Ways to detect and prevent phishing emails in Microsoft 365

Phishing attacks are targeted at stealing the sensitive information of any organization or individual. In general, intruders pose as genuine sources and try to collect personal information or sensitive data from the users or push a malware into the system. Either way, the attacker gets hold of the confidential user information (such as credit card data, user credentials, etc.,) by creating a false sense of urgency by sending highly personalized and sophisticated mails to manipulate the victims into sharing sensitive information. M365 Manager Plus, a comprehensive Microsoft 365 reporting, auditing, monitoring, management, and alerting tool, helps you to combat these phishing attacks in a number of ways.

Detect and prevent phishing attacks using M365 Manager Plus

• Monitoring inbox rules
• Monitoring external emails
• Monitoring unusual logons
• Monitoring activity on sensitive files
• Enabling MFA

Monitoring inbox rules

Monitoring inbox rules for mailboxes in your organization helps you track if a possible phishing email was directly moved to a separate folder or forwarded to another email outside your organisation or got deleted without the actual intended user noticing the email. M365 Manager Plus offers Inbox Rule report that helps you monitor the newly created and modified inbox rules to ensure that attackers do not infiltrate your mailbox and make any undesired changes.

Monitoring external emails

Using the content search feature identify emails with specific keywords and figure out the emails sent with a motive to pry on an organization’s private and classified information. For example, the emails about payments and banking information or about some confidential documents.

Monitoring unusual logons

You can't totally prevent users falling to phishing attacks. As hackers improve their tactics and techniques, employees at times, do fall for the bogus emails. However, there's still way to protect sensitive data. Monitoring and spotting unusual logons can prevent your network from being compromised. For instance, too manu logins from a different geographic location or outside the business hours could be an aftermath of phishing attack. Click here to learn more about how to monitor failed logons with M365 Manager Plus.

Monitoring activity on sensitive files

Though we take proper steps and educate end users about phishing emails, there are times when they fall for these bogus emails. So, the best practice is to have plan B. It is prudent to start monitoring activities on sensitive files in your organization to avoid these files from being tampered with. By monitoring file access activities you can stay informed about the changes made to the files and who made those changes. M365 Manager Plus offers a range of pre-configured file operations reports for the OneDrive for Business files.

Enabling MFA

Event though you employ techniques to prevent phishing, it does happen often. So what's the next step to safeguard data? Enabling MFA is a safe option to protect your organization’s network and ensure email security. It is good to be fail-proof and have two or more protection layers over just one. Employing MFA for application or system logins can help when users give away the credentials to phishing attacks, the systems still remain uncompromised as MFA is implemented. This way you can make sure that only the right and intended set of users have access to your organization’s resources. Learn about how you can configure MFA for all users in your organization.

To find out more about how M365 Manager Plus offers simple solutions for almost all Microsoft 365-related security issues, check out our tips and tricks section.