Contrast Security integrates with Microsoft Sentinel for real-time app defence

Contrast Security has announced its integration with Microsoft Sentinel, enhancing real-time detection and response capabilities at the application layer for security operations teams.

This collaboration brings live runtime telemetry from production applications into Microsoft Sentinel, which is Microsoft's cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform powered by artificial intelligence.

The new integration aims to address a critical need in the security operations centre (SOC), where application-layer attacks often bypass network and endpoint defences. The 2024 Microsoft Digital Defence Report highlighted a significant rise in complex threats such as API abuse, method tampering, and deserialization attacks, which are difficult to spot without direct visibility into applications as they run.

Bridging the visibility gap

Many SIEM platforms lack direct insight into application runtime behaviour, leaving SOC teams with incomplete data. The addition of Contrast's instrumentation-based threat sensor to Microsoft Sentinel enables the platform to ingest detailed, live telemetry from within running applications.

This capability allows SOC teams to detect and respond to modern application-layer threats as they develop, with new levels of precision and relevant context.

"Microsoft is raising the bar for what a modern SIEM can deliver," said Faya Peng, Head of Product and General Manager of ADR at Contrast Security. "By combining Sentinel's reach with Contrast's deep application-layer intelligence, we're giving joint customers the visibility and speed they need to stop real application attacks in production. It's a powerful step forward in helping SOC teams move faster and smarter."

Jesse Kopavi, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Security, commented on the evolving needs of security teams as they adopt artificial intelligence in their operations:

"Security teams integrated with AI need accurate, high-fidelity signals to stay ahead of evolving threats. By integrating Contrast Security's runtime intelligence with Microsoft Sentinel, we're helping customers gain deeper visibility into their application environments and accelerate threat detection and response."

Real-time detection and response

The integration enables Microsoft Sentinel users to detect and block application-layer attacks using information from Contrast's threat sensors. It also provides the ability to correlate application exploits with existing Sentinel data to view full attack chains, prioritise confirmed threats over less reliable alerts, and speed up triage by providing detailed attack context through the Contrast Graph.

This context includes the attack path, entry point, affected code, and exploitability, allowing analysts to swiftly identify root causes and respond effectively. The actionable intelligence reduces the need to verify whether an alert is genuine, as confirmed exploits are prioritised for remediation.

Security and development collaboration

The integration also supports cross-functional collaboration among security, application security (AppSec), and development teams. By offering a real-time, shared view of application-layer risk, these teams can focus their efforts on real, confirmed threats rather than static findings.

Use cases highlighted by the companies include responding to attacks based on actual runtime behaviour, conducting full-stack threat hunting that incorporates application-layer context, and enabling development teams to act promptly on data shared by SOC analysts. This shared data aims to facilitate closed-loop remediation, connecting detection with response and fix deployment.

With the incorporation of Contrast SmartFix AI, the solution can generate practical fix guidance, and when used with broader Contrast workflows, it can even initiate pull requests for code changes. This function is designed to help bridge the gap between identifying and resolving threats within applications.

Summary of benefits

Key benefits of the Contrast and Microsoft Sentinel integration include reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by supplying SOC analysts with real-time context within their existing workflows, blocking zero-day and novel attacks through behaviour-based detection at the application runtime, and outlining the full exploit-to-impact attack chain by combining Contrast's runtime insights with Sentinel's correlation engine.

The companies stated that the Contrast Security integration with Microsoft Sentinel is now available for customers.