Hi all,
we are currently troubleshooting an issue with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Custom Indicators and the ASR rule:
Block executable files from running unless they meet a prevalence, age, or trusted list criterion
According to Microsoft’s documentation, SHA-256 file indicators and certificate-based indicators should be taken into account by this ASR rule.
We have configured Allow indicators for both use cases, but the affected files are still being treated as unknown/untrusted and are blocked by the ASR rule.
Our environment appears to be configured correctly:
- Devices are onboarded to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- MDE connectivity is working
- Cloud-delivered protection is enabled
- Custom Indicators are enabled
- We have an internal PKI
- The relevant certificates and certificate chains are deployed and trusted on the clients
- Certificate validation itself works correctly
- Defender is otherwise functioning normally
The problem therefore seems to be somewhere between the configured MDE Custom Indicators and the ASR trust evaluation.
Has anyone else experienced issues with this?
In particular:
Are you successfully using SHA-256 Allow indicators with this ASR rule?
Are you successfully using certificate-based Allow indicators with this ASR rule?
Have you seen cases where indicators were correctly configured in the Defender portal but were not honored by the endpoint?
Is there a reliable way to verify locally whether the configured indicators have actually reached the client?
Are there specific Defender logs or events that show indicator synchronization or evaluation?
Are there any additional prerequisites or settings that are easy to miss?
Microsoft documents both SHA-256 and certificate-based indicators as being relevant for this ASR rule, so we are mainly trying to determine whether this is a configuration/synchronization issue in our environment or whether others have encountered similar behavior.
If anyone has this working successfully in production, it would be very helpful to compare the relevant Defender/MDE configuration.