We have been recently encouraging clients to consider a more robust spam filter than the one that comes built into Office 365. The reason is that we have been seeing an uptick in phishing attacks, email spoofing and other kinds of tricks that hackers use to get access to email, passwords or networks. Relying on Microsoft alone is not cutting it.
In September alone, we had two different clients report that one of their end users inadvertently clicked on a link that gave the sender access to their email. Microsoft didn’t flag it and as a result, a significant number of embarrassing emails were sent out to their clients, some with requests to change payment instructions.
Even with the best security tools in place, the end user is the weakest link in you security stack. It is therefore important to not only arm them with training and knowledge about how to identify rogue emails or phishing attacks, but also to provide an extra layer of protection to the organization if they happen to make a mistake.
As you may know, because hackers are so aggressive, and because they look for vulnerabilities in many places, every organization needs to have layers of security. (Which you do.) These layers include things like firewalls, antivirus, spam filters along with robust backups to recover from any disasters.
This is where the more robust spam filter like Barracuda comes in. We have been implementing Barracuda for Office 365 for many of our clients, and it has been very successful in closing this loop. It’s not expensive, but the value is high. Not only does it filter out significantly more spam on the way in, it also uses AI to identify and block spam emails from being sent out, like the examples above.
We use this tools ourselves and cannot stress enough its importance to your security. Contact us for further information.
