Category Archives: Endpoint Protection

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: The Latest Versions of Antivirus Engine & Signatures

In a previous episode on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, I described how to get a list of antivirus engine and signatures versions for the hosts in your infrastructure using the Microsoft Graph API. But the problem remains. You know the versions that are currently installed on the hosts. But where can you get the latest versions that should be installed there?

I haven’t found any pretty solution for this. I parse public html pages on the Microsoft site I’ll show you how I do it. If you know something better, please write in the comments.

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How to get Antivirus-related Data from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using Intune and Graph API

Hello everyone! In this episode, I would like to tell you how I tried to get automatically antivirus-related data (current status, engine and signature version, last full scan date) from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using Microsoft Intune and the Graph API.

Why is this necessary?

You might assume that if the Defender for Endpoint agent is installed on the host, everything should be fine automatically. But in fact, the antivirus engine and signature versions may be outdated, real-time protection may be disabled. And so all this needs to be monitored.

Grapf API

This will be the third episode about Microsoft Enterprise Security APIs. The first was about Defender and Defender API, the second was about Intune and the Intune API. And today I’m going to talk about the Grapf API, which should probably replace all the other APIs and should be more logical and easier. Although in my opinion it is even strangier and poorly documented. I didn’t like it.

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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Why You May Need It and How to Export Hosts via API in Python

Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. It’s not a well-known free Defender antivirus built in Windows 10, but an enterprise level solution with the similar name. Yes, the naming is pretty confusing.

I will not repeat Microsoft’s marketing thesis. Just the basic idea. The Windows endpoints on your network have built-in agents that can send some data to the Microsoft cloud. In the cloud, they process this data into security events. Users can see these events in the web interface on the Microsoft website.

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Kaspersky Security Center 11 API: getting information about hosts and installed products

I spent a lot of time last week working with the new API of Kaspersky Security Center 11. KSC is the administration console for Kaspersky Endpoint Protection products. And it has some pretty interesting features besides the antivirus/antimalware, for example, vulnerability and patch management. So, the possible integrations with other security systems might be quite useful.

Kaspersky SC 11 openAPI

A fully functional API was firstly presented in this latest version of KSC. It’s is documented pretty well, but in some strange way. In fact, the documentation is one huge .chm file that lists the classes, methods of these classes and data structures with brief descriptions. It’s not a cookbook that gives a solution for the problem. In fact, you will need to guess which methods of which classes should be used to solve your particular task.

For the first task, I decided to export the versions of Kaspersky products installed on the hosts. It is useful to control the endpoint protection process: whether all the necessary agents and products were installed on the hosts or not (and why not).

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Sending FireEye HX data to Splunk

FireEye HX is an agent-based Endpoint Protection solution. Something like an antivirus, but focused on Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). It has an appliance with GUI where you can manage the agents and see information about detected security incidents.

As with any agent-based solution, it’s necessary to ensure that the agents are installed on every supported host in your network. You may also want to analyze the alerts automatically. And for both purposes you can use Splunk. Let’s see how to do it. 😉

FireEye HX appliance login screen

Note, everything bellow is for FireEye Endpoint Security (HX) 4.0.6 and Splunk 7.0.2. If you use some other version, the things may be quite different.

The main idea is following. We should present FireEye hosts and alerts data in JSON format, add some mandatory fields ans send this packages to Splunk using HTTP Event connector. Then we can process it in Splunk like I’ve shown in “How to correlate different events in Splunk and make dashboards“.

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