Microsoft has announced it is adding a selection of useful security features to its Defender for Endpoint on Linux (opens in new tab) offering.
In addition to antivirus (opens in new tab) (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) abilities, which have been generally available since January 2021, Defender for Endpoint on Linux (opens in new tab) gained threat and vulnerability management (TVM) capabilities (opens in new tab), earlier this year in June, 2021.
“With recent Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux integration into Azure Security Center (opens in new tab), the benefits of our Linux EDR and TVM now extend to Azure Defender customers,” noted Microsoft (opens in new tab).
Azure Defender provides threat protection for workloads running in Microsoft’s cloud computing (opens in new tab) platform, Azure (opens in new tab), and in other clouds.
Extra Linux protection
For starters, the Linux EDR detection has been enhanced with the live response capabilities and is now available for public preview customers.
According to Microsoft, the live response capability enables admins to investigate issues and take corrective actions, in real-time. The feature also helps enhance investigations into incidents by helping collect forensic data, share suspicious entities for further analysis, and proactively hunt for possible threats.
Furthermore, based on the feedback from its customers, Microsoft has fleshed its list of supported Linux server distros (opens in new tab) with the addition of Amazon Linux 2 and Fedora 33+, and several downstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) variants.
It's also making Defender antivirus behavior monitoring generally available on Linux, and plans to use these behavior-based signals as additional runtime signals for their cloud-powered machine learning (ML (opens in new tab)) models.
"With behavior monitoring, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux protection is expanded to generically intercept whole new classes of threats such as ransom[ware] (opens in new tab), sensitive data collection, crypto mining (opens in new tab), and others. Behavior monitoring alerts appear in the Microsoft 365 (opens in new tab) Defender alongside all other alerts and can be effectively investigated," Microsoft notes while soliciting feedback from the users.
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