Exchange Online

Latest Articles

Protecting Administrator Mailboxes from Phishing and Other Threats

One way to protect administrator mailboxes is not to use them. And if you want administrators to use separate mailboxes for their permissioned and non-permissioned activities, that's what you might do. However, we can be smarter and use transport rules to selectively block email sent to administrator mailboxes to dissuade internal people from sending email and blocking all but the most essential email coming in from external domains.

March 7, 2022

Threat Explorer and Investigations: Useful Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Features

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (plan 2) contains the Threat Explorer feature. It's a useful way to investigate problematic messages which arrive in a tenant. The automated investigations feature can highlight messages containing malware by assembling evidence about warning signs in the message or its contents, and administrators can then action the recommendations up to and including the removal of messages already delivered to user mailboxes. Automating investigations is a good thing, if you afford Defender for Office 365 Plan 2.

February 21, 2022

Why Using App Secrets in Production is a Bad Idea

As many organizations adapt legacy scripts to use app authentication instead of traditional service account credentials, security can be compromised if certain risks are overlooked. While app secrets can be great for testing code, there’s a reason they have an enforced expiry date - the longer a secret exists in production, the higher the risk it will become compromised. The methods described in this article will help build a good foundation for app authentication while keeping security top of mind when creating or updating automation scripts.

February 16, 2022

Attack Simulation Training: RBAC and End User Notifications

Attack Simulations are Microsoft’s foray into a crowded field of competitors who provide a service that trains users to recognize dangerous email with simulated Phishing or malware-infested messages. Microsoft has continually added features and functionality since they released Attack Simulations, including additional simulation types, different payloads, custom payloads, customizable training and more. The most recent upgrades are RBAC permissions and end user notifications. These two additions to Attack Simulation Training are a great incentive to deploy and adopt this functionality, as End User communications are the key enhancement that make this feature worthwhile for an organization.

February 15, 2022

Exchange Online Launches Support for MTA-STS

Exchange Online now supports SMTP Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS), a mechanism to help defend SMTP communications between mail servers. Microsoft 365 tenants can decide if they want to enable MTA-STS for their domain by publishing a DNS record and an MTA-STS policy. You don't have to use MTA-STS, but it's a good idea to consider the option.

February 4, 2022