According to the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024, Microsoft customers face over 600 million cybercriminal and nation-state attacks daily. If left undetected, these attacks could lead to costly business disruptions, ransomware incidents, and theft of high-value data. The question is: can security teams rely solely on native security solutions to stay safe? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Vectra AI has observed a 6x increase in validated compromises in the first half of this year among organizations with Microsoft’s premium security license (E5) deployed. In all cases, Vectra AI was able to detect and stop the attacks.
The reason is while Microsoft is good at helping to prevent a large number of attacks, its native tools fail to provide the coverage and clarity necessary to stop threat actors that have bypassed first-line defenses. Microsoft’s native posture, log collection, and simple rules are not sufficient to find and stop modern attackers. Vectra AI’s comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities are purpose-built to fill these gaps in Microsoft’s native security, finding threats in Microsoft environments before any damage is done.
The Microsoft threat surface problem
Modern attacks against Microsoft infrastructure are no longer limited to a single attack surface. They span networks, endpoints, identities (both human and non-human), SaaS, cloud, and most recently Gen AI.
The following example represents the current state of modern cloud-ware attackers, who spread to the places where the highest-value data resides.
In these cases where posture and prevention fail, AI-driven detection capabilities — correlated across on-premises networks, Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Azure IaaS, Azure PaaS, and the endpoints —are critical to stopping threats.
Enterprise organizations solve the Microsoft threat surface problem with the Vectra AI Platform
“Before we deployed Vectra AI, we had limited visibility into malicious behaviors inside network traffic or Microsoft 365,” says Kevin Orritt, ICT security manager at Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. “We’re impressed by what we can now see.”
Vectra AI fills gaps by providing comprehensive coverage to tackle the Microsoft attack surface problem, AI-driven clarity to remove detection latency, and control capabilities that equip your security team with the answers needed to quickly investigate and confidently lock down compromised accounts in minutes instead of hours.
Coverage to reduce exposure
Vectra’s real-time, agentless, on-premise network threat detection, investigation, and response detects threats across the kill chain, providing east-west coverage for reconnaissance and lateral movement as well as north-south coverage for command and control and exfiltration. AI-driven detection does not rely on signatures, ensuring equally effective coverage for known attack frameworks like Cobalt Strike, as well as unknown and custom frameworks used by the next generation of attackers. It provides visibility not only into just what’s different but instead focuses on attacker behaviors, ensuring that benign activity does not waste security teams’ time. This network-centric coverage enables the earliest detection of attackers who have bypassed EDR and other preventive tools, offering resilient protection for any device, including IoT and OT devices where EDR cannot be deployed.
Vectra detects hybrid attacker techniques missed by Microsoft, such as credential attacks leveraging zero-day techniques and the abuse or privilege credentials for lateral movement. Vectra’s patented privilege access analytics technology finds the actual privilege of an identity against an ideal zero-trust score, ensuring that the moment a credential deviates from the actual privilege, an alert triggers. Coverage extends across the attacker’s identity kill chain, with alerts for attackers targeting credentials through techniques like Kerberoasting, brute force, and explicit protocol abuse of RDP, SSH, NTLM, LDAP, DCERPC, SMB and more.
Vectra detects when attackers first access a Microsoft Entra ID credential but also provides complete coverage what attackers do next, such as identifying cloud privilege abuse, new device registrations, and the creation of backdoor access. The right AI is used across Vectra’s coverage to provide unparalleled visibility. Long lived baselines tracking 20+ attributes of each user’s authentication are looked at simultaneously to find what credentials are under control. Vectra’s behavior-based AI has been proven to provide zero-day coverage for Entra ID by focusing on the privilege of the users and the operations executed. All this coverage is unified within the Vectra platform, connecting network and cloud identity to provide integrated visibility across the Microsoft enterprise.
Vectra detects living-off-the-land attacks in Microsoft 365, monitoring the full M365 attack surface including Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, eDiscovery, Power Automate and SharePoint, enabling full threat monitoring of business critical data.
Vectra detects attackers speeding up their attack by leveraging Microsoft’s Gen AI to speed up the discovery of targeted data that enables them to progress further into the environment or steal high value information.
Vectra’s network threat detection and response coverage extends seamlessly to IaaS environments by leveraging packets to deliver uncompromised threat detection capabilities. It enables complete hybrid visibility, connecting the dots between threats that move seamlessly between on-prem and cloud systems.
Vectra detects attacks against Azure PaaS using both human and non-human credentials, providing hybrid visibility into all critical resources and the Azure infrastructure. This includes monitoring Azure policies, Azure App Service, Azure automation accounts and more.
Endpoint
Vectra’s MXDR service combines signals from EDRs, including Defender for Endpoint, with Vectra’s full capabilities to provide comprehensive coverage for threats targeting endpoints, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. It offers 24x7 monitoring by expert analysts who investigate, respond, and remediate threats, ensuring complete enterprise security.
Clarity to remove latency in threat detection
Risk-Based Threat Prioritization
Vectra’s AI Prioritizes urgent threats before damage is done by correlating observed behaviors against host, human identities and machine identities. AI Prioritization excels at focusing teams on the complete story that requires their attention, maximizing their time by factoring in the observed activity, system class, privilege and custom priority settings.
Unified Attack Correlation Across Hybrid Environments
Correlation algorithms connects the dots between attacker behaviors across On-premise Data Centers, Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and Azure, creating a unified attack narrative for faster, more precise investigations. Each observed attacker event is attributed to an account or machine with the name of the actor – not simply IPs and not indecipherable Object ID, maximizing context for teams and their response time.
Eliminating False Positives and Benign Signals
Our AI filters out benign behaviors and only escalates suspicious events. It combines automated filtering with optional target manual filter to allow security teams to focus on genuine threats without the risk of missing an attack.
Enhanced Metadata for Investigations
Enrich metadata goes beyond what can be collected and processed in any SIEM. Additional AI driven context is added to metadata that unlocks new capabilities for security team with context like asset privilege scores, beacon events, JA3 and true name of the actor and more.
Control to stop attacks and maximize talent
Active Posture Monitoring
Vectra enables teams to shift left by identifying security gaps across networks, identities, cloud services, and GenAI tools like Microsoft Copilot for M365. We actively monitor over 20 AI-enhanced data streams and hundreds of attributes to find how attackers could bypass control in your environment in a future attack with the context to reduce your attack surface
Accelerated Investigations and Intuitive Threat Hunting
Vectra instantly delivers answers to analysts’ top questions from metadata across network, cloud, and identity in every case—without the need to write a single query. When deeper investigation is required, teams have access to all 20 data streams with integrated context, accelerating the path to identifying threats.
Comprehensive Response Capabilities
Vectra’s native integrations with EDR, AD and Entra ID allow security analysts to manually or automatically take the right action at the right time to stop an attacker wherever they are in the environment
Integration with Microsoft Sentinel
Vectra natively integrates with Microsoft Sentinel, enhancing existing workflows, removing the need to manage custom analytics and maximizing teams time.
Uncover your security gaps in Microsoft environments
To effectively address the Microsoft threat surface problem, take the next step to understand your current security gaps. Security teams are encouraged to conduct security tests across their Network, Identity and Cloud environments by utilizing tools that simulate modern attacker behaviors. Vectra AI is here to help you detect attackers the moment they compromise and hunt for the ones that are already in with comprehensive AI-driven defense.
To learn more about the Vectra AI Platform, check out our platform page or schedule a demo now.