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Cyber Security

Relief for Office 360’s Lacking Security Protocols?

 August 24, 2020

By  Anton Kiorolgo

Microsoft’s Advance Threat Protection (ATP) in Office 365 needs improving, and they agree – they’ve gotten to work on it by adding a few new features to the suite to help make managing security a little bit easier.

The new feature, Configuration Analyzer, “will be a place for you to compare your policies settings against the Recommended settings for EOP and Office 365 ATP security, Config Analyzer will measure your current policy settings against either the Standard or the Strict recommendations.” According to a release from Microsoft. It was newly introduced on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, and is set for an August 2020 release to all users.

Collision Course for Next Month?

Office 365 up to now has come with two security levels embedded in “reccomended settings” – innocuously enough, “Standard” and “Strict.” These handle Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Office 365 ATP security.

Each level provides upgraded/downgraded levels of security, implementing different anti-spam, anti-malware, and anti-phishing software configurations for blocking malicious emails from mailboxes, depending on each customer’s needs and environment, or any custom rules set forth.

These active Office 265 changes have been under works at Microsoft since November of 2019 and are estimated to have the “switch flipped” during Q3 2020, providing a new, higher level of security for users.

Office 365 administrators will love these new features, as they will be able to view system setting changes, making it easy to spot where items have been changed or the affects certain changes have caused within the environment.

Making Office 365 Safer

Office 365 ATP customers will have virus and malware payloads automatically sifted through, and an update pushed forward stating what was found, think of it like a virtual guidebook. Microsoft seeks to start a similar feature in Q2 of 2020 that would cause this to happen no matter what the security setup may be. The third layer on this security cake will be automatic blocking of email senders who fail DMARC authentication, but this is already in place, and has been since April of 2019. As the frosting on the security layer cake, forwarding to external email addresses will be blocked automatically, unless changed within system settings.

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