7 reasons to protect your Office 365 email from cyberattacks
Businesses aren't the only ones adopting Office 365. Hackers are also taking a keen interest. And, in particular, with increasingly sophisticated phishing techniques.
I'm a frequent and growing computer attack, targeting e-mail in increasingly sophisticated ways: who am I? Some of you will have already recognized phishing. A type of attack increasingly favored by hackers. Phishing often takes the form of an innocuous e-mail (an administration or bank asks you to confirm your contact details) which appears to open an official page. Of course, this is not the case: the only purpose of the page in question is to retrieve login information to enable the hacker to access resources.
While all messaging systems are targeted, those hosted in the cloud and intended for businesses, such as Office 365, are favored by hackers. And with good reason: every Office 365 user represents a potential entry point to valuable corporate resources. So there's an urgent need to secure these professional messaging systems. Here are 7 reasons why:
1. the majority of attacks begin with the sending of an email
According to IDC, 80% of attacks start with email, while phishing remains the most common type of attack, but... not the most familiar to employees.
In fact, while users are relatively aware of spam (no one escapes it) or malware (everyone has experienced or heard a bad story on the subject), phishing is less anticipated. This perception can be explained by the fact that a "good" phishing e-mail is painless in the first instance, and the damage only emerges later...
2. Every employee is a target
With phishing, every employee who can access company resources is a target. On the scale of a large company, there are thousands of potential targets to protect, given that each one receives hundreds, if not thousands, of malicious e-mails every year.
76% of companies say they were victims of phishing attacks in 2017, and for 48% this type of attack is on the rise.
rapport State of the Phish 2018.
3. Attacks become more sophisticated
Phishing is becoming more sophisticated, and is becoming " spear phishing". Explanations: phishing usually refers to mass attacks. These attacks rely on the fact that 20-30% of users will open malicious e-mails if they pass the filters. The spear phishing attack is much more personalized: it relies on an analysis of the target employee's social environment to send them a contextual e-mail, ideally referring to people they know.
These attacks are sequenced and progressive - the first e-mail generally asks for no information at all. Also known as "president fraud", spear phishing can compromise highly sensitive resources (administrative or bank accounts, etc.). In short, phishing is like fishing with a net, whereas spear phishing is closer to spearfishing.
4. the cost of attacks is underestimated
How much does a phishing attack cost? As is often the case with cyber attacks, companies don't go running for publicity on these subjects. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to list the various sources of costs:
- IT costs: for example, to restore compromised systems.
- Legal costs: particularly if personal customer data is involved in an information leak.
- Support costs : to manage the workload of telephone calls from affected users.
- Business disruption costs: the attack may force services to be suspended while they are re-secured.
Finally, let's not forget the even greater damage to the company's e-reputation, which will probably require investment to restore the trust essential to its business...
5. conventional anti-spam solutions are out of the game
Traditional security solutions are based on identifying known threats. To this end, they use signature databases (to intercept malware) and e-reputation repositories to assess the trustworthiness of a sender (to filter spam). The limitation of these processes is obvious: they are incapable of recognizing a threat the first time it arises.
6. Microsoft is a prime target
According to IDC, in the first half of 2018, Microsoft's messaging applications accounted for 54% of the global messaging application market and 47.6% of cloud deployments. In its latest reports, the publisher claims 155 million active users on Office 365.
Unsurprisingly, with such popularity, Microsoft and its solutions are prime targets for hackers. As a result, the latest edition of the "Phishers' Favorite" ranking names Microsoft as the number one company exposed to phishing attacks.
7. the need for complementary security solutions and AI
With Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Advanced Threat Protection, Microsoft offers several solutions to protect Office 365 from common threats. Effective against known threats, these solutions are much less effective against new attacks that are both more targeted and more sophisticated. From IDC to Gartner, analyst firms are strongly recommending the use of third-party tools to add extra layers of security to Office 365.
Against this backdrop, Vade Secure has chosen to invest heavily in artificial intelligence. The aim: to leverage the power of self-learning machine learning algorithms to identify as such - and in real time - unclassified threats. The aim is not to replace existing solutions, but to complement them so as to be able to deal with as yet unknown threats. Attacks that are sure to hit the headlines in the coming months.
Article translated from French