Office 365 offers numerous built-in security features to combat ongoing cybersecurity threats. But a lot is said about these features and whether they can stop cyber threats. From all the built-in security features in Office 365, one particular stands out as highly important – email security.
Email security for Office 365 aims to stop anything from business email compromise attacks to phishing attacks coming through your inbox. But is it enough to keep your Outlook accounts safe? This guide will examine the built-in email security features of Office 365 to give you a definitive answer to the question.
So with all that said, let’s begin.
Overview of Office 365 Email Security
Businesses can minimize cybersecurity risks by using appropriate security measures. Considering more businesses are transitioning to the cloud, cloud security has become a core feature of many cloud-based services.
Office 365 is one of the most popular cloud-based services, with millions of active users relying on native, built-in security features to stop threats and prevent data loss. The service gives users access to the native Microsoft Office apps and other apps such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Outlook, among others.
Outlook is the app of choice for all of your email needs. In addition, businesses are increasingly reliant on email for internal and external communication. Hackers know this and will move heaven and earth to bypass email security measures and gain access to valuable data.
Microsoft themselves understands the importance of email security, as email is the primary attack vector for many hackers. They will use everything from spam emails to phishing attacks to gain access to confidential information.
Despite all that, Office 365 native email security tools lack many capabilities of modern third-party solutions. While it can protect Microsoft accounts from phishing and spam and detect malicious files, it offers baseline protection against sophisticated attacks.
Microsoft Office 365 Email Security Concerns
We can better explain why Office 365 email security isn’t best equipped to stop sophisticated attacks by looking at the most prevalent security concerns of the feature. Let’s jump in.
- Phishing Attack Protection Gaps
Phishing is one of the most common malware. It is a social engineering attack that aims to trick users into opening phishing emails containing malicious links, websites, and documents.
For example, a phishing website aims to trick users into thinking they’re using a legitimate website when they’re using an identical copy. In addition, a phishing website aims to collect login information that hackers can use to log in to a legitimate website.
You can imagine the damage hackers can do if they obtain the bank login information of C-level executives.
Phishing websites are sent through email. Office 365’s built-in email security tools are designed for anti-phishing protection. But they’re full of gaps. Many of these emails bypass the suite’s anti-phishing detection and protection algorithm and go straight to users’ inboxes.
If a phishing email bypasses native security, it could cause a serious data loss incident.
- Zero-Hour Protection is Easily Bypassible
Zero-Hour auto purge (ZAP) is another Office 365 email security feature. The feature steps in whenever a phishing threat bypasses the native detection and protection capabilities and purges malicious emails.
Unfortunately, ZAP works under strict and very limited conditions. For example, ZAP can only purge malicious emails within 48 hours of delivery. So ZAP is essentially useless if malicious emails stay hidden for extended periods.
In addition, ZAP doesn’t work with hybrid deployments; it only works for Exchange Online mailboxes. So users who use Gmail or any other email service don’t benefit from ZAP. These two reasons allow businesses to turn to third-party email security solutions.
Moreover, all hackers need to do to bypass ZAP is to keep the volume of attacks low and only target a single organization since ZAP detects threats through a database. If the threat isn’t in the database, it won’t detect it even after bypassing the basic detection capabilities.
- Safe Links is a Limited Feature
The Safe Links feature detects malicious URLs from email messages and Office documents. You might think this is enough to detect these URLs, but you’d be surprised to find that hackers can easily send malicious URLs in the form of PDFs and other non-Microsoft documents.
Moreover, Safe Links doesn’t offer full protection across all cloud apps in Office 365. For example, Safe Links can detect a malicious Word document sent through Microsoft Teams but won’t detect a malicious PDF sent through MS Teams.
In addition, Safe Links cannot detect when a user opens a malicious document in Microsoft 365 in real-time. This increases the chances of users falling victim to various social engineering attacks aimed at stealing sensitive information.
Conclusion
Despite the effort put into email security, Office 365 isn’t fully capable of protecting your organization from ongoing social engineering attacks and similar threats. Moreover, Office 365 email security lacks the capabilities to detect sophisticated attacks, such as ransomware attacks.
This tells us that businesses and organizations must rely on third-party solutions to increase security and enhance data protection. These solutions turn to artificial intelligence algorithms to combat the ongoing cybersecurity threats that seriously harm organizations.
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