Control: 2.2.8 Ensure Multifactor Authentication is Required to access Microsoft Admin Portals

Description

This recommendation ensures that users accessing Microsoft Admin Portals (i.e. Microsoft 365 Admin, Microsoft 365 Defender, Exchange Admin Center, Azure Portal, etc.) are required to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) credentials when logging into an Admin Portal.

Administrative Portals for Microsoft Azure should be secured with a higher level of scrutiny to authenticating mechanisms. Enabling multi-factor authentication is recommended to reduce the potential for abuse of Administrative actions, and to prevent intruders or compromised admin credentials from changing administrative settings.

IMPORTANT: While this recommendation allows exceptions to specific Users or Groups, they should be very carefully tracked and reviewed for necessity on a regular interval through an Access Review process. It is important that this rule be built to include "All Users" to ensure that all users not specifically excepted will be required to use MFA to access Admin Portals.

Remediation

From Azure Portal

1. From the Azure Admin Portal dashboard, open Microsoft Entra ID.
2. Click Security in the Entra ID blade.
3. Click Conditional Access in the Security blade.
4. Click Policies in the Conditional Access blade.
5. Click + New policy.
6. Enter a name for the policy.
7. Click the blue text under Users.
8. Under Include, select All users.
9. Under Exclude, check Users and groups.
10. Select users or groups to be exempted from this policy (e.g. break-glass emergency accounts, and non-interactive service accounts) then click the Select button.
11. Click the blue text under Target resources.
12. Under Include, click the Select apps radio button.
13. Click the blue text under Select.
14. Check the box next to Microsoft Admin Portals then click the Select button.
15. Click the blue text under Grant.
16. Under Grant access check the box for Require multifactor authentication then click the Select button.
17. Before creating, set Enable policy to Report-only.
18. Click Create.

After testing the policy in report-only mode, update the Enable policy setting from Report-only to On.

Default Value

MFA is not enabled by default for administrative actions.