Enhancing Office 365’s detection and antispam

To be safe, augment the service’s default protection.

Infection by e-mail is a time-honored tradition for good reason. Take a look through Securelist, our blog for security researchers and experts. You don’t have to go far back — let’s say to the beginning of July — to get an eyeful of malware distributed through e-mail. Spam is a common means to distribute ransomware such as Rakhni. Classic phishing is a classic method for straight-up stealing victims’ cryptocurrency. Spear-phishing is a current APT trend. E-mail attachments spread malware such as Cryacl.

E-mail is hardly the most sophisticated malware vector, but it is the most widespread. In theory, the answer to the abovementioned threats lies in a solution installed on your business’s mail server that can filter spam and check attachments for the malware traces. However, that solution is of limited help if you use cloud services, such as Microsoft Office 365.

Of course, that does not mean you should stop using cloud e-mail. Just keep in mind that if your business relies on an outside service, you need to augment the service’s default protection. In the case of cloud-based Microsoft Office 365, we recommend Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365.

Not long ago, testers from Virus Bulletin compared levels of protection between Office 365 alone and Office 365 in combination with our solution. Our solution raised antispam detection by 2.41% without adding any new false positives. At first glance, that may not look spectacular. However, the improvement from 97.41% to 99.82% is a big deal. Microsoft Office 365 by itself is good at spam filtering. It catches all obvious spam. The spam it misses is the stuff that doesn’t really look like spam.

Can you guess who is making a real effort to disguise spam as legitimate mail? That’s right: Phishing actors and malware operators.

(The improvement we offer over Office 365 alone in antimalware efficiency should be clear without additional explanation: detection jumps from 79.6% to 99.6%. Fighting malware is our business; we have been doing it for more than 21 years.)

Put in gaming terms, our solution is like a magical Cloak of Protection. With it, you have +20 for malware detection and +2 for spam avoidance. That’s protection worth using. You can learn more about Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 and our other cloud solutions on the Kaspersky Business Hub website.

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