M365EXO-044: Required Exchange Online alerts enabled (MS.EXO.16.1)
- Platform
- Entra ID / M365
- Category
- Advanced Threat Protection
- Severity
- High
- Zero Trust pillar
- Visibility & Analytics (weight 2)
- Golden fixtures
- 4
- Branch coverage
- Observed: fixtures prove the verdicts they exercise
- Provenance
- baseline
What it checks
SCuBA MS.EXO.16.1 requires that a minimum set of alerts be enabled, including suspicious email sending patterns, suspicious connector activity, suspicious email forwarding activity, messages delayed, tenant restricted from sending unprovisioned email, tenant restricted from sending email, and a potentially malicious URL click detected. These alerts give administrators real-time insight into likely security incidents.
Recommended value
The seven required alert policies enabled: suspicious sending patterns, suspicious connector activity, suspicious forwarding, messages delayed, tenant restricted from sending unprovisioned email, tenant restricted from sending email, malicious URL click
Remediation
Verify each of the seven required alert policies is enabled: suspicious email sending patterns, suspicious connector activity, suspicious email forwarding activity, messages have been delayed, tenant restricted from sending unprovisioned email, tenant restricted from sending email, and a potentially malicious URL click was detected. Enable any that are disabled. Where a comparable third-party alerting solution is used, confirm it covers equivalent conditions.
Fixture-proven verdicts
Every verdict below is proven by a golden fixture in the module's gating test suite. This table derives from the last green run; it cannot be edited by hand.
| Scenario | Expected verdict |
|---|---|
| clean | PASS |
| empty | FAIL |
| known-bad | WARN |
| throttled | Not Assessed |
Framework mappings
- CISA SCuBA
- MS.DEFENDER.5.1v1
- NIST SP 800-53
- SI-4, IR-4, AU-6
- MITRE ATT&CK
- T1114.003