Microsoft SC-900 - Microsoft Security Compliance and Identity Fundamentals

Security Center

Microsoft Secure Score for Devices

Artikel

12.05.2022

3 Minuten Lesedauer

Applies to:

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management

Microsoft 365 Defender

Some information relates to pre-released product which may be substantially modified before it ' s commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here.

To sign up for the Defender Vulnerability Management public preview or if you have any questions, contact us (mdvmtrial@microsoft.com).

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Configuration score is now part of vulnerability management as Microsoft Secure Score for Devices.

Your score for devices is visible in the Defender Vulnerability Management dashboard of the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. A higher Microsoft Secure Score for Devices means your endpoints are more resilient from cybersecurity threat attacks. It reflects the collective security configuration state of your devices across the following categories:

Application

Operating system

Network

Accounts

Security controls

Select a category to go to the Security recommendations page and view the relevant recommendations.

Turn on the Microsoft Secure Score connector

Forward Microsoft Defender for Endpoint signals, giving Microsoft Secure Score visibility into the device security posture. Forwarded data is stored and processed in the same location as your Microsoft Secure Score data.

Changes might take up to a few hours to reflect in the dashboard.

In the navigation pane, go to Settings > Endpoints > General > Advanced features

Scroll down to Microsoft Secure Score and toggle the setting to On.

Select Save preferences.

How it works

Microsoft Secure Score for Devices currently supports configurations set via Group Policy. Due to the current partial Intune support, configurations which might have been set through Intune might show up as misconfigured. Contact your IT Administrator to verify the actual configuration status in case your organization is using Intune for secure configuration management.

The data in the Microsoft Secure Score for Devices card is the product of meticulous and ongoing vulnerability discovery process. It is aggregated with configuration discovery assessments that continuously:

Compare collected configurations to the collected benchmarks to discover misconfigured assets

Map configurations to vulnerabilities that can be remediated or partially remediated (risk reduction)

Collect and maintain best practice configuration benchmarks (vendors, security feeds, internal research teams)

Collect and monitor changes of security control configuration state from all assets

Explanation

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) access reviews enable organizations to efficiently manage group memberships, access to enterprise applications, and role assignments.

In Microsoft Defender for Cloud, the metric that represents the overall security health of your Azure subscription is secure score. Microsoft’s documentation explains: “Secure score provides an aggregated view of your security posture across your subscriptions and resources. It’s based on security recommendations; addressing those recommendations improves your score.” Defender for Cloud calculates secure score by assessing controls and recommendations mapped to standards, then weighting them by risk and importance: “Each recommendation contributes to the secure score. Completing remediation steps increases the score and reduces risk.” This single percentage view lets security teams quickly gauge how well current configurations and protections align with Microsoft’s security best practices and regulatory mappings. Other elements surfaced in Defender for Cloud—like “resource health,” “status of recommendations,” or “completed controls”—are components and statuses that feed into or relate to the scoring model, but the overall subscription security health indicator presented and tracked over time is secure score.

Microsoft’s Security, Compliance, and Identity materials describe Azure Policy as the governance service that lets you “create, assign, and manage policies” so resources “stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements.” Policies are enforced through effects such as Deny, Audit, Append, AuditIfNotExists, DeployIfNotExists, and Modify, which enable organizations to block non-compliant creations, append required settings, or deploy configuration automatically at the time of creation. The documentation further explains that Azure Policy “supports remediation of existing resources” by running remediation tasks for policies that use DeployIfNotExists or Modify, allowing Azure Policy to automatically bring resources into compliance without manual intervention.

Evaluation is continuous, not only at create or update time. Azure Policy “evaluates resources at deployment and regularly re-evaluates compliance,” and admins can also trigger on-demand scans. This means compliance state is updated both when a resource is created/changed and during periodic background assessments, ensuring drift is detected and corrected. Together, these capabilities allow Azure Policy to enforce standards for new resources, auto-remediate existing ones, and provide ongoing compliance posture—which is why the first two statements are Yes, while the claim that evaluation occurs only on create/modify is No.

Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure Advanced Threat Protection, also known as Azure ATP) is a cloud-based security solution that leverages your on-premises Active Directory signals to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions directed at your organization.

