vinayaklatthe Microsoft Security Copilot Agents
Security Copilot agents are purpose-built, semi-autonomous AI agents that operate within Security Copilot to take on high-volume security workflows, learn from analyst feedback, and act inside the Microsoft Security products. Each agent has its own Entra Agent ID, scoped permissions, and a supervision model.
When to use
Use this skill when the user wants to offload a high-volume, repetitive triage or remediation workflow to an agent and is ready to govern an autonomous workload identity.
Do not use this skill for:
- Basic Security Copilot setup, SCU provisioning, promptbooks (use
security-copilot) - General Entra Agent ID design (use
entra-id+ Entra Agent ID guidance) - Building a custom agent from scratch (this skill is operating built-in agents)
Pick the right agent for the job
| If the team is drowning in... | Agent | Owning product | Recommended first mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| User-reported phishing tickets | Phishing Triage | Defender for Office 365 | Recommendation - human approves verdicts for 2 weeks |
| DLP / Insider Risk alert backlog | Alert Triage (Purview) | Purview | Recommendation - measure precision before autonomy |
| Stale or duplicate Conditional Access policies | Conditional Access Optimization | Entra ID | Recommendation only - never autonomous in production |
| Patch / vuln backlog for endpoints | Vulnerability Remediation | Intune + Defender Vuln Mgmt | Recommendation; deploy patches via existing change control |
| Threat-landscape briefings for leadership | Threat Intelligence Briefing | Defender Threat Intelligence | Autonomous (read-only) |
| SOC analyst onboarding / context lookups | Conditional Access / IR partner agents | Partner ecosystem | Recommendation - third-party data path |
Rule of thumb: start every agent in Recommendation mode for 2-4 weeks. Measure agreement rate between agent verdict and human verdict. Only graduate to autonomous when agreement > 90% on the relevant queue.
Approach
- Provision capacity and licensing first — Each agent consumes Security Copilot Compute Units (SCUs). Most built-in agents need ~1-2 SCUs per concurrent workflow. Confirm SCU commitment and the owning product licence (e.g. Phishing Triage needs Defender for Office 365 P2). Without both, the agent surfaces in UI but fails at execution. Verify: Security Copilot → Owner settings → Capacity shows enough SCUs reserved for the agents you plan to enable.
- Set up the agent identity — Each agent has its own Entra Agent ID (workload identity).
Treat it as a privileged service principal: name it predictably (e.g.
sc-agent-phishingtriage-prod), document its owner, register it in your identity inventory, and enable sign-in monitoring. Verify: Entra → Enterprise applications shows the agent identity with the expected API permissions and no extras. - Scope permissions to least privilege — Built-in agents request a set of Graph / product permissions. Review and remove anything not needed for your scenario. For example, Alert Triage does not need Mail.Send even if the consent flow offers it. Verify: a test action in the agent succeeds; a deliberately out-of-scope action (e.g. sending mail when only triage is intended) fails.
- Configure supervision mode per action — Each agent has actions with different blast
radius. Set the mode per action, not per agent:
- Recommendation = agent suggests, human approves (always for blocking, deleting, password reset, MFA reset, policy change)
- Autonomous = agent acts without approval (acceptable for labelling, classification, read-only enrichment, briefing generation) Verify: an irreversible action in test data prompts for human approval; a reversible action proceeds without.
- Pilot on a slice — Scope the agent to one team, one mailbox, one site, or one device group for 2-4 weeks. Measure: agreement rate, time-to-decision, false positive/negative count, override rate. Verify: pilot dashboard shows >90% agent-human agreement before expanding scope.
- Wire to your SOC tooling — Agent activity logs flow to Defender XDR and Sentinel via the AuditLogs and agent-specific tables. Build a workbook tracking agent decisions vs human overrides so drift is visible.
- Lifecycle the agent identity — When you decommission an agent (or a workflow), disable the Entra Agent ID, revoke its API permissions, and remove it from your privileged identity inventory. Agent identities that outlive their use case are tomorrow's blast radius.
Guardrails
- Human-in-the-loop for consequential actions, always. Password reset, MFA reset, account disable, message purge, policy change, device wipe - never autonomous.
- Govern agent identities like privileged service principals. They are not service accounts to forget. Apply Conditional Access (where supported), monitor sign-ins, review API permissions quarterly, rotate any agent secrets, and audit consented permissions.
- Measure agreement rate before graduating to autonomous. A high-volume agent acting at 85% accuracy is a 15% incident factory at scale. Use the 90% threshold or higher.
- Watch SCU consumption. Agents can burn through SCU capacity unexpectedly during incident spikes; set alerts on SCU utilisation > 80%.
- Do not pile agents on the same identity. Each built-in agent has its own Entra Agent ID; consolidating is not supported and breaks the audit chain.
- Agent prompts can be poisoned. Phishing-Triage reads user-submitted email content; treat agent inputs as untrusted. Microsoft has built-in mitigations - do not add your own unsanitised data sources.
Common anti-patterns
- "Enable in autonomous mode on day one." No baseline of accuracy; first false positive becomes a real outage (blocked exec mailbox, disabled VIP account).
- "Use Global Admin for the agent identity." Catastrophic blast radius. Use the agent's default scoped permissions and trim further.
- "Treat the agent as the SOC analyst." Agents augment, not replace. Without a human review loop you lose the feedback that improves the agent.
- "Forget to disable retired agent identities." Inactive agent IDs sit in Entra with consented Graph permissions - prime supply-chain target.
- "Skip the pilot." Org-wide rollout exposes a queue-specific failure mode you would have caught in a 2-week pilot.
Example prompts
Deploy the Phishing Triage agent in Security Copilot.Which Security Copilot agent should I pilot first for my SOC?How do I supervise an autonomous alert triage agent and set permissions?What permissions does the Conditional Access Optimization agent need?Configure agent identity for an agentic SOC.Measure the accuracy of the Alert Triage agent before going autonomous.
Microsoft Learn
- Agents overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/copilot/security/agents-overview
- Security Copilot platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/security-copilot/microsoft-security-copilot
- Discover agents (catalog): https://learn.microsoft.com/copilot/security/discover-agents
- Configure and manage agents: https://learn.microsoft.com/copilot/security/agents-manage
- Entra Agent ID and identity for AI: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/identity/
- Manage SCU capacity: https://learn.microsoft.com/security-copilot/manage-usage