How to Stop Spam and Phishing Emails in Office 365 – Safeguard Your Account
Email Spamming & Phishing are widespread terms in the digital world whose aims are to steal your confidential information. Microsoft Office 365 plays a major role in today’s digital arena. However despite having major prons still there are common Office 365 issues that affect users’ productivity.
Phishing attacks are one problem. These attacks also happen in Office 365. Therefore, here we are going to explain Office 365 phishing protection. How to Stop Spam and Phishing Emails in Office 365 Outlook account using Office 365 ATP anti-phishing protection. Let’s begin!
Phishing is a term used by hackers and cybercriminals. It is a type of social engineering where a hacker wants to steal your data, and login credentials. It is done with an email attempting to obtain sensitive information through user interaction, such as clicking on a malicious link or downloading an infected attachment.
The phishing email messages generally appear like sent by some reputed financial institutions and credit card companies. But the truth is this type of phishing mail, redirects to us some other website to get access to our information. So don’t be a victim of email phishing and for that follow some important preventive measures.
What About Spamming?
On the other hand, a spamming attack is not the same as phishing. It is just junk mails that arrive in your mailbox. The Spam mail always looks like advertisements or company brochures. Spam emails are usually sent to the users to buy a product or service of any company. The spamming was initially started in 1990 and spammers get your email addresses by Spambot.
A Spambot is a program that is designed to harvest your email addresses from the internet to build a list of emails. Afterward, all these email addresses are used for spamming.
Additional Information- To prevent yourself from Spamming or phishing emails you can take the help of SysTools Free IP Reputation Checker Software. This software can freely determine IP addresses that involve spamming activities, malware distribution, hacking attempts, and other malicious behavior. This data is collected from various sources of platforms such as spam blacklists, security vendors, and online security communities.
Office 365 is No Longer a Stranger to Both Spamming & Phishing Attacks
It is true, Microsoft O365 covers a large market in its domain. Every business whose entire communication depends on emails has a huge concern about protection from spear phishing attacks in Office 365. They have queries like-
- Does Office 365 have a spam filter?
- How can phishing be prevented?
- Is there any anti-phishing protection in Office 365?
Therefore, it is suggested to always have a backup of Office 365 in your local system environment. For this, one can try SysTools Office 365 Backup & Restore Software for the same.
It is engineered to save a copy of Outlook 365 emails, contacts, and calendars in popular file formats on the desired location in the local system & restore whenever it is required.
One can also try the demo version of the software as it is available for Windows & Mac Operating systems.
Thus, to get protection from spear-phishing, phishing, and spamming attacks in Office 365 account regardless of its plans, stay on this page.
Here we illustrate the best possible workarounds to prevent phishing emails in Microsoft 365 Outlook account.
Top 4 Preventive Measures to Stop Getting Phishing Emails
It is very difficult for a naive user to identify or detect sophisticated phishing emails because it looks very legitimate. Fortunately, Google established the New Google Account Verification feature to prevent phishing and business email compromise attacks, Office 365 also provides various features to stop phishing attacks. Some of them are mentioned below:
#Solution 1: Enable Office 365 Advance Threat Protection
MS Office 365 provides us with protection policies to prevent phishing i.e. Office 365 ATP Anti-Phishing Protection. You can enable this functionality to prevent mailbox from the suspicious mail.
Steps to Set Up Office 365 ATP Anti-Phishing Policies
- First, go to “https://protection.office.com” and sign in with O365 account.
- Afterward, navigate to Office 365 Security & Compliance, and opt for Policy under Threat Management.
- After that, choose Anti-phishing or ATP anti-phishing.
- To add the new policy, you need to select + Create. Otherwise, one can edit the already existing policy. To do this, choose the policy name from the Anti Phishing page and click on Edit policy.
- Now you have to Specify the Name, Description, and Settings for your policy.
- Once you have done with all settings, choose this policy and save it.
Note:- ATP is included only with Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Business, Office 365 Enterprise E5, and Office 365 Education A5. To know more about, what is inside an Office 365 plan, you can refer to this blog- What is included in Microsoft Office 365? – Complete Guide
#Solution 2: Use Multi-Factor Authentication to Enable Phishing Protection
When attackers manage to get into your network through any phishing email. Still, users can save the O365 account by implementing multi-factor authentication. Using MFA, one cannot access the Outlook 365 account without entering the securing code.
Steps to Enable Multi-factor Authentication in Office 365
Step 1. Select the Setup option from the admin center.
Step 2. Opt for the View option under the section Make sign-in more secure.
Step 3. Afterward, choose the option Get Started from the following page.
Step 4. You need to check the following options:-
- Require multi-factor authentication
- Require users to register for multi-factor authentication
- Block access if the risk is detected
Step 5. If you want to exclude anyone from these policies, the admin can choose any users that you want to exclude from the drop-down list.
Step 6. At last, click on Create Policy. It will redirect to the Make sign-in more secure page, where ‘Completed’ is written.
#Solution 3: Configure Your Email for Secure Data Flow
Domain Keys Identified Mail or DKIM is a technique that permits the receiver to check whether an email was indeed sent and authorized by the owner of that domain or not. This technique is done by giving the email a digital signature. The DKIM signature is a header that is added to the message which is secure with encryption.
So, the administrator can whitelist various business domains to secure its organization or itself from phishing attacks coming from an external domain.
#Solution 4: Monitor Suspicious External Sites
Hackers and Cyber Criminals always create fake websites that are used for phishing attacks, because it is the easiest way to look legitimate.
So, to protect Office 365 from phishing always be on alert. Always analyze the URL of any link before clicking on it. Because, sometimes, the URL of the page is different from the original website page.
Workarounds to Stop Spam Emails in Office 365
If you are concerned about how to stop spam and phishing emails Office 365, then no need to worry about it. Thus, Office 365 built various spam filters to protect you and your organization from the attacks of spam emails. Some of them are mentioned below:
- Connection Filtering: – When you use a connection filter, MS Office 365 checks the reputation of the sender before sending it to the mailbox. Besides this, you can create a list of safe senders to stop spam in Office 365.
- Spam Filter: – With the help of Spam filtering, you can change what action to take on identified as spam. You can also turn on the advanced spam filtering option to get an aggressive approach to spam attacks.
- Email authentication: – This is a technique that uses the Domain Name System to add verifiable information to email messages about the sender is called email authentication. With this option, you can use this technique to stop spam emails in your Office 365 account.
Final Say on Office 365 Outlook Phishing Protection
In this blog, we have discussed all the possible ways to get the solution of how to stop spam and phishing emails in Office 365 accounts. So, if you are one of those users who want to break off from spamming and phishing, then go through this write-up because it will surely help you to accomplish the same.