account management and the use of multi-factor authentication.

This diagnostic statement protects against Use Alternate Authentication Material through the use of privileged account management. Employing auditing, privilege access management, and just in time access protects against adversaries trying to obtain illicit access to critical systems.

This diagnostic statement provide protection from adversaries that may possibly attack via alternate authentication methods. Various methods should be used to protect data-in-transit including encryption, password hashing, and tokenization.

This diagnostic statement protects against Use Alternate Authentication Material through the use of revocation of keys and key management. Employing key protection strategies for key material used for identity management and authentication processes, limitations to specific accounts along with access control mechanisms provides protection against adversaries trying to use alternate authentication material.

This diagnostic statement provides for implementing tools and measures for such as allowing/denying types of third-party applications which can help prevent adversary use of alternate authentication material.

This diagnostic statement describes how the organization implement appropriate authentication requirements, including selecting mechanisms based on risk, utilizing multi-factor authentication where necessary, and safeguarding the storage of authenticators like pins and passwords to protect sensitive access credentials.

This diagnostic statement provides protections for production environments. Measures such as network segmentation and access control reduce the attack surface, restrict movement by adversaries, and protect critical assets and data from compromise.

This diagnostic statement protects against Use Alternate Authentication Material through the use of hardened access control policies, secure defaults, password complexity requirements, multifactor authentication requirements, and removal of terminated accounts.

This diagnostic statement protects against Use Alternate Authentication Material through the use of DevSecOps, secure development lifecycle, and application developer guidance. Exploitable weaknesses can be mitigated through secure code, reduced vulnerabilities, and secure design principles.

This control provides minimal coverage of half of this technique's sub-techniques, without additional coverage of procedure examples, resulting in an overall score of Minimal.

This control may mitigate application access token theft if the application is configured to retrieve temporary security credentials using an IAM role.

This control provides partial detection for some of this technique's sub-techniques (due to unknown false-positive/true-positive rate), resulting in a Partial score.

Microsoft Defender security alerts explain the suspicious activities detected by Defender for Identity sensors on your network, and the actors and computers involved in each threat. Alert evidence lists contain direct links to the involved users and computers, to help make your investigations easy and direct. Defender security alerts are divided into the following categories or phases, like the phases seen in a typical cyber-attack kill chain. Learn more about each phase, the alerts designed to detect each attack, and how to use the alerts to help protect your network using the following links: Reconnaissance and discovery alerts Persistence and privilege escalation alerts Credential access alerts Lateral movement alerts Other alerts License: A Microsoft 365 security product license entitles customer use of Microsoft Defender XDR.

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken. It can be found at Microsoft Secure Score in the Microsoft Defender portal. Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices. Your score is updated in real time to reflect the information presented in the visualizations and recommended action pages. Secure Score also syncs daily to receive system data about your achieved points for each action. To help you find the information you need more quickly, Microsoft recommended actions are organized into groups: Identity (Microsoft Entra accounts & roles) Device (Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, known as Microsoft Secure Score for Devices) Apps (email and cloud apps, including Office 365 and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps) Data (through Microsoft Information Protection)

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken. It can be found at Microsoft Secure Score in the Microsoft Defender portal. Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices. Your score is updated in real time to reflect the information presented in the visualizations and recommended action pages. Secure Score also syncs daily to receive system data about your achieved points for each action. To help you find the information you need more quickly, Microsoft recommended actions are organized into groups: Identity (Microsoft Entra accounts & roles) Device (Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, known as Microsoft Secure Score for Devices) Apps (email and cloud apps, including Office 365 and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps) Data (through Microsoft Information Protection)

This control provides recommendations that lead to protections for some of the sub-techniques of this technique. Due to it only providing a recommendation, its score has been capped at Partial.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 includes powerful automated investigation and response (AIR) capabilities that can save your security operations team time and effort. As alerts are triggered, it's up to your security operations team to review, prioritize, and respond to those alerts. Keeping up with the volume of incoming alerts can be overwhelming. Automating some of those tasks can help. AIR enables your security operations team to operate more efficiently and effectively. AIR capabilities include automated investigation processes in response to well-known threats that exist today. Appropriate remediation actions await approval, enabling your security operations team to respond effectively to detected threats. With AIR, your security operations team can focus on higher-priority tasks without losing sight of important alerts that are triggered. Examples include: Soft delete email messages or clusters, Block URL (time-of-click), Turn off external mail forwarding, Turn off delegation, etc. Required licenses E5 or Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 licenses.

