Microsoft 365

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Protecting Administrator Mailboxes from Phishing and Other Threats

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
Ten Ways to Harden the Security of Your Microsoft 365 Tenant – Part 2 One comment

Ten Ways to Harden the Security of Your Microsoft 365 Tenant – Part 2

Over the years, the Microsoft security stack has become very feature rich and offers many ways to customize the configuration. Third-party products are available with similar features, but lack the integration capability of the Microsoft stack. In the second part of the "Ten Ways to Harden the Security of Your Microsoft 365 Tenant" series, we look at five ways to secure your environment using controls that require a premium license such as Office E5 or Azure AD Premium.

March 2, 2022
Use Azure Front Door to Leverage Microsoft’s Global Network for Exchange 2 Comments

Use Azure Front Door to Leverage Microsoft’s Global Network for Exchange

With Azure Front Door, you can reduce the strain on Exchange through caching, content compression, and by filtering out malicious bots before traffic even hits the on-premises network. In this article, we demonstrate how you can use Front Door to reduce your Exchange Server load, increase OWA Client performance and provide Microsoft managed certificates.

March 1, 2022
Threat Explorer and Investigations: Useful Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Features 19 Comments

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 3 Comments

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 2 Comments

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
Planning for Azure AD Conditional Access Policies 23 Comments

Planning for Azure AD Conditional Access Policies

Conditional Access policies provide many security benefits, from the implementation of MFA in a user-friendly way, to the controls that can limit what data users access or download. However, the process of setting up CA policies is daunting to some at first. This article provides some thought processes and best practices to make this security initiative more manageable.

February 10, 2022