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Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection Gets New Features


Microsoft enhances Advanced Threat Protection

With the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, businesses need even more advanced security tools to defend their sensitive documents.  With this demand Microsoft is stepping up to the plate at least for its' Office 365 subscribers.  Office 365 now has some  more advanced security tools to stay ahead of the ever-evolving threatscape.

Microsoft rolls out Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) upgrades

Microsoft has expanded the protection of “Safe Links”  which currently defends against potentially malicious links in emails to now include embedded links in other Office apps such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files.

If suspicious links are discovered, the user will be redirected to a warning page to avoid an infection as they would with an email that contained a hyperlink - See the overview of ATP below

An Overview of Advanced Threat Protection

  • Safe Links and Safe Attachments are a set of security features offered as part of Advanced Threat Protection in Office 365 Enterprise. When people click on hyperlinks in their email or Office documents, Safe Links checks to see if those hyperlinks are malicious. If the links are safe, users proceed as expected; if the links are determined to be malicious users are taken to a warning page instead.
  • Safe Attachments checks to see if email attachments are malicious, and then takes action to protect your organization. Attachments are tested in a virtual environment. If the attachments are determined to be safe, those attachments are delivered to email recipients as expected. If the attachments are determined to be malicious, those attachments are removed and can be researched.

Both Safe Attachments and Safe Links protect your organization according to policies that are set by your IT security administrators. Policies are set for specific people or groups, or for the entire organization. Safe Links policies can be set for email and for Office documents, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio files.

Threat Intelligence

Microsoft has also completed enhancements to their Threat Intelligence for Office 365 which gathers data from Microsoft security databases, Office clients, email, and other recorded security incidents to detect various cyberattacks. This feature gives users in-depth knowledge about prevalent Malware strains and real-time breach information to analyze the severity of certain attacks.

What’s more, Threat Intelligence comes with customizable threat alert notifications and easy-to-use remediation options for dealing with suspicious content.

If you would like to know more about Advanced Threat Protection contact us and we can explain more on how to have this service added to your Defense In Depth Security Approach