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How to Help Prevent Phishing Attacks in Office 365 and Outlook

August 17, 2017

Phishing attacks are a lot easier to pull off than a direct hack attack. You can send out a ton of messages at once and even one response for every thousand messages could be a huge return. Tech Republic offers three ways to help prevent these phishing attacks. The first is to rely on Microsoft's junk mail filter. Outlook's junk mail filter is reportedly able to distinguish between spam, phishing, and legitimate emails and filter them accordingly, even disabling hyperlinks and the ability to reply to a message. The second way is to disable hyperlinks by using group policy. If you elect this method, ALL hyperlinks will be disabled, including valid ones. A third option is to enable the optional Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Office 365. ATP is basically a cloud-based version of Outlook's junk mail filter.

Check to see if your e-mail security product has a feature for prevention of phishing attacks. Many products like Mimecast and Proofpoint offer options very similar to ATP. No matter what technology you implement, don't forget to train your employees as they are the biggest risk in making a phishing attack successful.

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