How Defender for Cloud Apps helps protect your Office 365 environment

Note

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is now part of Microsoft 365 Defender and can be accessed through its portal at: https://security.microsoft.com. Microsoft 365 Defender correlates signals from the Microsoft Defender suite across endpoints, identities, email, and SaaS apps to provide incident-level detection, investigation, and powerful response capabilities. It improves your operational efficiency with better prioritization and shorter response times which protect your organization more effectively. For more information about these changes, see Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps in Microsoft 365 Defender.

As a major productivity suite providing cloud file storage, collaboration, BI, and CRM tools, Office 365 enables your users to share their documents across your organization and partners in a streamlined and efficient way. Using Office 365 may expose your sensitive data not only internally, but also to external collaborators, or even worse make it publicly available via a shared link. Such incidents might occur due to malicious actor, or by an unaware employee. Office 365 also provides a large third-party app eco-system to help boost productivity. Using these apps can expose your organization to the risk of malicious apps or use of apps with excessive permissions.

Connecting Office 365 to Defender for Cloud Apps gives you improved insights into your users' activities, provides threat detection using machine learning based anomaly detections, information protection detections (such as detecting external information sharing), enables automated remediation controls, and detects threats from enabled third-party apps in your organization.

Defender for Cloud Apps integrates directly with Office 365's audit logs and provides protection for all supported services. For a list of supported services, see Microsoft 365 services that support auditing.

File scanning improvements for Office 365 (New!)

Defender for Cloud Apps has added new file scanning improvements for SharePoint and OneDrive:

• Faster near-real-time scanning speed for files in SharePoint and OneDrive.

• Better identification for a file's access level in SharePoint: file access level in SharePoint will be marked by default as Internal, and not as Private (since every file in SharePoint is accessible by the site owner, and not only by the file owner).

  Note

  This change could impact your file policies (if a file policy is looking for Internal or Private files in SharePoint).

Main threats

• Compromised accounts and insider threats
• Data leakage
• Insufficient security awareness
• Malicious third-party apps
• Malware
• Phishing
• Ransomware
• Unmanaged bring your own device (BYOD)

How Defender for Cloud Apps helps to protect your environment

• Detect cloud threats, compromised accounts, and malicious insiders
• Discover, classify, label, and protect regulated and sensitive data stored in the cloud
• Discover and manage OAuth apps that have access to your environment
• Enforce DLP and compliance policies for data stored in the cloud
• Limit exposure of shared data and enforce collaboration policies
• Use the audit trail of activities for forensic investigations

Control Office 365 with built-in policies and policy templates

You can use the following built-in policy templates to detect and notify you about potential threats:

Type	Name
Built-in anomaly detection policy	Activity from anonymous IP addresses Activity from infrequent country Activity from suspicious IP addresses Impossible travel Activity performed by terminated user (requires Azure AD as IdP) Malware detection Multiple failed login attempts Ransomware detection Suspicious email deletion activity (Preview) Suspicious inbox forwarding Unusual file deletion activities Unusual file share activities Unusual multiple file download activities
Activity policy template	Logon from a risky IP address Mass download by a single user Potential ransomware activity Access level change (Teams) External user added (Teams) Mass deletion (Teams)
File policy template	Detect a file shared with an unauthorized domain Detect a file shared with personal email addresses Detect files with PII/PCI/PHI
OAuth app anomaly detection policy	Misleading OAuth app name Misleading publisher name for an OAuth app Malicious OAuth app consent

For more information about creating policies, see Create a policy.

Automate governance controls

In addition to monitoring for potential threats, you can apply and automate the following Office 365 governance actions to remediate detected threats:

Type	Action
Data governance	OneDrive: - Inherit parent folder permissions - Make file/folder private - Put file/folder in admin quarantine - Put file/folder in user quarantine - Trash file/folder - Remove a specific collaborator - Remove external collaborators on file/folder - Apply Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity label - Remove Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity label SharePoint: - Inherit parent folder permissions - Make file/folder private - Put file/folder in admin quarantine - Put file/folder in user quarantine - Put file/folder in user quarantine and add owner permissions - Trash file/folder - Remove external collaborators on file/folder - Remove a specific collaborator - Apply Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity label - Remove Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity label
User governance	- Notify user on alert (via Azure AD) - Require user to sign in again (via Azure AD) - Suspend user (via Azure AD)
OAuth app governance	- Revoke OAuth app permission

For more information about remediating threats from apps, see Governing connected apps.

Protect Office 365 in real time

Review our best practices for securing and collaborating with external users and blocking and protecting the download of sensitive data to unmanaged or risky devices.

Next steps

How to connect Office 365 to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps