Almost all the businesses out there in the world rely on Microsoft Office Suite to get their day to day work done. If this is applicable to your business as well, it is important to take appropriate steps to prevent your business against Office 365 phishing. That’s because we see a lot of businesses out there in the world becoming victims of Office 365 phishing attempts. If you don’t take appropriate steps to overcome this, you will end up running your entire business as well.
Doesn’t Office 365 come along with anti-phishing protection?
Yes, Office 365 comes along with a large number of Office 365 anti phishing protection capabilities. ATP anti phishing can be considered as a perfect methodology that you can find in Office 365. However, the hackers are smart enough to get through these protection methods.
During the recent past, we were able to witness a rapid expansion of the phishing attacks on Office 365. In fact, Office 365 has become one of the most attractive targets out there in the world as well. It has been identified that around 1.3 million Office 365 accounts are being targeted per month with the phishing attacks. These figures are increasing on a daily basis. This fact has been proven by the Webroot Threat Report as well. Hence, all businesses must focus a lot on the phishing attempts and take appropriate steps to stay away from frustration.
How to implement o365 phishing protection?
Several effective methods are available for you to follow and overcome frustration. Below mentioned are some of the most prominent methods out of them. Any person who is looking forward to prevent phishing Office 365 can follow these steps and act accordingly. The effort you spend on these techniques can provide you with amazing results in the long run. Hence, you will not end up with any disappointments.
- Depend on the junk mail filter offered by Microsoft
When you are using Office 365 Outlook, you will be able to see that Microsoft has introduced a dedicated junk mail filter. This can be considered as one of the most powerful features that you can see in Outlook. In fact, it plays an effective role in filtering out the junk emails. Hence, you are encouraged to rely on it.
The junk mail filter offered by Office 365 has got the ability to differentiate genuine and legitimate emails from the phishing and spam emails. Hence, you should never ignore the functionality offered by it.
When Office 365 Junk Filter figures out a phishing mail, it would automatically deactivate your ability to respond to that message. In addition, the hyperlinks in the message will also be disabled. Even though it is possible for you to allow them, you are encouraged not to go forward with it. If you do, there is a high possibility for you to become a victim of Office 365 phishing.
If you are working as a network administrator of a company, you will be able to set up the junk mail filter on the server level. Then you will be able to take better control over the spam emails. In other words, you will be able to specify the senders of the emails and control them accordingly. In addition, you will be able to determine what top level domains are trusted and what are not.
- Disable all the hyperlinks of junk emails
When a person in your office clicks a hyperlink of a phishing email, there is a possibility for the entire business to be impacted by it. Hence, it is recommended for the network administrators to make sure that they disable the email hyperlinks with the assistance of a group policy. It is an efficient method to control junk emails. This method has proven to deliver positive results as well.
You should also keep in mind that this method has got the ability to kill some of the legitimate emails as well. In such a situation, the users might have to enter the complete URLs into the emails in order to make sure that others can access them. Anyway, that’s a good habit to be followed within the company. Adapting to such a methodology is totally worth instead of dealing with the negative consequences that come along with a phishing attack. Even the o365 phishing protection services recommend it.
- Enable Safe Link in Advanced Threat Protection
As you already know, managing Office 365 is quite different when compared to the steps that you will have to follow when you are managing a traditional Office installation. That’s because you will be able to enable reliable phishing and spam filtering in the traditional Office installations.
Along with Office 365, you will be able to get an impressive feature called Advanced Threat Protection. It comes as an upgrade to the Microsoft Office 365 subscription that you get. Hence, you are encouraged to get your hands on it without keeping any doubts in mind.
In Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection upgrade, you will be able to find a useful and an important component that is named as Safe Links. Safe Links is a set of filters, which you will be able to apply to a message before that is being sent into the inbox of the recipient. It will be there even after the message is opened and read as well.
The safe links can be considered as a cloud based and a polished up version of the junk mail filter that comes along with Microsoft Outlook. That’s because you will be provided with the opportunity to go ahead and apply rules on individual level as well as on groups. There is also the possibility for you to go ahead and apply the rules on an organizational level. Hence, you will be able to make sure that everyone at your office, who use Office 365 will be protected from phishing attempts.