How to Secure Office 365 Email

Are you wondering what the proven methods to secure your Office 365 email are? If so, this guide has you covered. Office 365 is a suite of productivity and collaboration tools that can greatly enhance your organization.

Most businesses do use Office 365 to perform essential day-to-day tasks. But consider the following. Most businesses also use email. Moreover, they use email for internal and external communication. That makes email the prime target for hackers and threat actors. Therefore, enhancing your Office 365 email security should be a top priority.

Here are the proven ways to achieve total email protection.

Protect Email Accounts With Multi-Factor Authentication

Even if your organization is small, it is still a target for hackers. One thing hackers do is they do not discriminate against sizes. They will target anyone and everyone they find with insufficient protection. And they will carry out targeted attacks through email.

Hackers will also use various tactics to gain access to your account. Most often, hackers use a form of attack called a social engineering attack. Social engineering attacks aim to trick the user into giving away sensitive data. This data could be login credentials, bank data, and more.

But you can make life harder for the hacker by employing multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a code on your smartphone. You get this code from Microsoft’s authentication application, which refreshes every 60 seconds.

You must type the code every time you log in to your email account. Even if hackers gain access to your login credentials, they will still need the code to access the account. MFA is such a capable feature that it can block up to 99.9% of all account compromise attacks and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

Employ Advanced Threat Protection Software

Despite the numerous security features and capabilities of the Microsoft suite, no email security feature of the suite can compare to third-party advanced threat protection solutions (ATP). ATP has become the industry standard for stopping threats, phishing attacks, ransomware, and malware.

These solutions employ state-of-the-art artificial intelligence tools to detect email attacks. ATP mainly focuses on detection. But prevention is still ATP’s strong side. However, these solutions aren’t cheap and can often cost a pretty penny.

That’s why we recommend doing your research to figure out what the best solutions on the market are. Luckily, you can easily integrate these solutions into Office 365. And as a matter of fact, Microsoft encourages you to use these tools instead of relying on their own features and email security capabilities.

Scan Mailboxes For Suspicious Activity

We can never be 100% sure that our email account has been compromised. We know about a potential threat actor once the damage is done. But one thing Office 365 does allow us to do is monitor Exchange Online mailboxes for suspicious activity.

This is thanks to the Unified Audit Log capability of the suite. This feature greatly improves Exchange Online protection and makes our Office 365 mailboxes more secure.

Don’t Sleep on Encryption

Encryption has become the go-to security feature for Office 365 and other online services. As a matter of fact, encryption is probably the best way to deter cyber threats.

Office 365 email encryption works flawlessly and is available to every Office tenant. With this feature, you can send encrypted messages and specify who can open them. The intended recipient can then use their decryption key to view the contents of the email before encrypting the message once again.

To use email encryption, simply go under “Encrypted Email,” choose “Settings,” and choose the encryption options. Once you do that, you can send an encrypted message to your coworkers to see if you’ve got it right.

Train Employees on Cybersecurity Awareness

It’s no use trying to protect your organization’s email capabilities if employees are clueless about cybersecurity matters. Nowadays, the best way to protect your organization is through education. Cybersecurity has improved a lot over the years. But so have threats.

Nowadays, hackers are more interested in your data than anything else and will use it against you. To prevent that, make sure to sign employees up for cyber-security awareness training. These courses teach and educate employees on all cybersecurity matters and will prepare them for real-life scenarios.

After all, the best way to avoid getting scammed is to know you’re getting scammed.

Conclusion

We can do many things to protect our email accounts from potential threats. For businesses using the Office 365 suite, a breach in your email account could mean the end of your entire business.

Therefore, securing your email accounts is important by using the industry’s best practices. These practices are designed by cybersecurity experts with a particular focus on Office 365 and similar productivity suites.