Microsoft Defender Adds Cross Platform Mobile Protections

Microsoft recently announced an important upgrade to Microsoft Defender.

It now supports vulnerability management for both Android and iOS.

The company's announcement reads in part as follows:

"With this new cross-platform coverage, threat and vulnerability management capabilities now support all major device platforms across the organization - spanning workstations, servers, and mobile devices.

Threat and vulnerability management in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint continuously monitors and identifies impacted devices, assesses associated risks in the environment, and provides intelligent prioritization and integrated workflows to seamlessly remediate vulnerabilities."

Although the new feature was introduced with very little fanfare, this is a significant change. This will make the lives of network admins much easier by significantly decreasing the surface attack area of mobile endpoints.

This is part of Microsoft's broader strategy to expand the security platform's capabilities across all platforms to provide endpoint users with a unified security solution.  Previous upgrades to Microsoft Defender's capabilities included adding support for Linux users back in 2020.

Just one month later, the company added a "Microsoft Secure Score for Devices" feature. This is a feature that that allows network security professionals to evaluate the state of security of all devices connected to the enterprise network. It also includes a "recommended actions" section to further bolster security.

Then in October 2020 the company added another new feature that automatically generated reports to assist with the tracking of vulnerable Windows and macOS devices on the network. These included vulnerability severity levels, exploit availability, vulnerability age, and vulnerable devices sorted by OS.

All these changes are superb when evaluated individually but taken together they demonstrate just how serious Microsoft is taking matters of security. They also display the company's clear commitment to provide cross-platform protection. This is all with the understanding that networks are no longer homogenous entities and are often made up of a wide range of different device types running a variety of operating systems.

Kudos to Microsoft for their ongoing efforts to make Microsoft Defender even more valuable than it already is.