How Secure Is Office 365 Email – Office 365 includes a powerful security feature, Office 365 Message Encryption (OME), which allows organizations to securely transmit sensitive information over a relatively insecure infrastructure—mail servers. OME combines email encryption with rights management capabilities powered by Azure Information Protection.
The E3 and E5 plans of Office 365 and the Microsoft 365 suite are automatically licensed for encryption. To use it on the lower plan, you must add the additional Azure Information Protection license for each user that requires encryption. If your Office 365 tenant was created after February 2018, message encryption capabilities are automatically present and enabled. If your tenant was created before this date, Microsoft is slowly but surely rolling out the capabilities and enabling them for you; they started this process in August 2018, so it shouldn’t be long before your oldest tenant has access. OME works with Office 365 mailboxes as well as internal mailboxes that use Exchange Online protection.
How Secure Is Office 365 Email
Emails are encrypted using a rights management template. You can use one of the default templates or create your own through the Azure portal.
Office 365 Management
To send an encrypted email using the Outlook client, from the message window, go to the Options tab, click “Permission” and select “Encrypt” from the list of security options.
In Outlook on the web, in a new message window, click Protect on the menu bar, and then click Change permissions. In the window that appears, select the “Encrypt” protection option:
When a user sends an encrypted message to an external recipient, the service will keep a copy of it on its servers and send a message that looks like this:
When an external user clicks the “Read Message” button, they can sign in with an existing social account that uses the same email address the message was sent from, or they can choose to have the service send a one-time passcode to that email. address. When any of these conditions are met, the service displays the protected message in a web browser window linked to a page in the Office 365 Message Encryption portal. The recipient can also securely reply to the original sender.
Vade For M365
To verify that your tenant is configured for encryption, use the following command, making sure that the sender value is a valid account in your tenant:
You can set a rule so that when a recipient replies to a protected message, an internal user does not need to log in to the encrypted message portal to view the reply. (Since the response remains on Microsoft’s servers, there is no risk of the message content being intercepted in SMTP transit.) Use the following command to set this rule:
Now that you’ve learned how to set up and manage message encryption, check out my post on creating and managing Office 365 groups.
Author, consultant and speaker on various IT topics. Jonathan has written books on Windows Server and related products and has spoken worldwide on topics ranging from networking and security to Windows administration.
Office 365 Monitoring And Management
Active Directory CISSP Cyber Attack Data Classification Data Management Data Security GDPR Threats Insider IT Compliance Office 365 IT Security 365 Privileged Account Management Risk Assessment SharePoint Windows Server
Cyber Chief Magazine – provides an in-depth look at key requirements of GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, NIST and other regulations. For many organizations, Office 365 is the perfect collaboration tool, providing a convenient platform for employees to share information and communicate every day. Microsoft offers different tiered packages to suit different customer needs. Its Office 365 Enterprise E5 and Microsoft 365 E5 suites offer platforms for medium and larger businesses, with lower-tier products offering fewer included features and therefore less protection against ransomware, advanced threats continuous (APT) and data loss protection (DLP) risks.
In this document, we look at common areas of concern we hear from customers using the Office 365 Enterprise E5 and Microsoft E5 platforms and look at how the Secure Email Gateway (SEG) can be used to provide improvements that are Adaptive Prevention of Data Loss Prevention (A-DLP) protects and complements the hygienic components of Office 365.
The Office 365 Enterprise E5 and Microsoft 365 E5 tiers offer the Information Protection and Compliance feature as part of the subscription, while it is an additional cost option for the M3 tier.
Troubleshooting Outlook, Exchange, Or Office 365 Mail Accounts
One of the main areas of feedback from our customers is that the DLP controls within Office 365 are not very comprehensive and can be difficult to configure effectively (eg the pre-configured GDPR policy controls only cover German, UK and US PII data).
Of course, all Secure Email Gateway Adaptive DLP policies can be applied to emails entering and leaving the organization. However, SEG can also extend these controls to emails that circulate within the organization, which has enabled some of our customers to address the risk of sharing information with inappropriate recipients within their organization (eg a team member of Child Protective Services accidentally selecting the wrong group in Outlook and emailing several case reports to senior managers within the organization).
Another reason our customers deploy Secure Email Gateway alongside their Office 365 instance is to provide an extra layer of protection against phishing, ransomware and APT attacks.
Our recommended best practice to ensure you have adequate protection to thwart phishing, ransomware and APT attacks is to use not only multiple layers of protection, but also multiple methods of protection. The M5 and E5 levels provide an ATP feature that includes secure attachments and secure links (checks the reputation of hyperlinks). This ATP feature is also available as an additional cost option for the M3 level. However, one of our customers’ main concerns is that this ATP feature alone does not give them the security of protection they need against ransomware and APT threats. If an attacker understands how the ATP feature works, he can create an attack that looks harmless to bypass the ATP feature and then becomes active when the user opens it on their desktop. Additionally, an attacker could easily sign up for an Office 365 account and test their attacks against that, before moving on to their real target when they realize they’ve created an attack that bypasses the Safe Attachment functionality.
Tips To Get More Secure In Office 365
Secure Email Gateway provides an alternative approach that complements APT functionality in Office 365, without necessarily disrupting legitimate business communications. Using SEG, our customers can extract active content from common office document formats (eg Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, etc.) and provide their users with sanitized underlying data. This technique removes active content commonly used in successful ransomware and APT attacks, and because it removes all active content, it is unable to fool defenses.
Customers have also told us that the reporting functionality in Office 365 is good for the day-to-day tasks of managing mail flow, but somewhat lacking when trying to investigate DLP policy violations. This is exacerbated when the users who need to perform the investigations are non-technical (eg HR, Compliance, etc.).
Secure Email Gateway provides a level of visibility into policy violations that is easier to understand and enables deeper investigation into the root cause of the violation. Better visibility is provided both at the reporting level and in informational messages sent to key personnel within the organization (eg HR, compliance, author manager, etc.).
Another reason our customers cite for using Secure Email Gateway in conjunction with their Office 365 deployment is that they find the message tracking functionality in SEG superior to the functionality provided by Office 365. SEG Message Tracking:
Mimecast Vs. Proofpoint: Why They Can’t Secure Office 365 & Gmail
This allows operational teams to answer user support questions about emails sent/received in real-time with absolute certainty of what happened.
In addition to these long-term benefits, one area where we’ve seen customers benefit from this multi-layered approach is when transitioning from Exchange on-premise to Office 365 itself. Customers with a mix of on-premises (eg internal applications that send email, third parties that route email to their organization on their behalf, etc.) and Office 365 report that they find it simpler to configure email routing at the Secure Email Gateway level, rather than at the Office 365 level.
Secure Email Gateway can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud (eg Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services) or as a managed service prior to the customer’s Office 365 deployment. Once deployed, it scans everything: You’ve heard the statistics…more than 70% of all business users will be equipped with cloud office applications in the next two years, including email. It is an overdue modernization that removes physical infrastructure to drive cost savings and consolidate services for improved productivity
Following this step, cybercriminals targeting account takeovers are changing their tactics, targeting end users with various identity tricks. Their evolving tactics and your defense against them deserve a closer look.
Office 365 Email Signature Manager
Email remains the number one threat vector for data breaches. And Microsoft itself is the number one abused brand when it comes to email phishing attacks.
Common phishing tactics include malicious emails
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