Microsoft continues to introduce sophisticated new features for Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (formerly Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection).
As one of Microsoft’s key partners in assisting with Office 365 migration and operations we thought we’d take a quick look at some of the highlights.
Preventing threats to work emails
Work emails are the primary target for malicious attachments and ransomware threats, and therefore it’s important to have a strong system in place to keep your private data under your control.
Office 365 provided robust email protection against spam, viruses and malware with Office 365 Protection (EOP), but as hackers launch increasingly sophisticated attacks, many organisations needed more. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is an optional email filtering service that provides additional protection against specific types of advanced threats.
What Office Advanced Threat Protection can do for you
ATP guards against sophisticated attacks in real time. Firstly there is a feature called Safe Attachments, which protects against unknown malware and viruses, and provides better zero-day protection to safeguard your messaging system. All messages and attachments that don’t have a known virus/malware signature are routed to a special hypervisor environment, where analysis is performed to detect malicious intent. If no suspicious activity is detected, the message is released for delivery to the mailbox.
EOP blocks any malicious hyperlinks in a message, but attackers sometimes try to hide malicious URLs with seemingly safe links that are redirected to unsafe sites by a forwarding service after the message has been received. ATP’s Safe Links feature proactively protects your users if they click such a link. Malicious links are dynamically blocked while good links can be accessed.
ATP also provides reporting and tracking capabilities, so you can gain insights into who is getting targeted in your organisation and the types of attacks you are facing. Reporting and message tracing allows you to investigate messages that have been blocked due to an unknown virus or malware, while the URL trace capability allows you to track individual malicious links in the messages that have been clicked.
Interested?
Thousands of users rely on Office 365 implementations from Vohkus already. We know the product and its feature set inside-out and can advise you on how to optimise its features and settings to match your specific environment and needs.
