Ensure 'Remote Encryption Protection Aggressiveness' is set to 'Medium' or higher

HighLevel 2Automatedintune-defender

Description

This policy setting configures how aggressively Remote Encryption Prevention Protection blocks malicious IP addresses. The recommended state for this setting is: Medium: Use cloud aggregation and block when confidence level is above 99% or higher. Configuring this setting to High: Use cloud intel and context, and block when confidence level is above 90% also conforms to the benchmark. Note: As of the publication of this Benchmark, the setting configuration state in Intune is the sentence above after The recommended state for this setting is: and not Medium or higher as the title states. This was done to keep title length to a minimum. Audit: reads the registry value(s) behind this Defender policy (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Defender) and prints compliant only when each satisfies the benchmark value. Policy delivered by Intune only appears here once it has been applied to the device.

How it is checked

Audit method: Windows registry

registry

$bad = @(); $v = (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Defender\PolicyManager' -Name 'RemoteEncryptionProtectionAggressiveness' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).'RemoteEncryptionProtectionAggressiveness'; if (-not ($null -ne $v -and @(1,2) -contains [int64]$v)) { $bad += 'RemoteEncryptionProtectionAggressiveness=' + $v }; if ($bad.Count -eq 0) { 'compliant' } else { 'non-compliant: ' + ($bad -join ', ') }

Expected output: compliant

How it is fixed

Fix method: Guidance or infrastructure patch

To establish the recommended configuration via configuration profiles, set the following Settings Catalog path to Medium: Use cloud aggregation and block when confidence level is above 99% or High: Use cloud intel and context, and block when confidence level is above 90%. Defender\Remote Encryption Protection Aggressiveness

Properties

Operating systems: Any
Tags: intune-defenderintuneregistry
Reference: CIS Microsoft Intune for Microsoft Defender Antivirus Benchmark v1.0.0 - 2.40 Ensure 'Remote Encryption Protection Aggressiveness' is set to 'Medium' or higher

Check this host

Run this on a machine you are allowed to audit. The scan is read-only.

shell

tmaegis scan --target intune-defender --level 2