Microsoft Defender for Office 365: New default (URL click) alert policy

Originally posted by Microsoft Apr 11, 2022 Microsoft 365 Apps 0 Comments

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers many default alert policies.  One of the current default alert policy, A potentially malicious URL click was detected, generates alerts when users click URLs (which are potentially malicious) in email messages. Currently, there are two scenarios that generate this alert.

1. The URL verdict changes to bad after the user has already clicked it.
2. A user clicks through (overrides the warning page) for a known, bad URL.

As part of the work to expand the scope of the alert for user clicks in workloads other than email (future roadmap), we’re splitting the existing alert policy based on those two scenarios.

The current alert policy ‘A potentially malicious URL click was detected’ will cover the ‘URL verdict change’ (# 1 above) scenario.

A new default alert policy named ‘A user clicked through to a potentially malicious URL’ will now cover the click through (# 2 above) scenario. The functionality in terms of alert generation, notification, AIR, and Incident correlation remain the same.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 93211.

When this will happen:

We expect this rollout to begin in mid-May and expect the rollout to be completed by late June. 

How this will affect your organization:

This change should not have any effect on security and alert detection in your organization. You can review both default alerts in the portal. However, if you’re exporting these alerts into external systems, you’ll need to include the new alert generated by the new policy.

What you need to do to prepare:

If you’re exporting these alerts to external systems for processing (via APIs), you will also need to set up the export of the new policy.

Message ID: MC355215