1. What is a threat vector, and can you give some common examples?
A threat vector is the path by which a hacker gains access to a target. Common vectors include email-based attacks like phishing, spoofing, and malware attachments. Other examples include password cracking and exploiting malicious insiders.
Understanding threat vectors is the first step in building a defence strategy. Email is a primary vector because it directly targets users, who can be tricked into giving up credentials or running malicious code.
2. Explain the difference between phishing and spear phishing?
Phishing is a broad attack where a hacker sends an email that appears to be from a trustworthy source (like a bank) to retrieve sensitive information, such as account credentials. Spear phishing is a highly targeted form of phishing directed at specific individuals or groups, often senior executives (also known as “whaling”). These attacks are typically customized using reconnaissance to appear more legitimate and are often for financial gain.
Spear phishing is more dangerous because of its targeted nature. An attacker might research the target to craft a convincing email, making it harder for the victim to identify it as a threat.
3. An attacker has gained access to a standard user’s account. What is their likely next step, and what is this process called?
After compromising a standard user account, an attacker’s next step is often to increase their power, typically by trying to gain Global Administrator privileges in Microsoft 365. This process is called elevation of privilege. The attacker might use the compromised account to steal credentials of other users with higher privileges or create a new account and promote it to a global admin role to “hide in plain sight”.
This highlights the importance of the principle of least privilege. Strong mitigation includes using MFA for all admin accounts and keeping the number of global administrators to a minimum (Microsoft recommends 2 to 5).
4. How can an organization prevent data exfiltration?
Preventing data exfiltration isn’t just about protecting the data itself; it’s also about securing the accounts and access methods that lead to the data.
A multi-layered strategy is required. Key methods include:
- Protecting accounts from breach and elevation of privilege attacks.
- Implementing strong Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the principle of least privilege to restrict data access.
- Using Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to prevent sensitive content (like social security numbers) from being emailed externally.
- Configuring external sharing policies to restrict how documents can be shared outside the organization.
- Employing a data classification scheme (e.g., High, Medium, Low Business Impact) to tag and monitor sensitive data.
5. What is Microsoft Secure Score and what is its primary benefit?
Microsoft Secure Score is a security analytics tool that provides a numerical summary of an organization’s security posture within Microsoft 365. Its primary benefit is to help organizations understand what they have done to reduce risk and provide a prioritized, actionable roadmap of what they can do to further improve their security. It moves security from a reactive to a proactive model.
6. How can an organization use Secure Score to develop a security roadmap?
An organization can follow a three-phase approach:
- Assessment: Involve key stakeholders (security, networking, Exchange admins) to use the tool to identify gaps between the current security state and recommended actions.
- Education: Learn about the recommended actions, why they are important, how to implement them, and their potential impact on users.
- Roadmap: Prioritize the actions to create a plan. A common approach is to start with “low-hanging fruit”—actions with low user impact but immediate security gains, such as enabling MFA for all admin accounts.
7. Explain the roles of EOP and Office 365 ATP in the anti-malware pipeline?
Exchange Online Protection (EOP) provides the first layer of defense for all Exchange Online mailboxes. It protects against spam, bulk mail, and known malware using techniques like IP/sender reputation, signature-based scanning, and heuristic clustering. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) extends EOP’s protection by filtering more advanced, targeted attacks that might get through, such as zero-day malware and malicious URLs.
8. How does ATP Safe Attachments work to protect against zero-day malware?
Safe Attachments protects against unknown (zero-day) malicious attachments by opening them in a special hypervisor sandbox environment before delivery. Inside this virtual environment, the attachment is “detonated” and undergoes behavioral analysis to see if it performs malicious actions like modifying the registry or system settings. If it is found to be malicious, it is blocked or replaced based on the policy.
This sandboxing technique is effective against zero-day threats because it doesn’t rely on known malware signatures. Instead, it identifies malicious behavior, allowing it to catch brand-new threats.
9. How does ATP Safe Links provide “time-of-click” protection?
Safe Links provides time-of-click protection by rewriting URLs embedded in emails and documents. When a user clicks the rewritten link, it is first redirected to a secure Microsoft 365 server that checks the URL against a frequently updated blocklist of known malicious websites. If the site is safe, the user is redirected to the original destination. If it’s malicious, the user is shown a warning page.
This is critical because a link that is safe at the time of email delivery can be weaponized later. By checking the link at the time of the click, Safe Links protects users from these delayed threats.
10. A user complains that receiving emails with attachments is taking too long. You have an ATP Safe Attachments policy in place. What policy option could you use to improve the user experience without sacrificing security?
