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Investigate a user account in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

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Applies to:

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Investigate user account entities

Identify user accounts with the most active alerts (displayed on dashboard as "Users at risk") and investigate cases of potential compromised credentials, or pivot on the associated user account when investigating an alert or device to identify possible lateral movement between devices with that user account.

You can find user account information in the following views:

  • Dashboard
  • Alert queue
  • Device details page

A clickable user account link is available in these views, which take you to the user account details page where more details about the user account are shown.

When you investigate a user account entity, you can see:

  • User account details, Microsoft Defender for Identity alerts, and logged on devices, role, logon type, and other details
  • Overview of the incidents and user's devices
  • Alerts related to this user
  • Observed in organization (devices logged on to)

The user account entity details page

User details

The User details pane on left provides information about the user, such as related open incidents, active alerts, SAM name, SID, Microsoft Defender for Identity alerts, number of devices the user is logged on to, when the user was first and last seen, role, and logon types. Depending on the integration features you've enabled, you can see other details. For example, if you enable the Skype for business integration, you're able to contact the user from the portal. The Azure ATP alerts section contains a link that takes you to the Microsoft Defender for Identity page, if you've enabled the Microsoft Defender for Identity feature, and there are alerts related to the user. The Microsoft Defender for Identity page provides more information about the alerts.

Note

You'll need to enable the integration on both Microsoft Defender for Identity and Defender for Endpoint to use this feature. In Defender for Endpoint, you can enable this feature in advanced features. For more information on how to enable advanced features, see Turn on advanced features.

The Overview, Alerts, and Observed in organization are different tabs that display various attributes about the user account.

Note

For Linux devices, information about logged in users is not displayed.

Overview

The Overview tab shows the incidents details and a list of the devices that the user has logged on to. You can expand these to see details of the log-on events for each device.

Alerts

The Alerts tab provides a list of alerts that are associated with the user account. This list is a filtered view of the Alert queue, and shows alerts where the user context is the selected user account, the date when the last activity was detected, a short description of the alert, the device associated with the alert, the alert's severity, the alert's status in the queue, and who is assigned the alert.

Observed in organization

The Observed in organization tab allows you to specify a date range to see a list of devices where this user was observed logged on to, the most frequent and least frequent logged on user account for each of these devices, and total observed users on each device.

Selecting an item on the Observed in organization table expands the item, revealing more details about the device. Directly selecting a link within an item sends you to the corresponding page.

Search for specific user accounts

  1. Select User from the Search bar drop-down menu.
  2. Enter the user account in the Search field.
  3. Click the search icon or press Enter.

A list of users matching the query text is displayed. You can see the user account's domain and name, when the user account was last seen, and the total number of devices it was observed logged on to in the last 30 days.

You can filter the results by the following time periods:

  • 1 day
  • 3 days
  • 7 days
  • 30 days
  • 6 months

Tip

Do you want to learn more? Engage with the Microsoft Security community in our Tech Community: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Tech Community.