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Evaluate security postures by using Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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Defender for Cloud continually assesses your resources, subscriptions, and organization for security issues. It then aggregates all the findings into a single score so that you can tell, at a glance, your current security situation: the higher the score, the lower the identified risk level.

To increase your security, review Defender for Cloud's recommendations page and remediate the recommendation by implementing the remediation instructions for each issue. Recommendations are grouped into security controls. Each control is a logical group of related security recommendations, and reflects your vulnerable attack surfaces. Your score only improves when you remediate all of the recommendations for a single resource within a control. To see how well your organization is securing each individual attack surface, review the scores for each security control.

For security analysts, it's essential to identify the potential risks associated with security recommendations and understand the attack vectors, so they can prioritize more effectively. To make prioritization easier, Microsoft Defender for Cloud maps its security recommendations against the MITRE ATTACK framework, a globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. Using this capability, customers can strengthen the security posture of their environment with recommendations that are mapped to the MITRE ATTACK framework and prioritize based on the potential risk across the cyber kill chain.

The advantage of using MITRE ATTACK when evaluating your security posture is that you can create campaigns to remediate recommendations based on the different phases of the MITRE ATTACK framework. The rationale is that if you remediate recommendations that are mapped to early stages of the MITRE ATTACK framework, you can prevent a threat actor from gaining further access to your workloads. Defender for Cloud has a filter that enables you to create this visualization as shown in the image below:

For a walkthrough of using Microsoft Defender for Cloud to manage your cloud security posture, view the following interactive guide.

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