Authenticator app report suspicious activity is enabled

Maester checks this too

EIDSCA.AG02 (Authentication Method - General Settings - Report suspicious activity - State.) checks the same setting. Running both reports it twice.

Overview

Threat actors increasingly rely on prompt bombing and real-time phishing proxies to coerce or trick users into approving fraudulent multifactor authentication (MFA) challenges. Without the Microsoft Authenticator app’s Report suspicious activity capability enabled, an attacker can iterate until a fatigued user accepts. This type of attack can lead to privilege escalation, persistence, lateral movement into sensitive workloads, data exfiltration, or destructive actions.

When reporting is enabled for all users, any unexpected push or phone prompt can be actively flagged, immediately elevating the user to high user risk and generating a high-fidelity user risk detection (userReportedSuspiciousActivity) that risk-based Conditional Access policies or other response automation can use to block or require secure remediation.

Remediation

• Enable the report suspicious activity setting in the Microsoft Authenticator app

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	Low
Effort to fix	Low
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	Identity
Category	Access control
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Authentication methods
Area	Authentication
ATT&CK	T1621 Multi-Factor Authentication Request Generation, T1078.004 Cloud Accounts
Licence	P1
Tenant	Workforce, External

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.