What does Azure Defender for Servers primarily protect against?

Azure Defender for Servers is primarily focused on enhancing the security posture of virtual machines (VMs) within Azure. It provides advanced threat detection capabilities specifically tailored to identify threats and vulnerabilities that target these server environments. By utilizing behavioral analytics and machine learning, Azure Defender can monitor the behavior of applications and user activities within the VM, enabling it to detect anomalies that might indicate a potential attack, such as unauthorized access attempts or other malicious actions.

The other options pertain to different aspects of Azure services. Application performance monitoring is concerned with measuring and optimizing the performance of applications, which is not the focus of Azure Defender for Servers. Networking configuration changes are managed under Azure's networking services, aiming to secure and optimize the network settings but not directly linked to server threat detection. User authentication failures relate to access control and identity management but do not encapsulate the comprehensive threat detection functionalities that Azure Defender for Servers provides. Therefore, the primary focus of Azure Defender for Servers on virtual machines and their security aligns with its role of threat detection in Azure environments.