Attack Prevention With Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender works proactively to prevent phishing emails and other threats reaching your business, reducing the need to implement remedial action. Prevention is always better than cure!
Phishing scams are, without a doubt, the most common cyber threat that businesses face today. In fact, of the 39% of UK businesses that have experienced a cyber attack this year, the majority say they’ve received phishing emails. A phishing email is designed to look like legitimate, trusted communication. Perhaps from a colleague, a supplier, or a customer. It tricks recipients into clicking on dangerous links, or sharing confidential information such as passwords or payment details.
In order to protect our data and technologies, we need to be doing what we can to reduce the risk.
Of course, the priority for many businesses is putting processes in place to reactively respond to attacks. Businesses are looking for ways to ensure the early detection of phishing attacks, and minimise their impact should they occur. But while critical, that shouldn’t be the firm focus. What we should be looking into is effective ways to prevent these attacks from happening in the first place.
Microsoft Defender can help. It works proactively to prevent phishing emails and other threats reaching your business, reducing the need to implement remedial action. Prevention is always better than cure! So how does it do it? Defender has a number of powerful prevention features that can help businesses significantly reduce the number of threats they need to deal with.
Microsoft Defender prevention features
The biggest prevention feature that comes as standard with Microsoft Defender is the email blocker function. Defender works to authenticate the sender before delivering an email to your inbox, automatically blocking it – or sending it to a separate designated inbox – if it appears sketchy. It uses anti-spoof technology to ensure that hackers aren’t able to mask the source of the email as a trusted contact, whether inside or outside your organisation. If something looks fake, it doesn’t get to you.
Microsoft estimate that approximately 25% of malicious emails are blocked by Defender at this first line of defence. Overall, around 100 million phishing emails are blocked by Defender each month.
However, phishing emails are just one type of threat. It’s believed that more than one in five UK businesses have experienced a more sophisticated variety, such as a malware attack. The good news is that Defender also has a range of features that can help to prevent these types of attacks.
One such feature is the common attachment filter functionality. This scans emails for attachment types that typically aren’t sent via email, such as .exe or .app files, and removes them before they reach your inbox. Another is rapid definition deployment. This means that Microsoft is constantly updating its definition of ‘malware’ so that Defender is always searching for the latest signs of risk.
Defend your business
While there are many prevention solutions on the market today, Microsoft Defender is one of the best options for businesses using Microsoft 365 apps. That’s because Defender isn’t just email-focused; it helps to prevent attacks through 365 apps such as Teams, SharePoint, and more.
Of course, some threats do get through. Defender is great at threat prevention. But it can’t block every single attempt. The good news is that the software has built-in threat detection capabilities to identify attacks that get through the first line of defence, and tackle them before they impact your business. Check out our blog post on attack detection with Microsoft Defender [link] to find out more.
According to Government statistics, only 54% of UK businesses are taking action to protect themselves against cybercrime. With Microsoft Defender, taking the right action is easy.
