Can you track Windows Defender sample submission?

I just had a popup from Windows Defender, it wanted confirmation for uploading a sample (some browser temp file). Elastic Agent+Defend is also running, the primary tool is still Windows Defender.
In my Elastic Dashboard I got no alerts from the host.

I know there's integrations for MS Defender for Endpoint, but I kind of would like to at least see something that the normal Defender had some suspicion.
Is there some integration I'm missing to see such events or is it a topic of tracking the event logs?

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If I understand you right, Windows Defender alerted on activity but Elastic Defend did not, and you didn’t see an alert in Kibana but wish you had?

When you run two Antivirus products on the same computer they are in a race to detect and prevent each threat. Sometimes one will reliably win and sometimes it’s a coin flip. It sounds like in this case Windows Defender stopped the threat before Elastic Defend.

Thanks for your reply.
Sorry I wasn't able to express myself better.

  1. I suppose that the sample being submitted was just suspicious, not malicious, but obviously I'm keeping an eye out for further AV updates
  2. considering the event just an example, what I was missing is that Elastic LOOKS for such events and integrates them into the alerts it shows

The rationale is clear, Elastic can be configured to monitor or to prevent intrusions. For the simplistic case, assume 'prevent' is toggled off, elastic is set to not be the primary AV registered in MS security center. Both of which are available settings.
Would you expect it to stay unaware of any intervention the main AV undertakes? if it's monitoring the system, why would it ignore such a major information source? Would you not rather expect it to do the optimum for each selectable choice?

yes, the other solution is responsible to do its job, but if you consider a hierachical value of information sources, you have top and lower tier sources.

information trust

top tier

  • what elastic's kernel module saw in syscalls etc.
  • in the case that it's not the prime AV system, events from the other should also be roughly on that level, albeit maybe lower since it is foreign information and something foreign will need to have less trust or undergo less processing, to not allow for exploitation.

medium tier

  • things like security audit logs
  • things like process events
  • things like normal event logs
  • already quite risky things like, i dunno, osquery, wmi data etc.

lowest tier

-untrusted things that came over integrity monitored channels like com or whatever stuff windows does.

  • things like windows event forwarding received data from remote sources where you can just validate the integrity of your read of the data, but not anything that relates to the sender.

logic problem

the 'other' defender works

if you got a defender for enterprise setup, elastic agent knows how to ingest the logs and events via an integration.
I think there ought to be either a second integration, or it just be handled by the normal windows agent integration.

it is the DEFAULT setup

i'm in favor of thinking it needs to be part of the standard windows integration since the stock MS defender doesn't go away (hopefully it's disabled in enterprise context next to Elastic, but if you look at the actual stock windows setup you WOULD find defender and Elastic would nomally run in parallel during eval etc.

it extends into multiple parts of windows AV

I think in that scenario it should already work as well as possible, and also log submissions to MS MAPS and such things.

I hope now I was better to understand :slight_smile:
It's not a very important thing for me, I just try to notice issues in my env that is mostly for testing rather than be asked about them by clients a year later in an env that matters.

race doesn't matter, but information does matter

Oh and finally, the race between AV products is not super applicable for this example. Elastic had a chance to catch the file when it was downloaded, maybe it just didn't create a false positive, or maybe it didn't have an IOC signature. I do not know. It might have caught the file later, but meh. It's not worth to track that down at this stage. We can and should assume it would have reacted if the browser had been hijacked and launched a cmd.exe or something.
On that end I consider the reaction completely OK for an EDR.
My issue is with ignoring high-value threat info.

ill-chosen examples

the medieval one

Imagine you got two guards watching a town gate. It's good if there's always who one sends away an intruder. But if the other one would tell you he knows nothing about that because his job is to guard the door, and not to watch what the other guy does - would you pay him that week? it becomes very thin argumentative ice whether he was even doing his job if he's not aware what happened.

the modern warfare one

If you want to watch a hillarious video about the result of thinking like that, look on youtube for the video on why the british SAS soldiers were banned from US bases. They constantly just walked in by exploiting that people followed 'procedures' instead of being on guard.

100% human

all bad examples were written by hand. I just added formatting so the lists look less loaded.

Hi @Florian_Heigl

Doesn’t MS Defender log to eventlog when stomething was found or some action taken?

Microsoft-Windows-Windows Defender/Operational

So in theory you could just add these events (see Windows Integration | Elastic integrations)

Event ID Meaning Use case
1116 Malware detected Primary detection signal
1117 Action taken (cleaned/quarantined) Response tracking
1118 Action failed Important for detection gaps
1119 Critical error during remediation High priority
1120 Malware not removed Persistence risk
1006 / 1007 Scan started/completed Context
5007 Configuration changed Tampering detection

And create a detection rule for whatever you want a detection on? (not 100 % sure the sample submission you are talkiong about logs a dedicated event)

Best regards,

Willem