Foundational Security Controls for Microsoft Teams

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Work-from-home requirements over the past year forced many organizations to rapidly increase adoption of video and collaboration applications like Microsoft Teams and Zoom without thorough security reviews and risk assessments. This large-scale increase in demand also surprised the providers, as numerous security and operational maturity issues arose as usage and attacks skyrocketed. Also, many organizations are employing these solutions in "new usage areas" such as medicine and education, that require specific access control, confidentiality, and financial management conditions.

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'Tis The Season For Online Safety!

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The COVID-19 pandemic has already created a golden opportunity for malicious actors to prey on human desires to help others or to discover a “deal.” Initial reports indicate campaigns to donate to scam charities, receive government-sponsored payments, or be first in line for a vaccine, have been wildly successful.

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Investigating User Account Compromises in Office 365

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Unfortunately, almost every organization at some point will have to manage a situation where a user’s account has been compromised. In this blog post, we present O365 native tools and techniques that organizations can utilize.

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Implementing Foundational Security Controls for Every Office 365 Environment

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In our previous post, we provided an overview of each of the 12 Foundational Security Controls that should be implemented for every Office 365 environment to deter business email compromise (BEC), account takeover (ATO) attacks, and unauthorized data access.

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Foundational Security Controls for Every Office 365 Environment

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As many organizations continue to adjust to an extended and potentially permanent remote workforce, dependency on cloud services has increased rapidly – as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in a recent earnings release – “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” The following post is intended to help organizations that may have recently begun using or have increased their usage of Office 365. 

Please note Microsoft continues to evolve their platform and these recommendations are current as of this posting.

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Microsoft Sentinel: Monitoring Audio/Video Conferencing Software

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This blog expands upon SecureSky’s “Top 10 Audio/Video Conferencing Security Best Practices” blog posted on April 8, 2020. If you have not read that blog yet, we encourage you to do so, as it provides recommendations on settings to harden various audio/video conferencing tools that you may use within your organization.

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Attackers Exploit Gap in Office 365 Best Practice Guidelines

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July 28, 2020 Update: Due to the complexities documented in this blog post, Microsoft is rolling out changes to e-mail forwarding configuration in Office 365. SecureSky is testing the changes that are documented at the following Microsoft URL, and will update this blog post after completion of testing to address these changes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/external-email-forwarding?view=o365-worldwide.

With a six times increase in COVID-19 themed incidents, security professionals need to take advantage of every possible configuration and security control to protect against this growing amount of attacks.  Today we will discuss how attackers are leveraging a gap in Office 365 best practices that allows undetected eavesdropping on victim’s emails.

When attackers gain control of an account in Office 365, one of the first steps they often take is to configure email forwarding in the compromised environment. Attackers configure email forwarding in order to see new emails that arrive in the victim’s inbox – which can be responses to attacker phishing attempts sent to the victim contacts. In order to disguise their presence, the attacker does not want the victim to see those emails. 

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Microsoft Security Defaults – A Step in the Right Direction, but Customers Should Do More

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We understand that managing security for Office 365 can be difficult and complex. As we continue to see common identity-related attacks against authentication like password spray, replay, phishing and malware-based increasing into today’s uncertain world it's imperative that we understand Microsoft’s “Security Defaults”.   

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Top 10 Audio/Video Conferencing Security Best Practices

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With the recent shift of much of the global workforce to home office work environments, it’s a good time to revisit Audio/Video conferencing security best practices. In this blog we will highlight what we consider the Top 10 ways you can train your employees to practice good, risk-reducing security hygiene when scheduling, creating and running online meetings using one of many popular audio/video conferencing platforms. We will also highlight ways to implement detection and alerting controls for audio/video conferencing platforms that offer such robust security features.

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SecureSky Cyber Threat Center Sees Greater Than 6 Times Increase In Attacks

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But There’s Still a Lot of Good Things Happening In These Trying Times! One of the most staggering statistics reported recently from the SecureSky Cyber Threat Center is seeing a 6x-7x increase in fraudulent scams and BEC cases in the last 30 days, with COVID-19 themes – phishing, fake investment, charities, prevention or treatment offers and testing scams. We have seen similar trending of overall phishing volumes from multiple clients and email gateway providers, which correlates to the sharp uptick in case volume, as well as click rates.

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