Ransomware has evolved. Attackers no longer just encrypt laptops; they infiltrate Microsoft 365 tenants, quietly exfiltrate sensitive data from OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, and Teams, and then trigger the encryption. Your own backup workflows do the rest, faithfully snapshotting the damage. By the time your team detects the incident, weeks of recovery points may already be compromised, and your data may already be in the wrong hands.

That's the problem Druva Threat Insights for Microsoft 365 is built to solve — with Threat Insights, users are enabled to stop threats before they strike with Threat Watch, then investigate and neutralize attacks instantly using Threat Hunting. These capabilities are now available as part of Druva's broader investment in assured cyber recovery.

Druva's backup platform sits at a unique vantage point: we have telemetry across every file change, version, and recovery point across your M365 workloads. That telemetry is a detection signal. Threat Insights activates that signal — giving security and backup teams the visibility to detect threats earlier, scope their impact precisely, and recover with confidence.

Why Backup-Layer Detection Changes Everything

Traditional security tools — EDR, SIEM, and email gateways monitor production environments. But once ransomware reaches your backup plane, those tools go blind. Organizations are left with a critical question: Which recovery point is actually safe to restore?

Answering that question without backup-layer detection means guessing. Guessing means downtime. Druva eliminates the guess.

By embedding threat detection directly into the backup workflow, Druva provides a level of assurance that accelerates incident response — minimizing disruption, reducing recovery time, and supporting the compliance reporting your regulators expect.

How Modern Ransomware Reaches M365 Backups

Modern attacks bypass traditional defenses by targeting identity, synchronization, and cloud management layers, not just endpoints. Here's how each attack path works and why conventional tools miss it:

Sync-Based Propagation: Once ransomware encrypts a local endpoint, the OneDrive sync client automatically pushes encrypted files into OneDrive and SharePoint Online. Clean cloud files are overwritten, and subsequent backup snapshots silently inherit the corrupted data. Traditional endpoint tools have already fired by this point, but the cloud damage is already done. (MITRE T1486, T1080)

Session Hijacking & MFA Bypass: Using stolen session cookies or adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing kits (MITRE T1539, T1078), attackers authenticate as legitimate users. Because they're operating inside a valid session, their activity is indistinguishable from normal employee behavior, making perimeter and identity alerts largely ineffective.

OAuth Abuse: Malicious OAuth apps trick users into granting broad Microsoft Graph API permissions (MITRE T1528). No endpoint compromise required. Attackers gain persistent access to mailboxes, files, and Teams data entirely invisible to endpoint-focused security stacks.

Living-off-the-Land Administrative Sabotage: Using compromised admin credentials, attackers abuse native tools like PowerShell and Graph APIs to mass-delete files, purge recycle bins, wipe version histories, and disable retention policies. Because these are legitimate administrative operations, malware scanners don't flag them. (MITRE T1490, T1078.004, T1059.009)

In every case, the result is the same: production data is compromised, native recovery paths are weakened, and backups inherit the damage.

Introducing Druva Threat Insights for Microsoft 365

Druva now extends cyber resilience directly into the backup plane for:

• OneDrive
• SharePoint Online
• Exchange Online (attachments)
• Microsoft Teams

Threat Watch: Continuous, Zero-Touch Monitoring

Threat Watch runs automatically — no configuration, no scheduling, no operational overhead. It continuously scans backups for ransomware indicators and known IOCs, ensuring threats are caught at rest, not just at the time of incident.

What it does:

• Automated IOC scans after every backup completion
• Continuous monitoring every 8 hours
• Automatic rescanning of historical backups when new threat intelligence is published
• Automated quarantine of compromised recovery points
• Instant alerting via SIEM, email, and in-app notifications
• Detailed audit trail for compliance reporting

IOC intelligence is powered by Google Mandiant, CISA, and Druva's own ReconX Labs security research team with support for custom IOC ingestion via API or CSV.

Threat Watch is your peacetime defense: always on, always watching, so threats don't go undetected for weeks.

Threat Hunting: Forensics for Active Incidents

When an incident occurs, Threat Hunting gives security teams the on-demand investigative capability to understand exactly what was affected, when, and where — across historical backup data.

What it does:

• On-demand scans scoped to specific users, SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, Exchange mailboxes, or Teams data
• Custom IOC scanning for incident-specific indicators
• Granular visibility into which snapshots and files are compromised
• Precise impact scoping across historical recovery points
• Direct support for cyber recovery and remediation workflows

This is your active incident capability: it tells you which recovery points are clean, so your backup and security teams can act with precision instead of uncertainty.

The Value: Speed, Confidence, and Compliance

For Security Teams: early threat visibility inside backups, faster incident scoping, and a defense-in-depth layer that traditional tools miss.

For Backup & Recovery Teams: confidence in clean recovery points, automated quarantine, and faster restore decisions without reinfection risk.

For CISOs and Compliance Teams: the audit-ready evidence chain to meet GDPR, SEC Cyber Disclosure, FCA Operational Resilience, and CERT-In reporting obligations.

Part of Druva's Assured Cyber Recovery Investment

Threat Insights for Microsoft 365 are part of Druva's larger platform investment in assured cyber recovery — the principle that backup data itself must be a trusted, verified, and defensible asset, not just a passive copy.

The combination of continuous monitoring (Threat Watch) and on-demand forensics (Threat Hunting) closes the recovery confidence gap — ensuring that when the time comes to restore, you restore right the first time.

Ready to see it in action? Tour the product, download the datasheet, or visit the product page.

If you're an existing Druva customer, reach out to your Account Executive or Druva Support to enable these capabilities today.