Why Microsoft 365 Backups Are Crucial Against Phishing

The popularity of the Microsoft 365 suite and similar cloud-based services opens the door to potential cyber threats. Despite these suites’ numerous productivity and collaboration benefits, they are prime targets for cybercriminals and threat actors who look to compromise your invaluable business data.

In many cases, companies using the Microsoft Office 365 suite will encounter phishing and similar cyber threats. That’s precisely why businesses using the Microsoft cloud must consider Office 365 protection and enterprise backup solutions.

Protection against phishing and internal security threats becomes essential in today’s day and age. But even the best backup solution will have difficulty uncovering phishing attacks. That’s precisely why every company must keep backups to prevent data loss incidents from phishing attacks.

This article will outline the reasons why Microsoft 365 backups are crucial against phishing. Let’s begin.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is a form of social engineering attack that tricks employees into downloading malicious documents and opening malicious websites to steal data and log-in credentials. Phishing attacks prey on human error, as the only way for these attacks to work is through willingly opening or downloading malicious files and websites.

Because of that, phishing is very difficult to spot, and even the most comprehensive solutions won’t always be as effective. So when all security measures fail, the only way to protect your critical business data is by keeping backups.

What Are Backups?

Backups are copies of your entire data. Backups are precautionary measures against data loss incidents and similar events. Data loss incidents occur due to various reasons, including accidental deletion, internal deletion, corrupted drives, and malware. Businesses must keep backups to ensure business continuity in case hackers try to delete critical files.

Backups are even more crucial for businesses using Office 365. Office 365 transforms how businesses handle complete business data, and the suite offers several backup measures to protect data.

Moreover, backups are standard data security practices. When faced with phishing attacks, businesses must find ways to ensure the uninterrupted flow of information. The only way to do that is by keeping copies from the various Office 365 apps.

3 Reasons Why Backups Are Crucial Against Phishing Attacks

Now, we’ll explain the three crucial reasons why every business using Microsoft Office 365 must keep backups of Outlook, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and OneDrive data. Let’s begin.

Prevent Data Loss Incidents

Few reasons are as important as preventing data loss incidents. Data loss prevention from phishing attacks is necessary for businesses using the Office 365 suite. Phishing attacks are devastating cybersecurity incidents that can steal employee credentials and bank accounts and even download harmful malware.

The most common attack vector for phishing attacks includes email. Email phishing is highly common in today’s fast-paced business world, as most businesses prefer communicating with clients and customers through email.

By keeping backups of your most important data, businesses are taking the necessary protection measures to combat the ongoing rate of phishing attacks.

Data Recovery At Any Time

No matter how much we try to avoid falling victim to a phished web page, these things do indeed happen. Phishing prevention is an excellent protection measure, but even the best cybersecurity minds will fail to uncover every single phishing incident.

Some forms of phishing make their way to your Office 365 suite through the OneDrive sync client, a USB flash drive, and other vectors. So that makes it nearly impossible to be fully protected against phishing.

However, backups provide businesses with the option of retrieving business data. If done correctly, businesses will keep their data stored locally and on the cloud. In addition, cloud backups offer instant recovery when local backups are compromised.

For businesses looking to transform their backup strategy, incorporating the 3–2–1 backup method is a clever move. This method states that businesses should keep three copies of their data on two different local media and one off-site for disaster recovery.

Potential Detection of Phishing Attacks

In some rare cases, data backups can play a role in detecting an ongoing phishing attack. Phishing incidents can perform a number of malicious tasks, including gaining access to bank accounts, duplicate files, virus entry, and more.

Some employees create duplicate files intentionally as a means to back up sensitive data. But this isn’t an optimal way to back up your most important data. With a fully-fledged Office 365 backup solution, businesses can perform regular backups and monitor changes in the data.

If performed by skilled hands, regular backups could potentially detect malicious intentions by looking at the data changes from the previous backup. For example, this could uncover an ongoing phishing attack. If so, employees should notify security teams.

Conclusion

Backups are a form of data protection against phishing and similar dangerous malware, including ransomware attacks. The Microsoft 365 suite offers several backup capabilities, but these aren’t fully-fledged solutions.

That’s why businesses should instead employ a dedicated backup solution with local and cloud backup capabilities.