Microsoft 365 Defender - Review 2022
Almost every Microsoft customer has heard of Windows Defender, since some version runs on every Windows desktop back to Windows XP. But with Microsoft'due south concerted effort to motility customers to its cloud services, the company has pushed its endpoint protection engineering into the Microsoft 365 application barn. At present called Microsoft 365 Defender, the tool is truly state of the art, including endpoint detection and response (EDR) features, active threat hunting, and back up for macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android devices. Windows users, of course, get the best desktop support, while Microsoft 365 users are the real winners since they'll also receive e-mail scanning equally function of the package. Just while Microsoft 365 Defender has all of the features necessary to be at the top of the heap, Microsoft has washed a surprisingly poor job at interface design. This keeps the current version backside our Editors' Choice winners in the endpoint space: Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra, F-Secure Elements, and Sophos Intercept Ten.
Microsoft 365 Defender Pricing and Plans
Interface bug bated, Microsoft 365 Defender has a fairly competitive though somewhat convoluted pricing scheme. For example, you can buy the Microsoft 365 Defender P2 version, which includes EDR and other advanced capabilities, as a standalone service for $5.00 per user per month. Alternatively, information technology's included in the Microsoft 365 E5 enterprise plan, the soup-to-nuts Microsoft 365 plan that runs to $57 per user per month.
If you're reading apace, that $five per user per month price might wait fantastic compared to the other solutions nosotros reviewed. Merely do the math, and it translates to $60 per user per year, which makes Microsoft 365 Defender on the pricier side. Our most costly Editor's Choice winner, Bitdefender GravityZone similarly starts at $57.40 per user per year, albeit that'due south without avant-garde features similar EDR, While Microsoft offers quite a fleck of feature oomph in exchange for those dollars, yous should all the same evaluate it carefully before plunking down all that money if you lot're not currently a Microsoft 365 customer.
More frugal businesses will desire the P1 version of Microsoft 365 Defender, which leaves out advanced features, including EDR. You tin can buy P1 as a standalone for $three per user per month, and it'south also role of the more than price-conscious Microsoft 365 E3 plan, which costs $32 per user per month.
Even if you don't currently have whatever Microsoft 365 subscription, y'all may even so take access to Microsoft 365 Defender. Customers who have purchased enterprise licenses of Office 365, Windows 10, and Windows 11 get access to Defender's features and portal at no additional cost, equally practise customers of previous Defender endpoint offerings, including Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Defender for Function 365 (Plan 2).
If yous desire to evaluate the service for yourself, there's a standalone and free 30-day trial version available (good for 25 users) for download from the Microsoft 365 website.
Getting Started With Microsoft 365 Defender
Ironically, getting started is the hardest part of using Microsoft 365 Defender. Microsoft's getting-started documentation (available online) assumes you already have a Microsoft 365 account and the ability to make changes to it. If you just want the endpoint portion, that is too available as a separate sign-up.
Once you're signed upwardly, onboarding is easy if you know where to look, merely knowing is the hardest function. There's currently a lengthy transition as Microsoft slowly moves former Defender functionality into the new version, so we found locating and using many features difficult at the time of this writing.
The best method we found was to navigate to Settings > Endpoints > Onboarding. Once at that place, you lot can download the onboarding script that runs on Windows x machines. Still, this procedure is somewhat tedious, which was a big turn-off, because that fifty-fifty some products that didn't charge per unit our Editors' Selection designation, such as Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud and Vipre Endpoint Security Cloud, provide easy-to-use installers.
For macOS machines, the process is slightly different but similarly cumbersome. Honestly, onboarding this style only actually seems suitable for Windows-centric shops, where you'll push the product out via Active Directory. For the average ambassador who might not be fully embedded in the realm of Windows Server, this is a big ask. Microsoft 365 Defender's setup was annoying plenty to be a significant ding in our book.
(Editors' Note: Vipre is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of PCMag.com.)
A Rollercoaster Interface
Using Microsoft 365 Defender is an upwards-and-downwardly experience. Once y'all've wormed your style through the installation process, you'll find the dashboard is something of a cluttered mess. It'due south informative, only not in the sense that you lot would want from an out-of-the-box experience. It's all almost what you tin do with the product, but it doesn't immediately provide the information y'all need virtually your network. We found ourselves sweeping the area clean and adding dorsum only the blocks that we wanted to see. Another annoyance is that you lot tin can suddenly and mysteriously air current upwardly on the old interface from fourth dimension to time. Fortunately, when you do end upwardly there, you'll also run across a conspicuous option to automatically redirect yous to the new site, which we turned on.