You should use the Dynamic Delivery option in the ATP Safe Attachments policy. Dynamic Delivery delivers the email message body to the recipient immediately but replaces the attachment with a placeholder. The user can read and respond to the email while the original attachment is being scanned in the sandbox. If the attachment is found to be safe, it is reattached to the message in the user’s inbox.
11. What is Azure Advanced Threat Protection (Azure ATP) and what phases of the cyber-attack kill chain does it focus on?
Azure ATP is a cloud-based security solution that monitors on-premises domain controllers to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions. It focuses on several phases of the cyber-attack kill chain, including:
- Reconnaissance: An attacker gathering information about the environment.
- Lateral Movement: An attacker spreading their attack surface inside the network.
- Domain Dominance (Persistence): An attacker capturing information to maintain long-term access.
Azure ATP works by capturing and parsing network traffic from domain controllers and using behavioral analytics and machine learning to detect anomalies and suspicious activities like Pass-the-Ticket and Pass-the-Hash attacks.
12. What is Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and what are its primary components?
Windows Defender ATP is an enterprise security platform designed to help prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats on endpoints (like Windows 10 machines). Its primary components include:
- Endpoint behavioral sensors: Built into Windows 10 to collect operating system signals.
- Cloud security analytics: Uses big data and machine learning to translate behavioral signals into threat detections.
- Threat intelligence: Generated by Microsoft security teams to identify attacker tools and techniques.
Windows Defender ATP provides a holistic endpoint security solution that combines endpoint detection and response (EDR), next-generation protection, and attack surface reduction capabilities.
13. How can you integrate Azure ATP and Windows Defender ATP, and what is the benefit?
You enable the integration from both portals. In the Azure ATP portal, you turn on the Windows Defender ATP integration toggle. In the Windows Defender ATP portal, you go to Advanced features and turn on the Azure ATP integration toggle. The benefit of integration is a more complete threat protection solution. While Azure ATP monitors domain controller traffic for identity-based threats, Windows Defender ATP monitors endpoints. Together, they provide a single, unified interface to protect your environment from both identity and endpoint attacks.
This integration allows security teams to see the full scope of an attack, correlating suspicious user activities detected by Azure ATP with endpoint activities detected by Windows Defender ATP.
14. What is Microsoft 365 Threat Intelligence, and what powers it?
Microsoft 365 Threat Intelligence is a service that provides organizations with broad visibility into the global threat landscape and delivers actionable insights to enable proactive cyber-defense. It is powered by the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which consumes and analyzes billions of anonymized data signals every second from sources like Microsoft data centers, over a billion Windows PCs, user activity, email, and security incidents.
The massive scale of the Intelligent Security Graph allows Microsoft to use machine learning to spot attack patterns and suspicious activities, providing customers with rich, evidence-based knowledge to protect their tenants.
15. What is the difference between the Security Dashboard and Threat Explorer?
The Security Dashboard provides a high-level, graphical overview of an organization’s threat landscape. It is designed for CISOs and business decision-makers to quickly understand top risks, global trends, and protection status.
Threat Explorer is a tool for security analysts and administrators to perform deep investigations. It allows them to drill down into specific threats, view details about malware families, filter email messages, and understand who is being targeted in their tenant.
Think of the Security Dashboard as the “what” and “why” for executives, while Threat Explorer is the “how” and “who” for the security operations team.
16. What is the difference between Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM)?
MDM focuses on managing the entire device. This involves enrolling the device into a management solution like Intune, which allows an administrator to configure device-level settings like PIN requirements, encryption, and VPN profiles.
MAM focuses on managing and protecting the data within specific applications, without managing the device itself. MAM can be used on both company-managed and personal (unmanaged) devices, allowing you to restrict actions like copy/paste of corporate data to unmanaged personal apps.
MDM is about device control, while MAM is about data protection at the application level. This distinction is crucial for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scenarios, where you need to protect corporate data without taking full control of an employee’s personal device.
17. Your company wants to allow employees to access corporate email on their personal (BYOD) phones but is concerned about data leakage. You do not want to fully manage their personal devices. What Microsoft 365 capability would you use?
You would use Mobile Application Management (MAM) without device enrollment. By creating Intune app protection policies and applying them to MAM-aware apps like Microsoft Outlook, you can protect corporate data at the app level. For example, you can create a policy that prevents users from saving attachments to the local device storage or copying email content into a personal app like Notes or Gmail, while leaving their personal data on the device untouched.
