Case Study: Large Banks & Financial Institutions strengthen security posture and remediate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint gaps with AttackIQ

Leading Bank Strengthens Security Posture with AttackIQ

Large Banks and Financial Institution, undergoing a migration from McAfee ePO to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE), were concerned that their new endpoint protection might not be fully effective. They engaged AttackIQ and deployed AttackIQ Enterprise (with AttackIQ Flex for broader testing) to run Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and continuously validate their endpoint defenses.

AttackIQ used Enterprise and Flex to emulate real-world attacks, revealing that MDE failed to block malware samples including Locky, Petya, and WannaCry and that a misconfigured Real‑Time Protection setting affected many thousands of MDE‑protected endpoints. AttackIQ escalated the findings to Microsoft, the misconfiguration was corrected, and MDE effectiveness improved significantly—likely preventing a large-scale malware breach—while AttackIQ’s continuous validation and reporting strengthened the institution’s overall security posture.