What can we do to stop all these phishing emails?!
A question we hear all too often. The unfortunate reality is that small businesses are plagued with email attacks daily. On average, each one of your employees receives ~5 phishing emails a week. One of the best ways to defend against this threat is to teach your staff how to spot these attacks with cybersecurity awareness training. But phishing and social engineering attacks continue to become more sophisticated and you can’t rely solely on your staff to stop an attack.
If you want to bolster your company’s email security, we encourage you to consider Microsoft’s Defender service. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a cloud-based email filtering tool that protects your organization against advanced threats like phishing and business email compromise. Defender can significantly reduce spam emails, prevent your employees from interacting with malicious email attachments or links, and flags incoming emails trying to impersonate members of your staff.
How Can My Business Get Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is included in some Microsoft plans like Microsoft 365 Business Premium. If you have a Microsoft 365 plan that does not included Defender for Office 365, you can add the tool for as low as a few dollars per user. This low cost translates to a significant increase in your organization’s email security.
How Does Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Work?
When an email attachment is sent into your environment and opened, that attachment is tested in a virtual sandbox. This sandbox acts as a safe location to inspect the attachment without putting your devices at risk. If the attachment is safe, it will open as normal. But if it is deemed malicious, the attachment will be removed, preventing user interaction.
By leveraging machine learning and impersonation detection algorithms, Defender’s Anti-Phishing tool evaluates all incoming emails for red flags typical of phishing attacks and automatically blocks them from entering the target’s inbox. Reducing the risk of an employee being tricked by a convincing phishing email.
Are your employees clicking every link in every email they receive? They shouldn’t. But with Safe Links, at least they are protected. Safe Links uses the same approach as Safe Attachments and opens the link in a separate environment to verify the destination. If the URL is found to be malicious, the recipient automatically receives an alert like the one below, warning them that the site might not be safe
