Microsoft Office 365 Adds An Extra Layer of Security
Lately the spam and malware attacks that we are seeing are so sophisticated that they get you to believe and click them. These days, it simply isn’t enough to put messages into the junk folder or tell users not to click on anything suspicious. These hackers are crafting their attacks so well that they don’t look suspicious at all.
Microsoft just announced that they will be adding an extra layer of security to Office 365. This extra protection will provide a warning for users to know that an email may be suspicious or that they can open it, knowing that it’s safe.
Microsoft plans to include a safety tip that will be displayed in a messaging bar at the top of the email in one of four color-coded categories indicating that the message is either Suspicious, Unknown, Trusted or Safe.
Messages marked Suspicious have a red safety tip and are either a known phishing message, have failed sender authentication, are a suspected spoofing message or have met some other criteria that Exchange Online Protection has used to determine the message is fraudulent. You should not interact with suspicious messages and instead should delete them.
A yellow bar at the top of the message indicates an Unknown safety level. Being marked as Unknown indicates that Exchange Online Protection has marked the message as spam. You can click the It’s not spam link in the yellow bar of a junk mail item to move the message to your inbox.
Messages from a Trusted sender display a green bar at the top of the message. These are from domains identified by Microsoft as being safe.
Messages marked with a gray safety tip indicates that the email was not filtered for spam because it is either considered Safe by the user’s organization, is on the user’s safe senders list or Exchange Online Protection marked the message as junk but the user moved it out of the junk folder to the inbox. The gray safety bar also appears when images within the message have been disabled.
All four types of Safety Tips are included in the Outlook on the web experience, whereas Outlook clients, whether desktop or mobile, will display only the Suspicious safety tip. Most messages in your inbox will not have a safety tip, they will only add them when they have information users need.
How do they determine which Safety Tip to apply?
Microsoft stated in their recent blog, “as an industry-leading solution for securing your email, Exchange Online Protection analyzes data patterns across millions of emails to identify spam, malware and phishing threats. Based on this ongoing analysis, Exchange Online Protection is able to identify suspicious messages and apply the appropriate Safety Tip.
Users can also report misclassified messages back to us for analysis. We’ll take these samples and use them to make your experience better.
Safety Tips are an important tool in combating phishing scams and online fraud. With this new functionality, Office 365 automatically provides an additional layer of protection for all its users. We will continue to enrich the Safety Tips feature to ensure our users have the best experience.”