Have you added “Advanced Threat Protection” to your email account?
Office 365 is vastly popular among the small business community. As of October 2019, there are 200 million active users. Microsoft is reporting 3 million users added per month. With Office 365 being so popular, most users assume their email is safe. Right? Although Office 365 does provide some robust email protection against spam, viruses, and malware, hackers from around the world are continually launching sophisticated attacks that many small businesses aren't providing protection for.
That's where Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) comes in. Advanced threat protection delivers several benefits that are crucial to your email security.
Let me give you some quick examples of real-life situations that small businesses experience.
- Have you ever received an email from a client that had an attachment that you were unsure of? Have you ever received an email from an unknown source with an attachment that you were unsure of?
- Have you ever received an email that contains a hyperlink that looked safe, but not sure what it exactly is or where it’s going to take you?
- Has your clients or friends ever received an email that looks like it was from you, but wasn't? Have you ever received an email from a client that looked legitimate, but in reality, after speaking to them was not actually sent by them?
These are all real-world examples that small businesses have experienced. Every one of these examples can be extremely dangerous and detrimental to your small business.
Example #1 above can give you Ransomware. Ransomware will encrypt all of your data on your computer, and you'll be unable to open anything. The only way to retrieve your data is to pay money to the criminals so that they can send you the decryption key.
Example #2 above, as you can guess, can give you a virus or malware on your computer which can steal your data. It can steal your passwords, or bank information that you may have stored, or any other private information.
Example #3 above is what you call a phishing attack. These are criminals who impersonate you to get information from others. For example, we’ve seen a small business that experienced a phishing attack where a criminal emailed the client’s bank with a form that authorized bank transfers to another account. Luckily, the bank called the client with a phone call to verify this information, and the attack was stopped.
Here are the benefits of adding ATP to your email protection:
ATP Safe Attachments: This provides a zero-day protection safeguard by checking your email attachments for malicious content. It routes all your messages and attachments that do not have a virus or malware signature to a special environment that Microsoft created and then uses technology to analyze their techniques to detect malicious intent. If nothing is found to be suspicious, the message is then forwarded to your mailbox.
ATP Safe Links: Safe links provide you time-of-click verification of the URLs in your email or office files. Each link is scanned and any link that is proven to be safe remains accessible and malicious links are dynamically blocked.
ATP Anti-Phishing: This module will detect attempts to impersonate you or any of your users. It applies machine learning model models and advanced impersonation detection algorithms to avert phishing attacks.
ATP for Sharepoint, OneDrive, and Teams: ATP will protect your organization when you collaborate and share files in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It does it by identifying and blocking malicious files and document libraries.
If you would like to know more about ATP and how your organization would greatly benefit from its protection, please reach out to Side by Side IT. We would be glad to discuss your options and work on providing greater security for your small business.
