Manage multifactor authentication (MFA) on your subscriptions

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If you're using passwords only to authenticate your users, you're leaving an attack vector open. Users often use weak passwords or reuse them for multiple services. With MFA enabled, your accounts are more secure, and users can still authenticate to almost any application with single sign-on (SSO).

There are multiple ways to enable MFA for your Microsoft Entra users based on the licenses that your organization owns. This page provides the details for each in the context of Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

MFA and Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Defender for Cloud places a high value on MFA. The security control that contributes the most to your secure score is Enable MFA.

The following recommendations in the Enable MFA control ensure you're meeting the recommended practices for users of your subscriptions:

  • Accounts with owner permissions on Azure resources should be MFA enabled
  • Accounts with write permissions on Azure resources should be MFA enabled
  • Accounts with read permissions on Azure resources should be MFA enabled

There are three ways to enable MFA and be compliant with the two recommendations in Defender for Cloud: security defaults, per-user assignment, and conditional access (CA) policy.

Free option - security defaults

If you're using the free edition of Microsoft Entra ID, you should use the security defaults to enable multifactor authentication on your tenant.

MFA for Microsoft 365 Business, E3, or E5 customers

Customers with Microsoft 365 can use Per-user assignment. In this scenario, Microsoft Entra multifactor authentication is either enabled or disabled for all users, for all sign-in events. There's no ability to enable multifactor authentication for a subset of users, or under certain scenarios, and management is through the Office 365 portal.

MFA for Microsoft Entra ID P1 or P2 customers

For an improved user experience, upgrade to Microsoft Entra ID P1 or P2 for conditional access (CA) policy options. To configure a CA policy, you need Microsoft Entra tenant permissions.

Your CA policy must:

  • enforce MFA

  • include the Microsoft Admin Portals

  • not exclude the Microsoft Azure Management app ID

Microsoft Entra ID P1 customers can use Microsoft Entra CA to prompt users for multifactor authentication during certain scenarios or events to fit your business requirements. Other licenses that include this functionality: Enterprise Mobility + Security E3, Microsoft 365 F1, and Microsoft 365 E3.

Microsoft Entra ID P2 provides the strongest security features and an improved user experience. This license adds risk-based conditional access to the Microsoft Entra ID P1 features. Risk-based CA adapts to your users' patterns and minimizes multifactor authentication prompts. Other licenses that include this functionality: Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 or Microsoft 365 E5.

Learn more in the Azure Conditional Access documentation.

Identify accounts without multifactor authentication (MFA) enabled

You can view the list of user accounts without MFA enabled from either the Defender for Cloud recommendations details page, or by using the Azure Resource Graph.

View the accounts without MFA enabled in the Azure portal

From the recommendation details page, select a subscription from the Unhealthy resources list or select Take action and the list will be displayed.

View the accounts without MFA enabled using Azure Resource Graph

To see which accounts don't have MFA enabled, use the following Azure Resource Graph query. The query returns all unhealthy resources - accounts - of the recommendation "Accounts with owner permissions on Azure resources should be MFA enabled".

  1. Open Azure Resource Graph Explorer.

    Screenshot showing launching the Azure Resource Graph Explorer** recommendation page.

  2. Enter the following query and select Run query.

    securityresources
| where type =~ "microsoft.security/assessments/subassessments"
| where id has "assessments/dabc9bc4-b8a8-45bd-9a5a-43000df8aa1c" or id has "assessments/c0cb17b2-0607-48a7-b0e0-903ed22de39b" or id has "assessments/6240402e-f77c-46fa-9060-a7ce53997754"
| parse id with start "/assessments/" assessmentId "/subassessments/" userObjectId
| summarize make_list(userObjectId) by strcat(tostring(properties.displayName), " (", assessmentId, ")")
| project ["Recommendation Name"] = Column1 , ["Account ObjectIDs"] = list_userObjectId

  3. The additionalData property reveals the list of account object IDs for accounts that don't have MFA enforced.

    Note

    The 'Account ObjectIDs' column contains the list of account object IDs for accounts that don't have MFA enforced per recommendation.

    Tip

    Alternatively, you can use the Defender for Cloud REST API method Assessments - Get.

Limitations

  • Conditional Access feature to enforce MFA on external users/tenants isn't supported yet.
  • Conditional Access policy applied to Microsoft Entra roles (such as all security admins, external users, external domain, etc.) isn't supported yet.
  • Conditional Access authentication strength isn't supported yet.
  • External MFA solutions such as Okta, Ping, Duo, and more aren't supported within the identity MFA recommendations.

Next steps

To learn more about recommendations that apply to other Azure resource types, see the following articles: