Description

The Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (or "MCSB") is an Azure Policy Initiative containing many security policies to evaluate resource configuration against best practice recommendations. If a policy in the MCSB is set with effect type Disabled, it is not evaluated and may prevent administrators from being informed of valuable security recommendations.

Rationale

A security policy defines the desired configuration of resources in your environment and helps ensure compliance with company or regulatory security requirements. The MCSB Policy Initiative a set of security recommendations based on best practices and is associated with every subscription by default. When a policy "Effect" is set to Audit, policies in the MCSB ensure that Defender for Cloud evaluates relevant resources for supported recommendations. To ensure that policies within the MCSB are not being missed when the Policy Initiative is evaluated, none of the policies should have an Effect of Disabled.

Impact

Policies within the MCSB default to an effect of Audit and will evaluate - but not enforce - policy recommendations. Ensuring these policies are set to Audit simply ensures that the evaluation occurs to allow administrators to understand where an improvement may be possible. Administrators will need to determine if the recommendations are relevant and desirable for their environment, then manually take action to resolve the status if desired.

Audit

From Azure Portal

1. From Azure Home select the Portal Menu.
2. Select Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
3. Under Management, select Environment Settings.
4. Select the appropriate Subscription.
5. Click on Security policies in the left column.
6. Click on Microsoft cloud security benchmark.
7. Click Add Filter and select Effect.
8. Check the Disabled box to search for all disabled policies.
9. Click Apply.

If no Policies are shown, no Policies are in Disabled status and no remediation is necessary. If any Policies remain in the list, the policy Effect should be changed to Audit.

Default Value

By default, the MCSB policy initiative is associated to all subscriptions and most policies will have an effect of Audit. Some policies will have a default effect of Disabled.

References

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security-center/security-center-policies
2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security-center/security-center-enable-transparent-data-encryption
3. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt704062.aspx
4. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt704063.aspx
5. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/policy/policy-assignments/get
6. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/policy/policy-assignments/create
7. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-in/azure/security-center/tutorial-security-policy
8. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/benchmark/azure/mcsb-governance-strategy#gs-7-define-and-implement-logging-threat-detection-and-incident-response-strategy