How can Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection protect your Modern Workforce?

How can Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
protect your Modern Workforce?

As I said in my last blog post, Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is not the best name for this new feature in Microsoft 365, but it does get the point across. From here on out, I will refer to Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection as it is commonly known, Office 365 ATP, but not to be confused by ATP, which is a whole other product. Microsoft reimagined vision of the Modern Workplace had to include security in a significant way. In the past, Microsoft treated security as an opportunity for third parties. It relied on them to create security solutions to defend the Windows desktop and server operating systems, but that did not work out so well. Malware has become more and more sophisticated, and data theft has become a multi-billion-dollar business. Weekend hackers can buy malware on the dark web, repackage it and deploy it through their favorite email service, all the while profiting from their victims. Do not get me wrong. There are some great security products out there, but the problem is they are all reactive not proactive. With the advances of Artificial Intelligence, maybe some of these same security companies will develop a proactive security solution that predicts when a user’s behavior is risking the company’s data and prevent a security breach. Meanwhile, I am going to show you the significant advances that Microsoft has implemented into Office 365 ATP and why it is an integral part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and not just another spam filter. This will give you another reason to transition your Modern Workforce from Office 365 to Microsoft 365.

Safe Attachments

Office 365 ATP comes with features like Safe Attachments, which is designed to prevent malicious attachments from impacting your Modern Workforce. With Safe Attachments, all attachments are put in a detonation chamber before being sent to your end-users and help to prevent zero-day attacks. If a new threat attachment is detected, Microsoft dissects the payload of the threats using its unique Office 365 ATP sandbox. Subsequently, Microsoft develops and deploys attack prevention measures of the newly introduced threat throughout the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

ATP Anti-Phishing

The ATP Anti-Phishing technology applies a set of machine learning models with detection algorithms to incoming messages. All messages are subject to an extensive collection of models trained to detect phishing messages. This protects your Modern Workforce from impersonation attacks.

Safe Links, Threat Trackers & Attack Simulator

Office 365 ATP protects your company with Safe Links by scanning links in real-time and presenting your end-users with a warning when they try to access it. If the end-user chooses to proceed with viewing the suspicious link, your company administrators receive a notification via reporting for tracking purposes utilizing Threat Trackers. With this, you can gain rich insights into who is being targeted within your Modern Workforce and which end-user is opening suspicious links and putting your company at risk of a cyber-attack. It’s critical to train these end-users to make the right decisions in the event of an attack. The in-product notifications will help your end-users understand the risks of performing such actions as clicking on a suspicious link. Additional features such as the Attack Simulator will help your company administrators launch realistic threat simulations to train end-users to be more aware and vigilant.

Automated Investigation and Response

Investigation and remediation in post-breach scenarios can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Most companies lack the expertise and resources needed for rapid analysis and effective remediation. Office 365 ATP provides advanced automated response option called Automated Investigation and Response, which your security administrators can leverage, saving a significant amount of time, money, and resources. Tools for an automated incident response such as the security playbooks and investigation graphs will help investigate and remediate attacks much faster.

Office 365 ATP leverages more than 6.5 trillion signals daily from email alone to detect threats quickly and accurately, protecting end-users against sophisticated attacks such as phishing and zero-day malware. Office 365 ATP blocked over 5 billion phish emails and analyzed more than 300k phish campaigns in 2019, protecting over 4 million unique end-users from advanced threats. Microsoft’s powerful detonation technology analyzed 7 billion URL clicks and 11 billion unique items in Office 365 ATP sandbox environment in 2019. This massive scale of operation helps Office 365 ATP detect suspicious content first and protect end-users before any other security service can catch it. Analyzing such a vast amount of data also continuously improves Microsoft machine learning algorithms leading to the highest accuracy and effectiveness in the industry. Office 365 ATP offers a 99.9% malware catch rate and the lowest phish miss rate compared to competitors.

If all the advances in technology that Microsoft has put into its Office 365 ATP product to protect your Modern Workforce from malicious email attacks do not beckon your company to transition your Modern Workforce from Office 365 to Microsoft 365, this last feature will. ATP for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams will also protect your end-users from malicious files that are shared by individuals outside your company through SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. The same machine learning and preventative technologies are there to protect your Modern Workforce, whether an attack comes through email or a link in a Teams message. Next time we will talk about Azure Multi-Factor Authentication. Until then, stay green.

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