Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

Posted on December 15, 2018 in Computer Systems, by Al Harris

Email is an essential part of everyday life. Many hours are spent trawling through business emails, and there is so much valuable data stored in your email clients. As a result, it’s become one of the easiest and most effective ways for cybercriminals and hackers to take advantage of you.

You’ve probably been sent email in the past that was something sinister disguised as something much less severe. Think of emails from your ‘bank’ that claimed your account security settings needed updating and asked for your username and password. Emails like this can lead to your personal information being stolen, while also resulting in dangerous malware on your computer.

Finding ways to protect yourself from email threats is very important, particularly if you run a business that sends and receives client data via emails. Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have a solution to this problem with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection.

What is Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection?

Office 365 ATP is the latest offering from Microsoft as they bid to fight the war against hackers and cybercriminals. While the Office 365 application already has built-in security features that take care of many forms of email spam/threats, it’s not good enough at keeping out some of the smarter criminals out there.

It’s a cloud-based system that’s designed to filter your emails and prevent anything dangerous from entering your mailbox and causing problems. On the off chance that an attack does happen, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection responds immediately to negate it.

How does it work?

The new Advanced Threat Protection keeps your emails secure by tackling some of the most common issues faced by people around the world every day. Here are the main features you will see in this system:

Safe Attachments: this helps protect against any harmful attachments by automatically analyzing them to understand if they’re suspicious.
Dynamic Delivery: this features works alongside the one above and lets you read and reply to an email while the attachment is being scanned.
Safe Link/Internal Safe Link: both these functions will scan links in emails (when you click on them) and block them if they contain malicious material. The difference between the two is that Internal Safe Link is used for links sent in emails between people in the same organization.
Identity Theft Protection: This is an advanced feature that you have to manually activate and it will help identify any threats from people posing as contacts in your address book. The software will learn how to figure out if someone is using a fake email or not and alert you to it.
Tracking & Reports: You can also use a feature that tracks any attacks that happen and creates reports so you can see which ones are most common and demand the most of your attention.