Microsoft 365 Email Protection

One of the most popular targets for cyber attacks these days is email. Both individuals and organizations regularly exchange sensitive information and files through email, which is why they are such a popular target for attackers.

Verizon’s 2021 DBIR discovered that 96 percent of malware and phishing attacks are sent through email, and unfortunately, many of these hackers are skilled enough to make their spam emails look legitimate enough to trick people.

Email is necessary for an organization to collaborate, but it can be highly vulnerable. That is why having excellent threat protection for Microsoft 365 emails is crucial to keeping your data secure. Here, we will examine how you can enhance your Microsoft 365 email security.

How to Enhance Microsoft 365 Email Security

Microsoft 365 does have its own security features, but cyber attacks can still break through, which is why it is a great idea to seek some extra protection for your Microsoft 365 email accounts.

SpamTitan Plus Improves Microsoft 365 Email Protection

SpamTitan Plus offers cutting-edge protection for your Microsoft 365 email accounts to keep your data protected. SpamTitan Plus has an advanced AI that is the best at picking up phishing links, no matter how well disguised the email is.

It also detects things more quickly and has the lowest false positive rate in the business. SpamTitan Plus uses the best predictive technology available to anticipate new cyberattacks to keep your inboxes protected from new tricks cybercriminals have up their sleeves.

With SpamTitan Plus, you will also get detailed quarantine reports that allow you to have more control over your email accounts. Part of that control allows each system, domain, and individual user to customize its own block list for emails.

Another excellent protection is that SpamTitan Plus will automatically scan your outbound emails for spam and malware to help prevent the IP address of your organization from being blacklisted.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Using only a username and password to sign in to your email is not secure enough anymore. By implementing multi-factor authentication, you add an additional level of security that makes it much harder for hackers to gain access to your inbox. This is one of the easiest ways you can protect your email accounts.

Disable Auto-Forwarding to Remote Domains

Many people love being able to automatically forward all of their emails to remote domains so that they can send their work emails straight to their personal inboxes. But if their personal inbox is not as secure as their business inbox, then any sensitive information may be compromised. Some hackers will also take advantage of this feature to forward emails to themselves so they can collect data on unsuspecting people. Disabling this feature is an excellent step to securing your organization’s information.

Get Suspicious Activity Alerts

You can set up alerts in Microsoft 365 email to get notifications if there is any abnormal behavior by your users or the system that might indicate an attack.

Encrypt Emails

Within Microsoft 365, you can set up email encryption for your most sensitive information that will prompt users to enter a password the first time they open the email, and it will restrict them from copying or printing anything and will make it so that the emails cannot be read outside of Microsoft 365.

Educate Your Employees

Your employees are a vital part of your organization, but even your best employee can make a mistake that leads to a data breach. They might accidentally click on a link in a phishing email, download an infected file, or visit an infected website. The best way to help arm your employees against these errors is to take the time to educate them on the best practices for cybersecurity for your organization. This includes encouraging them to use strong passwords that are harder to crack and to not use the same password for everything so that if one of their accounts is compromised, it is just that one account, not every other account they have for your organization that they use that password for.

Use Admin Accounts

Within Microsoft 365, you can create admin accounts that have more privileges than standard accounts. The admin accounts are, of course, a great target for hackers, which is why if you have admin accounts, you should only use them for administration emails. Every admin should still have their own personal email for their non-administrative emails. This will help improve the security of your admin accounts, which have even more sensitive information than other employees’ inboxes.

A recent study has found that 25 percent of phishing emails are not caught by Microsoft 365 and are still delivered to inboxes.

Why Microsoft 365 Security Alone Isn’t Enough

While Microsoft 365 does offer some email threat protection, it is not enough on its own. It does not use a multi-layered approach to security, meaning it does not have predictive technology to identify more advanced security threats, pattern matching, machine learning, and more. In fact, a recent study has found that 25 percent of phishing emails are not caught by Microsoft 365 and are still delivered to inboxes. With as great as cloud-based email like Microsoft 365 is, it opens up more ways for hackers to get into your organization’s email system, and they have more access to data when they succeed at a phishing attempt.

The same study indicated that one in every 25 emails sent to a business was a phishing email and that Microsoft and Amazon are the two most commonly impersonated brands in these attacks. Over half of these phishing emails have malware on them, and another 40.9 percent have credential harvesting in them, which gives hackers even more access to your organization’s sensitive data.

Many of the important security features that you need to keep email secure are off by default in Microsoft 365 email, which can lead to even more problems if your employees just assume they have this protection without anyone ever activating it. By using another layer of threat protection, you can make sure that all of the security features you need are always in place.

Spam Filtering is Off by Default

The spam filtering features for Microsoft 365 are off by default; someone has to activate it. Many may assume it does the filtering automatically since many other email services have it as an automatic feature. If you are unaware that you need to activate the spam filters, then this spam ends up in your inbox, and some of it can look pretty convincing.

Attachment Scanning is Off by Default

Hiding malware in attachments is common, so having your inbox scan any attachments for viruses should always be active. However, this is another vital piece of internet security that Microsoft 365 has disabled by default. This can have the same issues that spam filtering does; if you do not know you need to activate it and expect it to just do this automatically, then your employees may end up downloading malware or something worse.

Adopt an Extra Layer of Security

While Microsoft Office 365 does come with its own security features, some of which are quite powerful, these alone are not always enough to stop malware and phishing attacks. Hackers are constantly developing new tricks to try to slip viruses into a company’s systems, so the protections of old are not enough on their own anymore. That is why you should bring in an extra layer of security with SpamTitan Plus. Book your free SpamTitan Plus demo today and get started securing your inboxes!