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Review and manage remediation actions in Office 365

Tip

Did you know you can try the features in Microsoft Defender XDR for Office 365 Plan 2 for free? Use the 90-day Defender for Office 365 trial at the Microsoft Defender portal trials hub. Learn about who can sign up and trial terms on Try Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

As automated investigations on email & collaboration content result in verdicts, such as Malicious or Suspicious, certain remediation actions are created. In Microsoft Defender for Office 365, remediation actions can include:

  • Soft deleting email messages or clusters
  • Turning off external mail forwarding

These remediation actions are not taken unless and until your security operations team approves them. We recommend reviewing and approving any pending actions as soon as possible so that your automated investigations complete in a timely manner. You need to be part of Search & purge role before taking any actions.

We've added additional checks for duplicate or overlapping investigations with the same clusters approved multiple times. If the same investigation cluster is already approved in the previous hour, new duplicate remediation will not be processed again. This behavior doesn't remove duplicate investigations or investigation evidence - it simply de-duplicates approved actions to improve remediation processing speed. For the duplicate approved cluster investigations, you won't see action details in the action center side panel.

Approve (or reject) pending actions

There are four different ways to find and take auto investigation actions:

Incident queue

  1. In the Microsoft Defender portal at https://security.microsoft.com, go to the Incidents page at Incidents & alerts > Incidents. To go directly to the Incidents page, use https://security.microsoft.com/incidents.
  2. Filter on Pending action for the Automated investigation state (optional).
  3. On the Incidents page, select an incident name to open its summary page.
  4. Select the Evidence and Response tab.
  5. Select an item in the list to open its flyout pane.
  6. Review the information, and then take one of the following steps:
    • Select the Approve pending action option to initiate a pending action.
    • Select the Reject pending action option to prevent a pending action from being taken.

Action center

  1. In the Microsoft Defender portal at https://security.microsoft.com, go to the Action center page by selecting Action center. To go directly to the Action center page, use https://security.microsoft.com/action-center/pending.
  2. On the Action center page, verify that the Pending tab is selected, and then review the list of actions that are awaiting approval.
    • Select Open investigation page to view more details about the investigation.
    • Select Approve to initiate a pending action.
    • Select Reject to prevent a pending action from being taken.

Note

Pending actions time out after awaiting approval for one week.

Investigation and remediation investigations queue

  1. In the Microsoft Defender portal at https://security.microsoft.com, go to the Threat investigation page at Email & collaboration > Investigations. To go directly to the Threat investigation page, use https://security.microsoft.com/airinvestigation.
  2. On the Threat investigation page, find and an item from the list whose status is Pending action.
  3. Click Open in new window on the list time (between ID and Status).
  4. In the page that opens, take approve or reject actions.

Change or undo one remediation action

There are two different ways to reconsider submitted actions:

Change or undo through the unified action center

  1. In the Microsoft Defender portal at https://security.microsoft.com, go to the unified action center by selecting Action center. To go directly to the unified action center, use https://security.microsoft.com/action-center/.
  2. On the Action center page, select the History tab, and then select the action that you want to change or undo.
  3. In the pane on the right side of the screen, select the appropriate action (move to inbox, move to junk, move to deleted items, soft delete, or hard delete).

Change or undo through the Office action center

  1. In the Microsoft Defender portal at https://security.microsoft.com, go to the Office action center at Email & collaboration > Review > Action center. To go directly to the Office action center, use https://security.microsoft.com/threatincidents.
  2. On the Action center page, select the appropriate remediation.
  3. In the side panel, click on the mail submissions entry and wait for the list to load.
  4. Wait for the Action button at the top to enable and select the Action button to change the action type.
  5. This will create the appropriate actions.

Next steps

See also