Cloud Security
Lessons from the field. Always landing on my feet.
From Authorization to Action: Operationalizing CISA's Microsoft Cloud Logs Playbook in Sentinel
CISA released the Microsoft Expanded Cloud Logs Implementation Playbook on January 15, 2025. Its implementation guidance remains a practical baseline for deciding which Microsoft cloud audit signals belong in a defensible logging program. That is …
Copy Fail in the Cloud: A Defender, Sentinel, and AKS Response Guide for CVE-2026-31431
A Linux local privilege escalation bug is easy to dismiss if you only think in traditional server terms. An attacker already needs local access, so how bad can it be? In cloud environments, that assumption breaks fast. A compromised container, a …
Agent 365 Launch Playbook: I Tested the Defender Response for AI Agent Attacks
When I published this lab on April 20, Microsoft had announced that Agent 365 would become generally available on May 1, 2026. It reached that milestone; the launch-week security question behind the lab still matters. I wanted to answer a different …
Scan Blob Uploads, Trace Later Reads: Defender for Storage + Sentinel
Storage is where malware waits. A blob uploaded to ingest/ by a pipeline step, a partner’s SFTP connector, or a misconfigured Logic App sits quietly until something downstream opens it — a Data Factory copy, a Function app, a Synapse notebook, a …
Investigate Hidden Privilege Paths with Microsoft Sentinel Data Federation and Custom Graphs
After a compromised service principal incident, the first triage question is always the same: “What else can this identity reach?” The answer usually lives outside Sentinel, buried in entitlement exports, RBAC snapshots, or asset inventories that …
Building Custom Sentinel Connectors with CCF Push
Getting custom data into Microsoft Sentinel has traditionally required a lot of moving parts. You need a Data Collection Endpoint, a Data Collection Rule, an Entra app registration with a client secret, RBAC role assignments, a custom table …
AKS Runtime Security: Binary Drift, Anti-Malware & Gated Deployment with Defender for Cloud
In December, I published a post on securing the container supply chain — SBOM generation, image signing, and build provenance with GitHub Actions. That covered build-time security: making sure the image you ship is the image you built. But what …
The February 2026 Microsoft Sentinel Drop: UEBA Essentials, Copilot Connector, and 9 New GA Connectors
February 2026 brought one of the more substantial Sentinel drops in recent memory. UEBA Essentials hit v3.0.6 with a refined workbook and more than 30 hunting queries (including multi-cloud detections shipped in earlier releases), the M365 Copilot …
Sentinel MCP Server: Securing Your SOC's New AI Attack Surface
In September 2025, Microsoft announced the Sentinel MCP Server, a Model Context Protocol implementation that lets MCP-compatible AI assistants query your Sentinel data using natural language. Microsoft highlights GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio, and …
Terraform 1.11 Write-Only Arguments: Keep Supported Secrets Out of State
If you’ve worked with Terraform and secrets, you’ve probably wondered: “Wait, is my password actually in that state file?” The answer has historically been: yes. The sensitive = true flag does a great job hiding values from CLI output, but the state …