Microsoft has released a free investigative playbook designed to help security teams reconstruct what happened when AI systems like Microsoft 365 Copilot or Azure AI services are involved in a security incident. It’s a practical framework — not theory — built around the telemetry those services already generate.
The Problem It Solves
AI tool usage is no longer experimental in most enterprises. It’s daily work. But when something goes wrong — a prompt injection attempt, unexpected data exposure, or suspicious behavior from an AI agent — security teams often find themselves staring at raw signals with no structure to turn them into a coherent picture. Who triggered the action? When did it happen? What data was accessed? Without answers to those basic questions, an investigation stalls before it starts.
The telemetry is already there across Microsoft Purview, Defender, and Sentinel. It captures identity, timestamps, and resource access for AI interactions. The gap has been methodology — a consistent way to turn those scattered signals into a reconstructed account of events. The playbook targets exactly that.
The Approach: Scope, Context, Signal
The methodology follows three steps. First, scope: identify who interacted with the AI service, when it occurred, and which services were involved. Second, context: determine what resources were accessed, what data may have been exposed, and how that activity compares against expected behavior. Third, signal: analyze detection triggers — prompt injection attempts, anomalous usage patterns, credential exposure — within the broader activity chain.
It also covers agent-based systems, which add complexity. For agents, investigators need to know what agents are deployed, how they’re configured, what they’re authorized to access, and whether that authorization was used as intended.
Why This Is Worth Your Time
The playbook isn’t just documentation — it includes KQL queries, schema references, and detection patterns ready to use in Microsoft Sentinel. That matters because most security teams don’t have the luxury of building AI investigation workflows from scratch. Having a tested, vendor-provided framework that plugs into tools you’re already running cuts the ramp-up time significantly.
As AI tools handle more sensitive data and more critical workflows, the expectation that security teams can investigate AI-related activity with the same rigor they apply to endpoints and identities isn’t going away. It’s going to become a compliance requirement in regulated industries before long.
What’s Next
The playbook is available now at aka.ms/AIIRplaybook. Microsoft is likely to expand coverage to more AI services and agent platforms in future updates, especially as enterprise AI adoption accelerates and incident response teams demand better tooling. If your organization runs Copilot or Azure AI services, downloading this and running the schema queries in your Sentinel instance is a high-value afternoon project.