Microsoft Entra ID Protection is designed to detect and respond to identity compromise by calculating user risk and sign-in risk and surfacing risk detections such as “leaked credentials,” “anonymous IP address,” “impossible travel,” and related signals. Microsoft explains that Identity Protection “uses adaptive machine learning and threat intelligence to detect risky users and risky sign-ins and assigns each a risk level of Low, Medium, or High.” These detections include “Leaked credentials (found on public or dark-web lists)”, confirming that Identity Protection can detect when user credentials have been exposed.

ID Protection is integrated with Conditional Access to take policy-driven actions: “Risk-based Conditional Access policies let you require multi-factor authentication (MFA), block access, or require password change when a user or sign-in risk level is met.” The built-in policies include User risk policy and Sign-in risk policy, which can automatically enforce MFA or password reset when the configured risk threshold is reached.

However, Identity Protection does not manage Azure AD group membership. There is no capability to add users to groups based on risk level; group membership changes are outside the scope of Identity Protection’s controls. Instead, remediation is applied through Conditional Access or password reset policies driven by the calculated risk.

Therefore: adding users to groups based on risk (No); detecting leaked credentials (Yes); invoking MFA based on risk via Conditional Access (Yes).

In the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure, the methodology is organized into sequential stages that guide an organization from initial intent through operations. Microsoft describes the flow as: “Strategy → Plan → Ready → Adopt → Govern → Manage.” The guidance explains that before building landing zones or preparing environments (Ready), organizations should complete the Strategy and Plan work. Microsoft states that the framework “helps you create and align your business strategy, define business outcomes, and justify cloud adoption” in the Strategy stage; then, in Plan, you “translate that strategy into an actionable adoption plan, rationalize portfolios, and prepare a cloud adoption backlog.” Only after these two stages does the Ready phase occur, where you “prepare your cloud environment (landing zone) to host the workloads.”

Additionally, CAF emphasizes that Govern and Manage are ongoing disciplines that operate alongside and after adoption rather than preceding Ready: “Govern and Manage provide iterative guardrails and operational baselines that evolve as you adopt more workloads.” Therefore, the two phases addressed before the Ready phase are Define Strategy and Plan, aligning with Microsoft’s prescribed order and intent of the Cloud Adoption Framework methodology.

Microsoft positions Compliance Manager as a capability available inside the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center (now Microsoft Purview compliance portal). In Microsoft’s SCI learning content, Compliance Manager is described as the centralized workspace in the compliance portal that “helps you manage your organization’s compliance requirements,” providing a compliance score, pre-built and custom assessments, and improvement actions you track and assign. The documentation explains that admins “use the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center to access Compliance Manager,” where they can review the score, map controls to regulations and standards, and manage evidence and testing of controls. It also clarifies that Compliance Manager is surfaced directly in the compliance portal navigation, enabling authorized roles (such as Compliance Administrator, Global Administrator, or Compliance Data Administrator) to open the Compliance Manager blade to create or view assessments, assign actions, and review detailed guidance. By contrast, the Microsoft 365 admin center focuses on tenant, billing, and user management; the Microsoft 365 Defender portal focuses on security operations and threat protection; and the Microsoft Support portal is for service requests. Therefore, the direct and intended entry point for Compliance Manager is the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is designed to prevent the inadvertent or inappropriate sharing of sensitive data across Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft’s guidance states that DLP “helps you discover, monitor, and protect sensitive items across Microsoft 365,” and that with DLP policies you can “identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive items in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams.” This directly supports option C, because DLP can detect sensitive info in OneDrive documents and automatically apply protective actions such as blocking external sharing, restricting access, or auditing the event.

DLP also provides end-user coaching through policy tips: “Policy tips are informative notices that appear when users are working with content that contains sensitive info … to help prevent data loss.” When a user is about to send or share sensitive data in violation of policy, these tips surface in Outlook and Office apps (including when files are stored in SharePoint/OneDrive), aligning with option A.

By contrast, enabling disk encryption (e.g., BitLocker) and applying device security baselines are endpoint/device management tasks handled through Microsoft Intune or Group Policy—not by DLP. Therefore, A and C are the correct tasks you can implement with Microsoft 365 DLP policies.