Microsoft has introduced a graph-based detection capability aimed squarely at combating hybrid cyberattacks that target complex, interconnected environments spanning both on-premises and cloud resources.
As enterprises increasingly operate across these dual realms, the interdependencies between devices, identities, and resources create attack surfaces that conventional tools often fail to fully protect.
This oversight is particularly acute in scenarios where low-to-medium confidence security events, which in isolation do not warrant alarm, are part of a broader, multifaceted attack chain orchestrated by sophisticated threat actors.
Advanced Exposure Graph
Contemporary security platforms such as SIEM and XDR have elevated organizations’ ability to monitor, detect, and respond to threats within their respective realms.
However, these solutions often lack the context needed to correlate events that traverse the on-premises and cloud divide.
Without unified visibility, SOC teams may miss the complete scope of an attack, especially when attackers leverage the lack of shared entities, like IP addresses or user accounts, to evade detection.
Microsoft’s new approach leverages the “Enterprise Exposure Graph,” an integral component of Microsoft Security Exposure Management (MSEM), to bridge this contextual gap.
The exposure graph dynamically maps relationships between devices, users, secrets (including tokens and cookies), and workloads throughout both realms.
In doing so, it delivers a comprehensive view that allows defenders to connect the dots across seemingly disparate events such as the compromise of a local device and suspicious activity in an Azure cloud account.
Supercharges Cross-Realm Threat Detection
One highlighted attack scenario involves an adversary exploiting a vulnerability on an unmanaged device to obtain an unexpired Entra session cookie from a user’s browser.
By extracting and replaying the session cookie along with stolen credentials the attacker is able to hijack the user’s cloud identity, satisfying multifactor authentication requirements and gaining privileged access to the Azure environment.
If the targeted user holds the Global Administrator role, this on-premises foothold quickly escalates into a full-scale Azure takeover, enabling actions such as mass data exfiltration from storage accounts and potentially facilitating ransomware extortion or data sales on the dark web.
Traditionally, security operations would struggle to correlate device-based evidence of compromise (such as reconnaissance, credential theft, or exploit execution) with subsequent cloud-based privilege escalation or lateral movement, given the lack of shared entities and contextual linkage.
The exposure graph counters this limitation by tracing the provenance and connections of secrets like session cookies used across both realms.
When an endpoint device is found to contain an Entra session cookie capable of authenticating as a cloud user, the exposure graph surfaces this relationship, flagging the potential for cross-realm lateral movement.
According to the Report, Microsoft’s integration of the exposure graph with Defender XDR enables the automatic enrichment and correlation of alerts triggered on endpoints and in the cloud.
Suspicious device activities and anomalous Azure operations that might previously have been classified with only moderate confidence can now, when connected via graph-based analysis, be escalated to high-confidence incidents enabling faster, more decisive response by SOC teams.
By fusing exposure management with advanced threat detection, Microsoft is empowering organizations to recognize the full kill chain of hybrid attacks, bridging a longstanding gap in enterprise cybersecurity.
As threat actors continue to devise multi-stage campaigns that exploit the blurred boundaries of modern IT environments, these new graph-based capabilities mark a critical step forward in defending the enterprise’s most vital assets from end to end.
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