What is defender-for-business?

A guidance skill for Microsoft Defender for Business, an endpoint-security product for small and medium-sized businesses with up to 300 employees. Endpoint security protects company computers and devices from malware and other attacks.

Use it to plan or operate endpoint protection for an eligible small business, compare Defender plans, or manage security for multiple small-business customers through Microsoft 365 Lighthouse.

It helps a small IT team understand what Defender for Business includes and how it differs from related Microsoft Defender plans, without requiring a dedicated security operations team.

defender-for-business — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by vinayaklatt

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills --skill defender-for-business

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/defender-for-business/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/defender-for-business)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/defender-for-business"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/defender-for-business/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/defender-for-business"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/defender-for-business.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 223 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,134 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00223	$0.02134
Opus 5	$0.00112	$0.01067
Sonnet 5	$0.00045	$0.00427
Haiku 4.5	$0.00022	$0.00213

Measured 13d ago against content hash 833d77a8c8cd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

defender-for-business scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/defender-for-business/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Microsoft Defender for Business

Defender for Business (MDB) is endpoint security packaged for the small-and-medium- business (SMB) segment — up to 300 employees. It includes most of MDE Plan 2's protective power (next-gen AV, EDR, ASR, automated investigation, vulnerability management) with a simplified, wizard-driven configuration so a small IT team or an MSP can deploy and operate it without a dedicated SOC.

It's bundled with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and available as a standalone SKU. For MSPs, it's delivered through Microsoft 365 Lighthouse for multi-tenant management.

When to use

You're an SMB up to ~300 employees, or an MSP delivering security to SMB customers, and you need real endpoint protection without an enterprise SOC budget.

Do not use this skill for enterprise EDR (defender-for-endpoint), Defender XDR cross-product investigation (defender-xdr), or Azure server protection (defender-for-servers).

What's in MDB

Capability	MDB	MDE P1	MDE P2
Next-gen AV	✅	✅	✅
Attack surface reduction	✅	✅	✅
Web content filtering	✅	✅	✅
EDR	✅ (simplified)	—	✅
Automated investigation & remediation (AIR)	✅	—	✅
Vulnerability management	✅ (subset)	—	✅
Threat intel & advanced hunting (Defender XDR)	Limited	—	✅
Mobile threat defense (iOS/Android)	Add-on / via Intune	—	Yes
Server protection	MDB Servers add-on (≤60 servers)	via DfC	via DfC

Rule of thumb: MDB stops where you need a SOC analyst doing advanced hunting in raw tables. At ~300 users / multi-site / regulated, plan migration to MDE P2 + E5.

Approach

License path. Most SMBs get MDB via Microsoft 365 Business Premium — bundled with Entra P1, Intune, and DLP basics. Check seat count: MDB is hard-capped at 300 users; once you exceed, you must move to enterprise SKUs.
Onboard via the simplified setup wizard in security.microsoft.com → Assets → Devices. Three default device groups: workstations, mobile, servers (servers via add-on). Wizard pre-configures sensible defaults for AV, ASR, EDR.

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

13d ago First seen · 152 lines · 223 tokens per session scan A 833d77a8c8cd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

defender-for-business is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills (173 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 223 tokens to every session and 2,134 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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