In the new interface, the left-hand side of the folio neatly lays out your available options. Incidents & Alerts is where yous'll spend most of your fourth dimension. This section identifies any active and remediated threats beyond all your registered and currently connected endpoints. The practiced part near this, compared to the rest of the interface, is that it's well-structured. Incidents are grouped and so that a batch of infections doesn't look like a series of discrete events. If they make it on the machine via the same procedure, yous'll run across that visualized in an investigation bureaucracy. If y'all drill into the investigation, you'll get an EDR style graph that gives you the full pictures of how the infection started and what it affected. While other tiptop-ranked products do this too, such as Editors' Choice winners F-Secure Elements and Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra, Microsoft 365 Defender does it cleanly, with splendid on-screen explanations.
The threat analytics page is closely tied to incidents. It shows the most prevalent threats in the wild and whether they affect your network, and it offers fascinating insights into what might striking your network next and which of your devices are vulnerable. Related to this is the Vulnerability Management section, which includes a dashboard showing an exposure score and how to improve it and several pages for discovering and managing vulnerable software. For each of the vulnerabilities found, it gives remediation steps, if available, or links to the out-of-date software'south page so that y'all can acquire updates. Information technology provides a diversity of helpful data, as well; and then much and then, in fact, that it'southward somewhat overwhelming. It could easily lose someone who didn't already know what to look for. It's definitely necessary to spend some time reading the documentation for this one, but there's a lot of power here.
While Microsoft 365 Defender's threat and vulnerability management is top-notch from a technical perspective, policy management isn't. Y'all exercise get some granularity in how email is handled, but the general endpoint settings seem out of place and geared toward connecting with other Microsoft offerings, such as Intune, Secure Shop, and Office 365 Threat Intelligence. These settings are as well not handled with defined policies and are a global ready. Lacking a cohesive process for restricting devices, setting the level of protection, and managing exclusions, Defender's policy management seems like an afterthought.
Reports are another positive for the Microsoft 365 Defender interface, as they are both colorful and helpful. Everything from device wellness and compliance to a comprehensive security report is available. That said, they are somewhat buggy as of the time of testing. Many reports generated errors or stated that data wasn't available when enough of data was. Nosotros suspect this volition go better over time and undoubtedly via several patches. Another small gripe is the inability to print these reports or catechumen them to a PDF, but it's not a bargain-breaker.
Endpoint Protection Testing
As with all our other contenders, nosotros ran Microsoft 365 Defender through our endpoint protection testing procedure. During the phishing attack, we tested ten verified phishing links from PhishTank. When we used Microsoft Edge, all of the pages were reported as Unsafe by Microsoft Defender SmartScreen. When we tested Chrome and Firefox, they did not seem to be protected by this feature, which is fairly typical for a Microsoft-geared production merely is nevertheless a mark confronting it.
Adjacent, we used Metasploit'southward Autopwn two feature to launch a browser-based assault against the system using a known vulnerable version of Chrome with the Coffee 1.7 runtime installed. Only attacks that were likely to succeed in granting a remote trounce were launched automatically, and none of the attacks succeeded.
We and so fake executing a standard Meterpreter binary tacked onto the end of Windows Calculator. The executable was not fifty-fifty allowed to copy to the desktop. We also tested a fix of Veil 3.0-encoded Meterpreter executables that included PowerShell, Auto-IT, Python, and Ruby. All of them were detected the moment they were copied to the desktop, and we were unable to proceed with any further admission tests.
Lastly, we disabled the network connection on our virtual machine (VM), extracted a set of known malware executables chosen TheZoo, and attempted to run them. Defender quarantined each of them before it had the chance to run, confirming that Defender's signature-based detection was working well. In that location was a slight delay betwixt deploying the malware and seeing the arrangement react, but nosotros suspect this was the notification lagging behind the action taking place.
Backing up our test results, we found that Defender has as well performed well in MITRE ATT&CK evaluations. Information technology handled well-nigh all of the attacks and stood up to several noted existent-world threats.
Powerful Simply Unpolished
Microsoft 365 Defender is a mixed bag. It has most of the elements of a winner, but information technology lacks plenty polish to really brand it one. That said, if you are already a Microsoft 365 user, you may already have admission to it, making information technology worth a look to see if it tin come across your needs while Microsoft works to meliorate it.
You tin can be confident in knowing that it will protect your network from threats fairly, even if it tends to exist a bit confusing at commencement. For me, this is a pass, but it should become on the watch list for hereafter options. For now, our preference would be to stick with ane of our Editors' Option winners: Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra, Sophos Intercept X, or F-Secure Elements.
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/old-hosted-endpoint-protection/48177/microsoft-365-defender
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