An incident in Microsoft Defender XDR is a collection of correlated alerts and associated data that make up the story of an attack. Microsoft 365 services and apps create alerts when they detect a suspicious or malicious event or activity. Individual alerts provide valuable clues about a completed or ongoing attack. Attacks typically employ various techniques against different types of entities, such as devices, users, and mailboxes. The result of this is multiple alerts for multiple entities in your tenant. Piecing the individual alerts together to gain insight into an attack can be challenging and time-consuming, Microsoft Defender XDR automatically aggregates the alerts and their associated information into an incident. A typical Incident Response workflow in Microsoft Defender XDR begins with a triage action, next is the investigate action, and finally is the response action. Microsoft 365 Defender Incident Response responds to use alternate authentication material attacks due to Incident Response monitoring for third-party application logging, messaging, and/or other artifacts that may use alternate authentication material, and suspicious account behavior across systems that share accounts. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender XDR

Defender for Identity LMPs are visual guides that help you quickly understand and identify exactly how attackers can move laterally inside your network. The purpose of lateral movements within the cyber-attack kill chain are for attackers to gain and compromise your sensitive accounts using non-sensitive accounts. Compromising your sensitive accounts gets them another step closer to their ultimate goal, domain dominance. To stop these attacks from being successful, Defender for Identity LMPs give you easy to interpret, direct visual guidance on your most vulnerable, sensitive accounts.

M365's Defender Attack Simulation Training allows organizations to automate the simulation of benign real-world cyberattacks. These simulation automations feature social engineering techniques, payloads, and can start on an automated schedule. This detection focused security control partially improves organizations security posture by continuously conduct attack simulations that fine tune analytics, and provide hands-on training for users and cyber professionals to improve response capabilities. The following social engineering techniques are available: Credential Harvest: Attempts to collect credentials by taking users to a well-known looking website with input boxes to submit a username and password. Malware Attachment: Adds a malicious attachment to a message. When the user opens the attachment, arbitrary code is run that helps the attacker compromise the target's device. Link in Attachment: A type of credential harvest hybrid. An attacker inserts a URL into an email attachment. The URL within the attachment follows the same technique as credential harvest. Link to Malware: Runs some arbitrary code from a file hosted on a well-known file sharing service. The message sent to the user contains a link to this malicious file, opening the file and helping the attacker compromise the target's device. Drive-by URL: The malicious URL in the message takes the user to a familiar-looking website that silently runs and/or installs code on the user's device. OAuth Consent Grant: The malicious URL asks users to grant permissions to data for a malicious Azure Application. License Requirements: Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2.

M365's Defender Attack Simulation Training allows organizations to automate the simulation of benign real-world cyberattacks. These simulation automations feature social engineering techniques, payloads, and can start on an automated schedule. This detection focused security control partially improves organizations security posture by continuously conduct attack simulations that fine tune analytics, and provide hands-on training for users and cyber professionals to improve response capabilities. The following social engineering techniques are available: Credential Harvest: Attempts to collect credentials by taking users to a well-known looking website with input boxes to submit a username and password. Malware Attachment: Adds a malicious attachment to a message. When the user opens the attachment, arbitrary code is run that helps the attacker compromise the target's device. Link in Attachment: A type of credential harvest hybrid. An attacker inserts a URL into an email attachment. The URL within the attachment follows the same technique as credential harvest. Link to Malware: Runs some arbitrary code from a file hosted on a well-known file sharing service. The message sent to the user contains a link to this malicious file, opening the file and helping the attacker compromise the target's device. Drive-by URL: The malicious URL in the message takes the user to a familiar-looking website that silently runs and/or installs code on the user's device. OAuth Consent Grant: The malicious URL asks users to grant permissions to data for a malicious Azure Application. License Requirements: Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2.