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Overview of Microsoft Defender for DNS

Important

  • As of August 1, 2023, customers with an existing subscription to Defender for DNS can continue to use the service as a standalone plan.
  • For new subscriptions, alerts about suspicious DNS activity are included as part of Defender for Servers Plan 2 (P2).
  • There's no change to the protection scope: Defender for DNS continues to protect all Azure resources connected to Azure's default DNS resolvers. The change affects how DNS protection is billed and bundled, not what resources are covered.

Microsoft Defender for DNS provides an additional layer of protection for all Azure resources that use Azure DNS's Azure-provided name resolution capability.

From within Azure DNS, Defender for DNS monitors the queries from these resources and detects suspicious activities without the need for any extra agents.

Availability

Aspect Details
Release state: General availability (GA)
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for DNS is billed as shown on the pricing page
Clouds: Commercial clouds
Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet
Azure Government

What are the benefits of Microsoft Defender for DNS?

Microsoft Defender for DNS detects suspicious and anomalous activities such as:

  • Data exfiltration from your Azure resources using DNS tunneling
  • Malware communicating with command and control servers
  • DNS attacks - communication with malicious DNS resolvers
  • Communication with domains used for malicious activities such as phishing and crypto mining

A full list of the alerts provided by Microsoft Defender for DNS is on the alerts reference page.

Dependencies

Microsoft Defender for DNS doesn't use any agents.

Next steps

In this article, you learned about Microsoft Defender for DNS.

For related material, see the following article:

Security alerts might be generated by Defender for Cloud or received from other security products. To export all of these alerts to Microsoft Sentinel, any third-party SIEM, or any other external tool, follow the instructions in Exporting alerts to a SIEM.