This MAM-WE (MAM without enrollment) approach is ideal for BYOD. It allows the organization to secure its data within the managed app ecosystem without infringing on the user’s privacy or taking full control of their personal device.
18. A user wants to enroll their new iPhone into your company’s MDM solution. What is the key technical prerequisite you must have in place for this to work?
To enroll and manage any Apple iOS or macOS devices (like iPhones and iPads), you must obtain an Apple Push Notification service (APNs) certificate from Apple and upload it to your MDM authority (like Intune or MDM for Office 365). This certificate is required by Apple for secure communication between the MDM service and the device. Without a valid APNs certificate, iOS devices cannot be enrolled or managed.
The APNs certificate is valid for one year and must be renewed annually using the same Apple ID it was created with. If it expires, you will lose the ability to manage your enrolled iOS devices and enroll new ones.
Of course. Based on the provided sources, here are some additional interview questions and answers that are different from the previous list. These questions focus on other important concepts within Microsoft 365 Threat Protection.
19. What is the cyber-attack “kill chain,” and how does a defense-in-depth strategy in Microsoft 365 address it?
The “kill chain” is a common process that most cyber-attacks follow, proceeding from one step to the next to achieve the hacker’s goals. The best defense strategies apply security measures at every step of this chain. Microsoft 365’s defense-in-depth approach addresses this by using multiple layers of security. For example:
Exchange Online Protection (EOP) provides the first line of defense against email-based threats like known malware and spam.
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) adds another layer to catch more sophisticated threats like zero-day malware (via Safe Attachments) and malicious URLs (via Safe Links) that might bypass EOP.
Azure ATP focuses on later stages of the kill chain, such as reconnaissance, lateral movement, and domain dominance, by monitoring on-premises domain controller activity.
This multi-layered approach is critical because an attacker might bypass any single defense. By implementing controls at each stage of the kill chain, an organization significantly increases its chances of stopping an attack before major damage occurs.
20. How does the “Dynamic Delivery” option in an ATP Safe Attachments policy improve user experience while maintaining security?
Dynamic Delivery is a policy option that avoids message delivery delays often associated with sandboxing attachments. It works by delivering the email body to the recipient immediately, with the original attachment replaced by a placeholder. The user can read and respond to the email while the actual attachment is scanned in a secure sandbox environment. If the attachment is found to be safe, it is automatically reattached to the message in the user’s inbox; if malicious, it is blocked.
This feature directly addresses a common user complaint about security measures—slow email delivery. By separating the delivery of the message from the scanning of the attachment, Dynamic Delivery balances security needs with user productivity, making it a highly effective and user-friendly policy choice.
21. Your company wants to allow employees to access corporate data on their personal phones (BYOD) but must prevent data leakage. How do Intune’s Mobile Application Management (MAM) app protection policies solve this without fully managing the device?
You can use Intune’s MAM without device enrollment (MAM-WE). This allows you to apply app protection policies to MAM-aware applications (like Microsoft Office apps) on a user’s personal device. These policies protect data at the app level by restricting actions like “Save As” to local storage or preventing copy/paste from a managed app to an unmanaged personal app.
This is a key capability for BYOD scenarios. The management is centered on the user’s identity, not the device itself, which allows the company to protect its data within the corporate apps without touching the user’s personal data or infringing on their privacy.
22. What is Windows Defender Application Guard, and how does it use hardware isolation to protect against web-based threats?
Windows Defender Application Guard is a security feature for Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge designed to isolate untrusted websites. When an employee browses to a site not on the pre-defined trusted list, Application Guard opens that site in an isolated, Hyper-V-enabled container. This container is completely separate from the host operating system.
The hardware isolation approach is its key strength. If the untrusted site is malicious, the attack is contained within the isolated environment. The attacker cannot access the host PC, enterprise data, or the employee’s corporate credentials, rendering many common web-based attack methods obsolete.
23. What is a Device Enrollment Manager (DEM) account in Intune, and in what scenario is it most useful?
A Device Enrollment Manager (DEM) is a special Intune user account that can enroll a large number of corporate devices—up to 1,000. This account is not subject to the standard per-user limit for device enrollment (which is typically five). A key characteristic is that when a DEM enrolls a device, no user is associated with it, meaning it doesn’t have per-user access to resources like email.
The DEM role is most useful for scenarios involving bulk or shared device enrollment. For example, a restaurant could use a DEM account to enroll 50 point-of-sale tablets that are shared among employees and do not need to access user-specific company data. This simplifies the management of large-scale deployments of single-purpose or shared devices.
