Email Security with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

Email Security Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

Email Security with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

More than 90% of targeted attacks start with email as cybercriminals look to gain access to your organisation. With sophisticated cyber attacks on the rise, your email security must keep up. Microsoft is continuing to wage on war on phishing attacks and email scam with the latest Email Security service, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection.

What is Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection?

Advanced Threat Protection is an optional service of Office 365, available at an additional fee on most subscriptions but is indeed one that we would highly recommend. It is a cloud-based email filtering service and built to provide nearly unparalleled email security with little impact on productivity. Urban Network have been including this important feature within all client proposals for some time now.

Features

Advanced Threat Protection defends your organisation from today’s growing and evolving advanced threats with powerful protection capabilities like Safe Links and Safe Attachments

Safe Links provides time-of-click protection to help prevent users from opening or accessing malicious links. The protection can apply to hyperlinks in email and hyperlinks in Office documents, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio files on Windows.

Safe Attachments protects users from opening malicious email attachments. All messages and attachments that don’t have a known virus/malware signature are routed to a special environment where ATP uses a variety of machine learning and analysis techniques to detect malicious intent. If no suspicious activity is detected, the message is released for delivery to the mailbox.

Over the last month, Microsoft announced the availability of two new capabilities – URL Detonation and Dynamic Delivery – which improve the security Advanced Threat Protection provides while keeping people productive.

URL Detonation

When a user receives an email, Advanced Threat Protection analyses the URLs for malicious behaviour

This new capability is in addition to the URL reputation checks that Advanced Threat Protection already does. If the user clicks a link during the scan, the message “This link is being scanned” is displayed. If the link is identified as malicious after the scan, a pop-window opens notifying the user that the file is malicious and warns the user against opening it.

Dynamic Delivery

Since introducing Safe Attachments, Advanced Threat Protection has greatly reduced the time it takes to scan emails containing attachments. While any malware solution requires some small amount time to scan suspicious attachments, Advanced Threat Protection enables you to remain productive during this scan time. Now, with Dynamic Delivery, recipients can read and respond to the email while the attachment is being scanned. Dynamic Delivery delivers emails to the recipient’s inbox along with a “placeholder” attachment notifying the user that the real attachment is being scanned – all with minimal lag time.

If a user clicks the placeholder attachment, they see a message showing the progress of the scan. If the attachment is harmless, it seamlessly re-attaches to the email so the user can access it. If it is malicious, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection will filter out the attachment.

Rich reporting and critical insights

ATP rich reports give Office 365 admins visibility into each potentially dangerous click within the company, who within your organisation is being maliciously targeted, as well as the category of the attacks you’re up against.

How to get started with Advanced Threat Protection?

Microsoft’s Office 365 service has been with us for some time now in its various forms or brands. It was reported in January of this year that the global adoption rate of the service had brought the subscriber numbers up to some 24.9 million. These are big numbers and show that Office 365 has not only thrived but is looking to become the cloud application of choice for business around the world.

With Microsoft’s Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, you can protect your mailboxes against unsafe attachment and malicious links in real time. Contact our Office 365 expert today to learn more how you can add Advanced Threat Protection to your Office 365 subscription.

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