As more and more employees are required to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic, online meeting and communication platforms have become much more critical.
Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams are adopted by a lot of companies. Thanks to Microsoft Teams you can provide guest access and external access to collaborate with people outside your organization. Incredibly practical, but nonetheless IT staff generally aren’t without concerns about it either…
File and data access and sharing between (an unlimited number of) users… It’s not something to take lightly. It’s important to take the necessary measures against malicious files and links within Teams. If you are preoccupied with it, you are not alone. You’re right to be cautious.
To reassure you, Xylos offers many services but first and foremost we’d like to share some security best practices for Microsoft Teams you can get started with right away. We’ll also dive into the available Microsoft Defender for Office 365 features a little.
Microsoft 365 Defender is part of Microsoft’s XDR solution. It leverages the Microsoft 365 security portfolio to automatically analyze threat data across identities, endpoints, data, apps, e-mail, and collaboration tools. It builds a complete picture of each attack in a single dashboard.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is part of Microsoft 365 Defender. It is a cloud-based e-mail filtering service that helps you protect your organization. More specifically, it counters threats to e-mail and collaboration tools. Some examples (probably well familiar to you)? Phishing, business e-mail compromise and malware attacks.
Defender for Office 365 also provides investigation, hunting, and remediation capabilities to help security teams efficiently identify, prioritize, investigate, and respond to threats.
Safe Links and Safe attachments are features of Microsoft Defender for Office 365, that will protect your Microsoft Teams environment against potential threats.
After you turn on Safe Links protection for Microsoft Teams, URLs in Teams are checked against a list of known malicious links when the protected user clicks the link (time-of-click protection). In case a link is found to be malicious, users will have the following experiences:
So, how do Safe Links works in Teams at a high level? Simple:
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams protects your organization from malicious files.
Safe Attachments for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams helps detect and block existing files that are identified as malicious in team sites and document libraries.
When Safe Attachments for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams is enabled and identifies a file as malicious, the file is locked using direct integration with the file stores.
Although the blocked file is still listed in the document library and in web, mobile, or desktop applications, people can’t open, copy, move, or share the file. But they can delete the blocked file.
In a one of our next posts, we will dive deeper into other security recommendations for your Microsoft 365 environment. Interested in learning how Xylos can help you to secure your Microsoft 365? Get started today and schedule a call.
