Defender XDR Unified Detections Meet Sentinel Data Lake

With the Unified Security Operations Platform (USOP), Microsoft introduces Unified Detections - a single detection framework spanning both Sentinel and Defender XDR data. Pair this with native Sentinel Data Lake ingestion for XDR tables, and you have a compelling cost-optimization story. But is it ready for prime time? Let’s dive into the capabilities, current limitations, and what it means for your detection strategy. Architecture Overview Previous Detection Architecture In the ‘previous’ architecture, detections were created and managed separately for Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR. This often led to overhead in terms of ‘where to create the detection’. Let’s take the use-case of IoC (Indicators of Compromise) based detections. Previously, if a security team wanted to create a detection based on IoCs imported via TAXII into Sentinel and the DeviceNetworkEvents table, they would need to ingest the DeviceNetworkEvents data into Sentinel as well and create the detection rule there. Furthermore, many MSSPs leveraged this pattern to create custom detections for their customers across Defender Advanced Hunting Data. ...

February 24, 2026 · 10 min · 2101 words · Nicola Suter

Enriching Microsoft Sentinel tables with eligible Entra directory roles

Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel provide an IdentityInfo table that contains various information that is helpful for threat hunting and detections. One key piece are also the assigned Entra directory roles for a specific identity. Unfortunately only permanently assigned permissions are covered and in times of Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) we should have standing permissions only for non-privileged roles and break-glass accounts. Within this blog post I want to share a few tips and tricks to answer the following questions with Sentinel and a little bit of scripting and KQL: ...

November 17, 2023 · 5 min · 1047 words · Nicola Suter

Maintaining Microsoft Sentinel Analytic Rules in JSON and YAML with GitHub Actions

Microsoft Sentinel Analytic Rules can be shared in both the YAML and ARM format, whereas the ARM format leverages JSON as file type. Within… Microsoft Sentinel Analytic Rules can be shared in both the YAML and ARM format, whereas the ARM format leverages JSON as file type. Within this short post I want to demonstrate an approach that leverages a GitHub Action to automatically build and update the rules in YAML format — so you can just export and update existing rules without any manual conversion effort. ...

November 13, 2023 · 4 min · 650 words · Nicola Suter

You must not touch my endpoint security settings!

Intune Endpoint Security Configuration Settings have become the way to go for configuring security features on various platforms. What did start with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint settings for Windows clients has evolved to settings for macOS, Windows Servers and is treated like a first class citizen. So it is important to guard those sensitive configurations as they control (and can potentially disable) vital security features on endpoints such as defender tamper protection, attack surface reduction rules, firewall and many more. ...

March 12, 2023 · 3 min · 634 words · Nicola Suter