SC-200 Respond to security incidents Practice Question
You are a Security Operations Analyst using Microsoft Defender XDR. An incident named 'Phishing campaign targeting finance' has been automatically created from multiple alerts. The incident contains evidence for several users and mailboxes. You need to determine which users were affected by the campaign and the timeline of their interactions with the malicious emails. Which feature should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse the Incidents queue summary with the detailed attack story timeline that provides the chronological user interaction view.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The incident's Attack story timeline
The Attack story timeline within a Microsoft Defender XDR incident aggregates alerts, events, and entities into a chronological narrative. This directly shows which users were involved in the phishing campaign and the sequence of their actions, such as clicking links or opening attachments, enabling rapid scoping and response.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Explorer
Why it's wrong here
Explorer (Threat Explorer) in Defender for Office 365 is designed for investigating email threats, but it focuses on email entities and does not provide a unified incident timeline across multiple workloads. It would not directly show the full attack story with user interactions across endpoints and identities as the incident timeline does.
- ✗
Advanced hunting with a custom KQL query
Why it's wrong here
Advanced hunting is powerful for proactive threat hunting and custom queries, but it does not automatically present the incident's pre-correlated timeline. While you could write a query, it would require manual effort to join multiple tables and would not provide the ready-made attack story view that directly answers which users were affected and when.
- ✓
The incident's Attack story timeline
Why this is correct
The Attack story timeline in Microsoft Defender XDR provides a chronological view of alerts, events, and entities associated with an incident, allowing you to see which users interacted with the phishing emails and when. It aggregates evidence across workloads, helping you quickly assess the scope and sequence of the attack without manually correlating alerts.
- ✗
The Microsoft 365 Defender portal's Incidents queue
Why it's wrong here
The Incidents queue lists incidents with summary information such as severity, status, and affected entities, but it does not show a detailed chronological timeline of user interactions. To see the sequence of events and which users were impacted, you need to open the incident and view its attack story, not just the queue.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
This SC-200 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SC-200 exam.