Most teams treat a block as the end of the story: defense succeeded, move on. That’s true — but incomplete.
Microsoft Defender and Sentinel do an excellent job surfacing and stopping threats. What many SOCs miss is the next step: turning those blocked alerts into fresh, environment-relevant threat intelligence that prevents whole campaigns — not just the same file — from striking again. In our recent webinar we showed how detonating artifacts from Defender/Sentinel in a high-fidelity sandbox uncovers the “deep context” that a standard block never reveals.
Why blocking alone is insuffi...
Most teams treat a block as the end of the story: defense succeeded, move on. That’s true — but incomplete.
Microsoft Defender and Sentinel do an excellent job surfacing and stopping threats. What many SOCs miss is the next step: turning those blocked alerts into fresh, environment-relevant threat intelligence that prevents whole campaigns — not just the same file — from striking again. In our recent webinar we showed how detonating artifacts from Defender/Sentinel in a high-fidelity sandbox uncovers the “deep context” that a standard block never reveals.
Why blocking alone is insufficient
Blocking is necessary. But you need the motive and the network.MS Defender or Sentinel will show you who triggered the alert, where it appeared, and what was blocked — what we call the broad context. That visibility is valuable, but it rarely shows what the attacker intended next. Without that, you lack the full picture for hunting, forensic work, and proactive defence.
Broad vs deep context:
Broad context is sensor and telemetry data (user, endpoint, alert signal). Deep context is what would have happened if the attack had continued — the payloads it would have dropped, the C2 domains it would call, persistence mechanisms, and configuration artifacts. Those are the facts that let you generalize an attack to a campaign and build prevention that stops related activity, not only identical files.
A concrete example: a blocked phishing artifact can hide staged payloads, encoded configuration, or a QR code that launches a second-stage download. Without detonating that chain, your view ends at “this mail was malicious.”
With dynamic analysis, you discover the full delivery chain and the infrastructure behind it — and that’s the intelligence that scales.
What sandboxing adds: three practical benefits
Here are the core, operational gains you get when you pair Microsoft Defender/Sentinel with high-fidelity sandboxing:
1) Fresh, relevant IOCs you can trust
Submitting blocked files and URLs for detonation produces first-order indicators — IPs, URLs, hashes, extracted C2 domains and configuration artifacts — that are current and specific to the sample you saw.
Those IOCs are more actionable than recycled feed entries because they reflect the actual behavior attempted against your estate. Use them to populate Defender indicators, update firewall rules, or enrich a TIP.
2) Faster, more confident SOC decisions
Sandbox-powered enrichment adds a verdict, a prioritized set of IOCs, and a narrative (what the sample tried to do). That lets junior analysts triage confidently, faster. Instead of “maybe malicious,” the SOC sees “malicious — persisted via registry, attempted DNS beacons to X, config shows SMTP exfil,” and can escalate or remediate with clear next steps. This moves triage from guesswork to evidence-based action.
3) Forensic assets for IR and hunting
Dynamic analysis preserves the artifacts you need for incident response: process trees, memory snapshots, PCAPs, and extracted configs. Our recent webinar session demonstrated a case where config extraction (credentials, C2 endpoints) gave the IR team precise hunting queries and attribution leads — things you can’t extract from telemetry alone.
That turns a single alert into a reusable intelligence artifact.
How VMRay integrates with the Microsoft security stack — a practical workflow
The value lies in automation and repeatability. Here’s a practical step-by-step workflow shown in the webinar (and used by many teams today):
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Alert or submission: Defender or Sentinel flags an artifact (email attachment, URL, endpoint artifact) and the SOC captures the evidence.
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Automated submission: The artifact is queued for detonation — either manually by the analyst or triggered automatically via a Logic App, SOAR playbook, or a connector. VMRay supports integrations that accept submissions from abuse mailboxes, EDR/Defender alerts and Sentinel incidents.
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High-fidelity detonation: The sample runs in an evasion-resistant, hypervisor-based sandbox that follows multi-stage chains and observes real behaviour (downloads, registry changes, in-memory payloads).
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Clarity & extraction: VMRay’s clarity engine filters benign side-effects and extracts the true, malicious artifacts: IOCs, configuration strings, and TTP mappings.
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Push back to Microsoft tools: Outputs are pushed back into Defender (indicator store, comments) and Sentinel (incident enrichment, Threat Intelligence), or exported to TIPs in machine-readable formats (STIX/JSON). Logic Apps/Playbooks can then use those IOCs to automate containment and hunting.
In short, you don’t need to choose manual OR automated: start with selective automation (high-confidence rules) and expand as your enrichment quality proves itself. Integration artifacts (connectors, Logic App templates) and marketplace listings were referenced as delivery points for these playbooks in our session.
Conclusion & recommended next steps
Operational rule of thumb: Block, then detonate. Blocking protects your estate today. Detonating gives you the intelligence to protect it tomorrow.
Practical starter plan:
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Pick one high-value queue (phishing reports, abuse mailbox, or quarantine).
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Automate submission of artifacts from Defender/Sentinel into a sandbox in staged fashion.
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Ingest sandbox outputs into Defender indicators and Sentinel incidents.
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Measure value: reduction in triage time, new IOCs added to hunting, and faster containment.