Technology & IT | Saturday 28 March, 2020 8:04 am |

The new version of Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 widens protection for employee collaboration by covering SharePoint Online and enabling secure file sharing within Microsoft Teams — in addition to previously available protection for Exchange Online and OneDrive. The solution will not only continue to shield inboxes from malicious phishing emails, but also ensure that only clean and reliable files can access SharePoint Online, allowing IT security managers to define the scope of sites for scanning. To help companies ensure the security of remote working and collaboration, Kaspersky has extended the product’s free trial version to six months. 

Phishing remains a serious menace for corporate users. Kaspersky research found that 186 million malicious spam messages targeted corporate users in 2019 — which is 54 million more than in 2018[1]. One of the most effective phishing techniques in 2019 were emails disguised as automatic notifications from legitimate services, such as Microsoft Outlook. Emails asking users to authorize services would obtain user credentials from corporate emails, which could then be used in an attack on an organization.

During January and February 2020, Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 blocked at least one attempt per mailbox on average, to click on a phishing email link. The recent protection upgrade introduces enhanced anti-phishing capabilities with a dedicated anti-spoofing feature. This protects corporate users from targeted phishing emails, supposedly sent on behalf of colleagues or subcontractors but which actually use spoofed domain names. The new feature allows a customer to create a list of reliable company and subcontractors email domains, so that the product can detect a malicious email sent from a forged domain. 

In order to reduce exposure to other threats, Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 has extended protection for SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams, securing all collaboration and messaging channels within Microsoft Office 365. This is especially important for companies with remote workers mostly communicating with colleagues through digital channels

Thanks to this extended protection, customers can now be sure that malware won’t be uploaded into SharePoint Online and then spread across the whole company. The product detects a malicious file by scanning every file immediately once it is uploaded, moving it to quarantine, and providing an IT security manager with the detection report and statistics on the dashboard. Furthermore, administrators can manage and refine the scope of scanning of corporate SharePoint sites — for example, to add protection to selected sites only or all of them at once. 

Overall, the product now enables safer collaboration and file sharing within Microsoft Teams. This means that even if a malicious file accesses a user endpoint and an employee tries to share it with colleagues – through chats or Teams channels — it will be detected and transferred to quarantine almost immediately so other users do not have a chance to open it and initiate infection. 

“Companies that are moving to cloud services and tend to use communication tools, such as Microsoft Teams, want to keep their data protected and meet the requirements of secure collaboration and messaging for their employees. To help companies meet these needs, we have expanded protection for Microsoft Office 365 to cover all associated applications. This gives customers assurance that the entire cloud service is secured by default and potential threats do not affect employees’ working processes,” — says Sergey Martsynkyan, Head of B2B Product Marketing at Kaspersky.