MAPS in the cloud: How can it help your enterprise?

[Petrovic]

Malware can easily send a huge enterprise infrastructure into a tailspin. However, you can get greater protection from malware by using services in the cloud.

Yes, there’s an opportunity to get real-time results from suspicious malware triggers where your system can:

1. Consult the cloud upon detecting suspicious malware behaviors.
2. Respond by blocking malware based on derived logic from the account ecosystem data, and local signals from the client.

How? Through the Microsoft Active Protection Service (MAPS).


What is MAPS?

The Microsoft Active Protection Service is the cloud service that enables:

• Clients to report key telemetry events and suspicious malware queries to the cloud
• Cloud to provide real-time blocking responses back to the client

The MAPS service is available for all Microsoft's antivirus products and services, including:

• Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• System Center Endpoint Protection
• Windows Defender on Windows 8 and later versions

What can MAPS do for your enterprise software security?

Enabling MAPS in your system gives you:

• Greater malware protection through cloud-delivered malware-blocking decisions
  

Enable MAPS to trigger cloud calls for suspicious events. Doing so helps ensure that the machine uses the latest malware information available from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) research team, back-end big data, and machine learning logic.

• Aggregated protection telemetry
  
  Leverage the latest ecosystem-wide detection techniques offered through the cloud. Microsoft aggregates protection telemetry from over one billion clients, and cross-references them with numerous signals.
  

MMPC threat intelligence leverages algorithms to construct and manage a view of threats in the ecosystem. When the endpoint product encounters suspicious activities, it can consult the cloud for real-time analysis before acting on it.

The vast data and computing resources available in the cloud allows the fast detection of polymorphic and emerging threats and the application of advanced protection techniques.

At a high level, here's what the MAPS protection looks like:



Figure 1: How the cloud protection and telemetry works from the endpoint and back.


Client machines selectively send telemetry in real-time (for detection), or periodically (for health checks) to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center’s (MMPC) cloud service which includes:

• Threat telemetry – to identify the threats, threat-related resources, and remediation results
• Suspicious behavior – to collect samples, determine what to monitor and remediate
• Heartbeat – to check the system's pulse to know if the antivirus application is still running, and if it has the updated version

The MMPC cloud service responds to client telemetry with:

• Cloud actions – which include context and a set of instructions from the cloud on how to handle a potential threat (for example, block it).
• Cloud false positive mitigation response – to suppress false positive malware detections

The data gathered is treated with confidentiality. See the Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection Privacy Statement for details. To help protect your privacy, reports are sent to Microsoft over an encrypted connection. Relevant data is analyzed.

What the data shows



Figure 2: Percentage of protection MAPS can contribute over a six-month period

If we take the System Center Endpoint Protection data as an example, you'll see how MAPS is contributing 10% of protection to enterprise users on SCEP systems.

Imagine living without it – there'll be 10% more machines infected, and 10% more chance of intruders.


Prerequisites
Both Basic membership and Advanced membership enable cloud protection. See the Microsoft Active Protection Service (MAPS) section of the Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection Privacy Statement for details.

By default, MAPS Basic is enabled in all of Microsoft’s new antimalware products. For enterprise customers, you have to enable it to get cloud protection from new threats that are coming in.

With the Advanced membership, you can get more information about the malware and/or suspicious behaviour. Such information can give your enterprise infrastructure better protection.

To get your system ready for MAPS, see the Introduction to Endpoint Protection in Configuration Manager.


So, what can you do to protect your enterprise?

Keep MAPS enabled on your system.

Join the Microsoft Active Protection Service Community.

To check if MAPS is enabled in your Microsoft security product, select Settings and then select MAPS:



Figure 3: With the MAPS option enabled, Microsoft anti-malware security product can take full advantage of Microsoft's cloud protection service
Source

 

[Moose]

Thank you for sharing!

 

[donetao]

Thanks @Petrovic I just checked mine and it was set to default. Good information! Maybe MSE will get better ratings here on MT now.
This looks pretty impressive to this old country boy. Good work Microsoft!!
There are three situations that highlight the benefits of cloud protection:

• If a file is known to be malware by our servers but not by the local antimalware product, the cloud protection module can tell the local product to block or remove it.
• If a file is known to be clean by our servers, but the local antimalware product detects the file as malware (an incorrect detection situation), the cloud protection module can tell the local antimalware to not detect it, and the incorrect detection does not affect the user.
• If a local antimalware product encounters a file that we don’t know about, our server can make a determination based on probabilities, and tell the local antimalware software to block it, even without having seen a copy of the file.