Why does Exchange need to be protected?
Your company email is constantly under attack and in danger. Even now, as you read this. I know that sounds alarming and in a way, it is, but there are things we can do to protect your business from danger
Published by Rob chambers 09/07/2018
There are many ways that Enterprise Email is under threat:
Spam & Infomail
The first and most obvious is Spam and infomail, filling up mailboxes everywhere.
Email Viruses
Viruses sent through email are the no. 1 way for outside attackers to get inside your computer network.
Hackers
Most email systems come under threat by direct hackers, Email Accessibility makes this even easier, strong passwords required.
The User
Unfortunately one of the biggest threats to a mailbox is the user it belongs to, accidental deletions, folder moves, erroneous email rules, all contribute to the threat level.
Mailbox Storage
The mailbox itself is inherently prone to data failure, bloat, getting full, going down for maintenance. Even in Office 365, Microsoft deliberately move mailbox databases between servers to stop them from stagnating.
Data Loss
When we talk about Data Loss in Email, we refer to data being sent out that really shouldn't be. Users sending out credit card numbers, National insurance numbers, personal data, these definitely should never be sent out by email.
Spoofing
There are criminal organisations out there who have found ways to pretend to be you. One of the ways they exploit this is to email a bunch of people using your email address, asking to pay a fake invoice into their accounts.
8,500%
Increase in Cryptoware distribution
£3Trillion
Cost of Cyber threats last year
45%
Of Email users have clicked on malware in email
52%
of organizations that suffered successful cyber attacks in 2016 aren't making any changes to their security in 2017
What can we do?
As a Customer Service Provider, we have to try and stay ahead of these threats, but not all protection comes included with Office 365 email
QIC systems takes email security very seriously, even if some of our clients don't! Out of the box, Office 365 Email comes with:
- Data Loss Prevention - to prevent sensitive data being sent out
- Basic Exchange level Spam filtering - Filters out some things, but has little controls
- In-place archiving - To mitigate issues in the mailbox, gives you an extra 50-100Gb depending on license.
- Mailbox Maintenance - Every 6 months your mailbox is moved to a different server in 365, it mitigates corruption and software obcelescence
- Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC - These three tools in unison help stop spoofed email in its tracks, SPF helps with incoming, DKIM and DMARC with outgoing
These protective systems are pretty good in most cases, but we still have some issues with the user, hacking and more complex viruses.
What else can we do?
We recommend a number of steps we can take and some 3rd party products.
Spam & Infomail Filtering
We recommend a 3rd party product, Everycloud, to sort this out. It has market leading machine learning doing the work. Its inexpensive at £21 per user per Year.
Journalling
Journalling is storing incoming and outgoing mail before it reaches the mailbox at either end. It cannot be modified and because it stores the email before it gets to the mailbox, it doesn't matter what folder it ends up in.
In Place Archiving
In Place Archiving comes with Office 365 Exchange, all we have to do is turn it on. It comes as default with a modifiable 2 year archive Policy. I beg you, please never use PST files, you WILL lose data.
Mailbox Backup
We also recommend backing up your mailboxes. Users are fantastic at losing their emails, accidental deletions, movements, drag and drops, email rules, all contribute to things going missing. A backup keeps you covered, we can recover a mailbox, even with the folders intact. We recommend Cloudberry backup for this, please get in touch to find out more.
Data Loss Prevention
DLP (Data loss prevention) comes with Office 365 as standard, all we have to do is turn it on and configure it, please get in touch to find out more.