Microsoft Certified: Security Operations Analyst Associate Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

You are investigating a suspected hands-on-keyboard attack against a single user. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) shows process execution and network connections, but the Microsoft 365 Defender incident timeline is missing related identity events (sign-ins, token anomalies). Azure AD sign-in logs exist for the user. You need to ensure future incidents correlate endpoint and identity signals into a single incident with minimal operational overhead. What should you do?

Your organization uses Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (MDO). Several high-confidence phishing emails are being delivered to VIP mailboxes despite user-reported submissions confirming the messages as phishing. Investigation shows the emails use newly registered domains and pass SPF/DKIM/DMARC alignment. You need to reduce time-to-remediation across all mailboxes and prevent recurrence while minimizing false positives for legitimate external partners. What is the best approach?

A SOC analyst is reviewing an incident in Microsoft 365 Defender that includes multiple alerts from Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Office 365. The analyst needs to add a custom piece of evidence (a suspicious URL observed in proxy logs) so it can be used for automated response and future correlation in the incident graph. What should the analyst use?

Your company onboards multiple Azure subscriptions into Microsoft Defender for Cloud. The security team wants to enforce that all virtual machines have endpoint protection and that SQL databases have vulnerability assessment enabled. They also need consistent, subscription-wide compliance reporting and automatic remediation where possible. Which Defender for Cloud capability best meets these requirements?

You are implementing Defender for Cloud in an environment with strict change control. The security team wants to enable just-in-time (JIT) VM access to reduce inbound management exposure. However, several teams rely on Azure Bastion and private management networks, and they are concerned about breaking existing access paths. What is the best design decision?

Your organization uses Microsoft Sentinel and wants to ingest Azure AD sign-in logs, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint alerts, and custom application logs from on-prem servers. After onboarding, analysts complain that incidents are missing key entities (Account, Host, IP) and automated playbooks that rely on entity triggers are not running. KQL queries show the data is present. What is the most likely root cause?

You are troubleshooting a Microsoft Sentinel scheduled analytics rule that detects suspicious lateral movement using Windows SecurityEvent logs. The query returns results when run manually, but the rule produces no alerts. You confirm the rule is enabled and runs every 5 minutes. Which issue is the most likely cause?

Your SOC wants to standardize detections across multiple data sources (Windows SecurityEvent, Sysmon, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) using Microsoft Sentinel. You need to create analytics rules that work even when some data sources are missing, and you want to reduce rewrite effort when onboarding new sources. What is the best approach?

You need to design a Microsoft Sentinel automation strategy for high-volume incidents. Requirement: when an incident is created from a specific analytics rule, automatically enrich it with user context from Azure AD and device context from Defender for Endpoint, then close the incident if the enrichment indicates a known benign pattern. The solution must minimize analyst effort and avoid running enrichment on unrelated incidents. What should you implement?

A customer has two Microsoft Sentinel workspaces: one for corporate IT and one for OT/IoT. They want a centralized SOC to hunt across both without duplicating data ingestion or moving data between tenants. They also need to ensure least privilege for hunters who should not be able to modify analytics rules. What should you recommend?