Welcome to Microsoft Defender XDR for Security Analysts

Welcome to Microsoft Defender XDR for Security Analysts, a hands-on course designed for security analysts, SOC professionals, incident responders, and cybersecurity practitioners who want to strengthen their threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities using Microsoft Defender XDR. This course focuses on how Microsoft Defender XDR provides unified threat protection across identities, endpoints, email, applications, and cloud workloads. You’ll learn how security teams leverage Microsoft Defender XDR to detect sophisticated attacks, investigate incidents, automate responses, and improve organizational security posture. You’ll begin by exploring the fundamentals of Microsoft Defender XDR, its architecture, benefits, and integration with Microsoft Sentinel. From there, you’ll learn how to configure alerts, investigate incidents, utilize Automated Investigation and Response (AIR), and implement advanced detection and security optimization techniques. Through concept-driven lessons, practical demonstrations, and real-world security scenarios, you’ll gain hands-on knowledge of modern security operations and incident response workflows using Microsoft’s extended detection and response platform. Recommended Background * Basic understanding of cybersecurity concepts and threat landscapes. * Familiarity with Microsoft 365 security technologies is helpful. * Experience with security operations, monitoring, or incident response is beneficial. * General understanding of cloud security and endpoint protection concepts. * Interest in Security Operations Center (SOC) workflows and threat hunting.By the End of This Course, You Will Be Able To: * Understand the architecture, capabilities, and benefits of Microsoft Defender XDR. * Configure and manage alerts, incidents, and threat analytics within Microsoft Defender XDR. * Investigate security incidents and perform threat analysis using Defender XDR tools and workflows. * Implement Automated Investigation and Response (AIR) to improve security operations efficiency. * Create custom detection rules, tune alerts, and optimize threat detection strategies. * Apply Data Loss Prevention (DLP) concepts and align security solutions using Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architecture (MCRA). * Integrate Microsoft Defender XDR with Microsoft Sentinel for centralized security monitoring and incident management. * Strengthen organizational security posture through proactive threat detection and response practices.