Category Archives: Security

AzureAD, Identity, Microsoft Cloud App Security, Security

Sensitive group protection

02/10/2020 JosL Leave a comment

It is best practise in IT to secure access to resources with Groups.

Membership of a security group means access to whatever resources are secured by that group. Sometimes these groups are self-managed by an owner, sometimes centrally.

In all cases, fairly low privileged users, that are not global admins, can add users to these groups including themselves. Imagine that you have a group called ‘Global Admins’, and your helpdesk user assigns himself to that group. You’d like to know right?

With Privileged Access Groups in Azure AD (Preview) you can protect groups like these actively, but, this requires a P2 license and still lacks some customization features.

An alternative method is to use a simple alerting rule in MCAS (Microsoft Cloud App Security), where you set an alert when ‘someone’ joins a specific group, or if you want to do more than alerting you could also run an automation playbook.

Here’s how to protect a specific Azure AD or Office 365 group with MCAS:

look up its GUID in AzureAD
Create an Activity Policy in the MCAS console
Specify the group GUID as ‘Activity object ID’ in the policy and the correct action type:

AzureAD, EMS, Exchange Online, Intune, Microsoft Teams, Office 365, OneDrive for Business, Security, Sharepoint Online

Comparing M365 suites

06/09/2019 JosL Leave a comment

A full overview of all Microsoft 365 (Business, F1, E3 and E5) plans and their features in a table for your convenience 🙂

Comparing Microsoft’s 365 offers

Azure, AzureAD, Identity, Security

Azure AD sign in and audit log retention

11/04/2019 JosL 2 Comments

Often we, as cloud admins, need our audit or sign in logs. Usually, we need real-time data because, for example, we’re debugging why that one user has conditional access issues. But sometimes, we need to go back further than 30 days. And that is not something Azure does by default, but can be enabled:

Our options when exporting logs are limited to a Storage account, Log Analytics or an Event Hub. All these options offer multiple extraction methods to cover your transport needs to other systems. The default retention period is then forever, which is nice as we might need audit info going back a bit as hacks are usually discovered after about 206 days.

If you don’t have specific tools or requirements, I recommend setting up a Log Analytics workspace and connecting that to Azure AD:

Whichever method you choose, a P1 or P2 license is required. You only need a single license for the entire tenant when using the export audit / singin log functionality of AzureAD. Once configured, the Logs option directly bring you to the Log Analytics workspace search results:

I’ve briefly shown how to configure AzureAD to send audit and sign in logs to Log Analytics so you can go back further than 30 days. Stay tuned for the next post that will utilize these logs to dive deeper into Guest User activity.

Automation, AzureAD, EMS, Intune, Powershell, Security

Devices that lack a bitlocker recovery key in AzureAD

09/04/2019 JosL 11 Comments

With Intune’s new Bitlocker Encryption Report administrators have an effective way of seeing which of their devices have been encrypted.

But if we want to know if we can actually recover the bitlocker key of a device, we need to know if it was ever uploaded to AzureAD.

Network or local device issues can sometimes prevent the recovery key from reaching AzureAD, resulting in lost data if the device’s disk needs to be recovered for any reason. To hunt down devices that have not escrowed their recovery key to AzureAD, you can use my report function (in PowerShell as always):