Protecting your company from a breach or malicious attack is no longer an afterthought for Irish SMEs today. With BEC (Business Email Compromise), Ransomware, Man in the middle Attacks and Social Engineering scams ever evolving, ensuring your data is protected at the highest possible level is ever more critical to the business.
With Microsoft 365 comes some fantastic solutions such as exchange for email services, SharePoint for central companywide document management, Teams for instant communication, OneDrive for personal document storage, however, protecting these environments involves strategic planning and organisation.
It’s vital you sit down with your IT Partner and discuss how to maximise protection for these digital assets, as default protection is not always as secure as it may seem. To ensure the highest levels of protection requires an understanding of the various Microsoft 365 plans such as the Microsoft 365 Business Basic Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Microsoft 365 E3/E5 plans and which suits your business security needs best.
Once you decide the best package, you need to proactively assess the following areas of vulnerability and how best to minimise risk and exposure of a company security breach:
1. Unauthorised or External File Sharing
Always assess what levels of access are set to default on SharePoint as an example. Always avoid “Anyone links” if possible, to prevent data from unauthorised access via external file sharing.
2. Email Spoofing
This can be avoided by updating your DKIM and DMARC records. By doing so, this validates the authenticity of the of the email sender and receiver and ensures your email cannot be spoofed
3. Global Administrator Account Breaches
Safeguard your Global Administrator accounts as they hold significant control over your M365 environment.
4. Lack of Data Protection Policies and Training
Educate employees on data protection best practices and implement robust policies to secure valuable information.
5. Avoiding Detection
Stay proactive by regularly monitoring your Microsoft 365 environment for any suspicious activities or potential security threats
6. Secure Score
The Microsoft Secure Score is the equivalent to your company credit rating except it is based around your Microsoft 365 security posture. An often-overlooked area that needs constant reviewing to strengthen overall security
7. Security Alerts and Policies
Again, an often-overlooked area that can quickly inform the main stakeholders in the business of a suspicious activity such as access to emails and or data from a suspicious country, or a large quantity of data leaving the company Microsoft 365 environment such as SharePoint
8. Block Legacy Authentication
To avoid Password Spraying attempts on your Microsoft 365 tenant, ensure you have legacy authentication protocols such as SMTP disabled
9. Multi Factor Authentication
The single most important security feature of Microsoft 365 and the weakest access point for an employee’s email if this feature is not enabled. Apply MFA via Conditional Access Possible will provide maximum security
10. Data Exfiltration
Put measures in place to prevent unauthorised extraction of large amounts of sensitive data from your M365 environment. Depending on your plan there are a number of measures that can be enforced to ensure audit trails are at hand in the event they are required for suspicious activity.
Get a Free Security Assessment with Tier3Tech!
Stay vigilant, create a culture of awareness and take proactive steps to protect your organisation from these potential Microsoft 365 security risks!
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