Edit

DLP content inspection in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

  • Article

If you enable content inspection, you can choose to use preset expressions or to search for other customized expressions.

You can specify a regular expression to exclude a file from the results. This option is highly useful if you have an inner classification keyword standard that you want to exclude from the policy.

You can decide set the minimum number of content violations that you want to match before the file is considered a violation. For example, you can choose 10 if you want to be alerted on files with at least 10 credit card numbers found within its content.

When content is matched against the selected expression, the violation text is replaced with "X" characters. By default, violations are masked and shown in their context displaying 100 characters before and after the violation. Numbers in the context of the expression are replaced with "#" characters and are never stored within Defender for Cloud Apps. When creating a file policy, if you've enabled an inspection method, then you can select the option to Unmask the last four characters of a match to unmask the last four characters of the violation itself. It's necessary to set which data types the regular expression searches: content, metadata and/or file name. By default it searches the content and the metadata.

Content inspection for protected files

Defender for Cloud Apps allows admins to grant Defender for Cloud Apps permission to decrypt encrypted files and scan their content for violations. This consent is also required to enable scanning labels on encrypted files.

In order to give Defender for Cloud Apps the necessary permissions:

  1. Go to Settings and then Microsoft Information Protection.
  2. Under Inspect protected files, select Grant permission to grant Defender for Cloud Apps permission in Microsoft Entra ID.
  3. Follow the prompt to allow the required permissions in Microsoft Entra ID.
  4. You can configure the settings per file policy to determine which policies will scan protected files.

Next steps

Control cloud apps with policies

If you run into any problems, we're here to help. To get assistance or support for your product issue, please open a support ticket.