Manage incidents in Microsoft Defender

Article
08/21/2024
Applies to:

Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel in the Microsoft Defender portal

Incident management is critical to ensuring that incidents are named, assigned, and tagged to optimize time in your incident workflow and more quickly contain and address threats.

You can manage incidents from Incidents & alerts > Incidents on the quick launch of the Microsoft Defender portal (security.microsoft.com). Here's an example.

Here are the ways you can manage your incidents:

Edit the incident name.
Assign or change severity.
Add incident tags.
Assign the incident to a user account.
Resolve them.
Specify its classification.
Add comments.
Assess the activity audit and add comments in the Activity log.
Export incident data to PDF.

You can manage incidents from the Manage incident pane for an incident. Here's an example.

You can display this pane from the Manage incident link on the:

Alert story page.
Properties pane of an incident in the incident queue.
Summary page of an incident.
Manage incident option located on the upper right side of the Incident page.

In cases where you want to move alerts from one incident to another, you can also do so from the Alerts tab, thus creating a larger or smaller incident that includes all relevant alerts.

Edit the incident name

Microsoft Defender automatically assigns a name based on alert attributes such as the number of endpoints affected, users affected, detection sources or categories. The incident name allows you to quickly understand the scope of the incident. For example: Multi-stage incident on multiple endpoints reported by multiple sources.

You can edit the incident name from the Incident name field on the Manage incident pane.

Note

Incidents that existed before the rollout of the automatic incident naming feature will retain their name.

Assign or change incident severity

You can assign or change the severity of an incident from the Severity field on the Manage incident pane. The severity of an incident is determined by the highest severity of the alerts associated with it. The severity of an incident can be set to high, medium, low, or informational.

Add incident tags

You can add custom tags to an incident, for example to flag a group of incidents with a common characteristic. You can later filter the incident queue for all incidents that contain a specific tag.

The option to select from a list of previously used and selected tags appear after you start typing.

An incident can have system tags and/or custom tags with certain color backgrounds. Custom tags use the white background while system tags typically use red or black background colors. System tags identify the following in an incident:

A type of attack, like credential phishing or BEC fraud
Automatic actions, like automatic investigation and response and automatic attack disruption
Defender Experts handling an incident
Critical assets involved in the incident

Tip

Microsoft's Security Exposure Management, based on predefined classifications, automatically tags devices, identities, and cloud resources as a critical asset. This out-of-the-box capability ensures the protection of an organization's valuable and most important assets. It also helps security operations teams to prioritize investigation and remediation. Know more about critical asset management.

Assign an incident

You can select the Assign to box and specify the user account to assign an incident. To reassign an incident, remove the current assignment account by selecting the "x" next to the account name and then select the Assign to box. Assigning ownership of an incident assigns the same ownership to all the alerts associated with it.

You can get a list of incidents assigned to you by filtering the incident queue.

From the incident queue, select Filters.
In the Incident assignment section, clear Select all. Select Assigned to me, Assigned to another user, or Assigned to a user group.
Select Apply, and then close the Filters pane.

You can then save the resulting URL in your browser as a bookmark to quickly see the list of incidents assigned to you.

Resolve an incident

When an incident is remediated and resolved, select Resolved from the Status drop-down list. Resolving an incident also resolves all the linked and active alerts related to the incident.

When you change an incident's status to Resolved, a new field is displayed immediately following the Status field. Enter a note in this field that explains why you consider the incident resolved. This note is visible in the activity log of the incident, near the entry recording the incident's resolution.

Screenshot of incident management panel with incident resolution note.

On both the incidents queue page and the incident page of a resolved incident, you can see the incident resolution note in the side panel, in the Incident details section.

Resolving an incident also resolves all the linked and active alerts related to the incident. An incident that isn't resolved displays as Active.

Specify the classification

From the Classification field, you specify whether the incident is:

Not set (the default).
True positive with a type of threat. Use this classification for incidents that accurately indicate a real threat. Specifying the threat type helps your security team see threat patterns and act to defend your organization from them.
Informational, expected activity with a type of activity. Use the options in this category to classify incidents for security tests, red team activity, and expected unusual behavior from trusted apps and users.
False positive for types of incidents that you determine can be ignored because they're technically inaccurate or misleading.

Classifying incidents and specifying their status and type helps tune Microsoft Defender XDR to provide better detection determination over time.

Add comments

You can add multiple comments to an incident with the Comment field. The comment field supports text and formatting, links, and images. Each comment is limited to 30,000 characters.

All comments are added to the historical events of the incident. You can see the comments and history of an incident from the Comments and history link on the Summary page.

Activity log

The Activity log displays a list of all the comments and actions performed on the incident, known as Audits and comments. All changes made to the incident, whether by a user or by the system, are recorded in the activity log. The activity log is available from the Activity log option on the incident page or on the incident side pane.

You can filter the activities within the log by comments and actions. Click the Content: Audits, Comments then select the content type to filter activities. Here's an example.

You can also add your own comments using the comment box available within the activity log. The comment box accepts text and formatting, links, and images.

Export incident data to PDF

Important

Some information in this article relates to prereleased product which may be substantially modified before it's commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here.

The export incident data feature is currently available to Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft unified security operations center (SOC) platform customers with the Microsoft Copilot for security license.

You can export an incident's data to PDF through the Export incident as PDF function and save it into PDF format. This function allows security teams to review an incident's details offline at any given time.

The incident data exported includes the following information:

An overview containing the incident details
The attack story graph and threat categories
The impacted assets, covering up to 10 assets for each asset type
The evidence list covering up to 100 items
Supporting data, including all related alerts and activities recorded in the activity log

Here's an example of the exported PDF:

If you have the Copilot for Security license, the exported PDF contains the following additional incident data:

The export to PDF function is also available in the Copilot side panel. When you select the More actions ellipsis (...) on the upper right corner of the incident report results card, you can choose Export incident as PDF.

Screenshot of additional actions in the incident report results card.

To generate the PDF, perform the following steps:

Open an incident page. Select the More actions ellipsis (...) on the upper right corner and choose Export incident as PDF.
In the dialog box that appears next, confirm the incident information that you want to include or exclude in the PDF. All incident information is selected by default. Select Export PDF to proceed.
A status message indicating the current state of the download appears below the incident title. The export process may take a few minutes depending on the incident's complexity and the amount of data to be exported.
Another dialog box appears indicating that the PDF is ready. Select Download from the dialog box to save the PDF to your device. The status message below the incident title also updates to indicate that the download is available.

The report is cached for a couple of minutes. The system provides the previously generated PDF if you try to export the same incident again within a short time frame. To generate a newer version of the PDF, wait for a few minutes for the cache to expire.

Next steps

For new incidents, begin your investigation.

For in-process incidents, continue your investigation.

For resolved incidents, perform a post-incident review.

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