Threat hunting against Email and Collaboration tables in Microsoft 365 Defender Advanced Hunting is operational

Overview

Advanced hunting in Microsoft Defender XDR lets security teams query event and entity data across email and collaboration telemetry using Kusto Query Language. Email and Collaboration tables such as EmailEvents, EmailAttachmentInfo, EmailUrlInfo, EmailPostDeliveryEvents, and UrlClickEvents help analysts find suspicious messages, attachments, links, clicks, and post-delivery actions that may not already be tied to an alert. Threat actors can use new sender patterns, weaponized links, or delivered attachments before alert rules fully identify the campaign. Hunting gives the SOC a way to look across initial access, credential access, lateral movement, and impact signals and connect them to incidents. This check only proves the API and table are available and returning data; it does not prove that skilled analysts are writing effective hunts or that hunts run on a useful cadence.

Remediation

• Run a hunting query - Microsoft Graph
• Advanced hunting schema tables
• Hunt for threats across devices, emails, apps, and identities

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	Medium
Effort to fix	Medium
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	SecOps
Category	Email and collaboration security
Product	Defender
Feature	Tenant settings
Area	Logging and detection
ATT&CK	T1566 Phishing
Licence	THREAT_INTELLIGENCE
Tenant	Workforce

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.