Review EDX Course Security in Office 365 (Microsoft CLD245x)

• how threat actors gain access
• kill chain
• how the work and threat landscape changed
• on-premises environment vs “gray area” (cloud etc.) in terms of controll and security
• phishing
• malware
• spoofing
• escalation of privilege
• data exfiltration
• data deletion including ransom ware
• data spillage (“Data spillage occurs when protected data is transferred to a system that doesn’t provide the same level of protection as the source.”)
• as well as password cracking
• malicious insiders

• Exchange Online Protection (EOP)
• Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (Office 365 ATP)
• Office 365 Threat Intelligence
• Auditing and alerts
• Advanced Security Management (ASM)
• EOP (not End Of Protection 😉 but Exchange Online Protection)
• Office 365 Threat Intelligence
• Threat Dashboard
• Auditing and alerts
• Advanced Security Management (AMS)
• Threat detection
• Enhanced control
• Discovery and insights

• Overview of Office 365 Secure Score
• security related measurements
• Office 365 Secure Score API
• API & powershell
• downstream data for other tools and SIEM etc.
• The Secure Score dashboard
• The Secure Score analyzer tab
• Increasing your security posture
• I liked some of the points:
  • Enabling multi-factor authentication on all admin accounts
  • Designating more than one global admin
  • Enabling auditing across workloads
  • Enabling mailbox auditing
  • Having a weekly review of sign-ins after multiple failures
  • Having a weekly review of sign-ins from unknown sources
  • Having a weekly review of sign-ins from multiple geographies

• The anti-malware pipeline in Office 365
• Zero-hour auto purge
• ZAP, detect spam or malware that was undetected by heuristics and delivery patterns
• Phishing and spoofing protection
• SFP, DKIM, DMARC
• Spoof Intelligence
• Give overview of spoofing attempts, allow spoofing for certain senders for certain addresses
• Managing spoof intelligence

• How ATP expands protection provided by EOP
• Safe attachments
• sandbox/detonation chamber 😀
• Safe attachment policy options
• Safe links
• URL detonation -> mix of safe links and sage attachements
• Safe links policy options

• Creating safe attachment policies in the Security and Compliance Center
• Creating safe attachments policies using Windows PowerShell
• Modifying an existing safe attachments policy in the Security and Compliance Center
• Creating a transport rule to bypass safe attachments
• Safe attachments end user experience

• Creating safe links policies by using the Security and Compliance Center
• Creating safe links policies using Windows PowerShell
• Modifying an existing safe links policy
• Create a transport rule to bypass safe links
• Safe links user experience in email
• Safe links user experience in Office 2016

• Threat protection status report
• ATP message disposition report
• ATP file types report
• Malware detections report
• Top Malware report
• Top Senders and Recipients report
• Spoof Mail report
• Spam Detections report
• Sent and received email report
• Security & Compliance Report Demonstration

• Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph
  • Source: Windows, Office 365, Cloud Services, 3rd party
• Threat dashboard
  • reporting tool for C-level
• Threat explorer
  • analysts, admins

• Threat detections in your tenant
• Security and malware trends
• Alerts
• More insights
• Threat Intelligence Demonstration

• Viewing options in Threat explorer
• Filtering capabilities in Threat Explorer
• Drilling for details
• Incident reports

• Auditing architecture in Office 365
• Audited activities
• Office 365 Management Activity API

• Mailbox actions logged by mailbox audit logging
• Enabling mailbox auditing
• Specifying owner actions to audit
• Changing the age limit for entries in the mailbox audit log

• Enabling auditing in your tenant
• Granting permissions
• Searching the audit log
• Viewing the search results
• Filtering the search results
• Exporting the search results to a file
• Searching the audit log by using Windows PowerShell
• Using a SIEM application to access your auditing data

• The SharePoint sharing schema
• The SharePoint Sharing model and sharing events
• How to identify resources shared with external users

• Introduction to insights and alerts
• Types of insights that are available
• Types of alerts that are generated
• Alerts features in the Security & Compliance Center
• Alert policy settings
• Default alert policies
• Viewing alerts
• Managing alerts

• Lesson introduction
• Anomaly detection policies
  •     Login authentication failures
  •     Administrator activity
  •     Inactive accounts
  •     Location
  •     Impossible travel
  •     Device and user agent
• Activity policies
• Anomaly detection and activity alerts
• Policy templates
• Productivity app discovery
• App permissions

• Enabling and accessing Advanced Security Management
• Creating anomaly detection policies
• Creating activity policies
• Reviewing and taking action on alerts
• Investigating activities in the Activity log
• Grouping IP addresses to simplify management

• Log file requirements
• Supported vendors and their data attributes
• Creating app discovery reports
• Reviewing app discovery findings
• Troubleshooting errors when log files are uploaded

• App permissions architecture
• Managing app permissions
• Approving or banning an app

From my side more insight on the security mechanisms and more detail on Threat Intelligence would have been great.  The course goes into logging and how to find strange behaviour, malware and threat intelligence. Which was really nice to see how much effort Microsoft put into securing their cloud products.

A lot of the questions in the module assessements questions are more about configuration the platform itself or how tabs are named, I felt a bit like in a MS exam long time ago. Large parts of the content is text and not videos, most courses are a bit different here.