How to Stop Spam & Phishing Emails in Office 365 – Prevent Your Account

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Written By Mohit Jha
Anuraag Singh
Approved By Anuraag Singh
Published On September 6th, 2022
Reading Time 7 Minutes Reading

Email Spamming & Phishing are very common terms in the digital world whose aims are just to steal your confidential information. These attacks also happen in Office 365. Therefore, here we are going to explain how to stop spam emails and phishing attacks in Microsoft Office 365 Outlook account using Office 365 ATP anti-phishing protection. Let’s begin!

Phishing is a term used by hackers and cybercriminals. It is a type of social engineering where hacker wants to steal your data, and login credentials. It is done with an email which attempting to obtain sensitive information through some user interaction, such as click on a malicious link or downloading an infected attachment.

The phishing email messages generally appears like sent by some reputed financial institutions and credit card company. But the truth is, this type of phishing mail, redirects to us some other website to get access to our information.

And, What About Spamming ?

On the other hand, spamming attack is not the same as phishing. It is just junk mails that arrive in your mailbox. The Spam mail always looks like advertisement or company brochures. And spam emails are usually sent to the users to buy a product or service of any company. The spamming is initially starts in 1990 and spammers get your email addresses by Spambot.

A Spambot is a program that is designed to harvest your email addresses from the internet in order to build a list of emails. Afterward, all these email addresses are used for spamming.

Office 365 is no longer stranger with both Spamming & Phishing Attacks

It is true, Microsoft O365 covers a large market in its domain. Every business whose entire communication depends on the mails has huge concern about protection from spear-phishing attacks in Office 365. In fact, they have queries like-

 

  • Does Office 365 have a spam filter ?
  • How can phishing be prevented ?
  • Is there any anti-phishing protection in Office 365 ?

 

Therefore, it is suggested to always have a backup of Office 365 in your local system environment. For this, one can try SysTools Office 365 Backup & Restore Software for the same. It is engineered to save a copy of Outlook 365 mails, contacts, and calendars in popular file formats on the desired location in the local system & restore whenever it is required. One can also try the demo version of the software as it is available for Windows & Mac Operating system.

 

Thus, to get protection from spear-phishing, phishing, and spamming attacks in Office 365 account regardless of its plans, stay on this page. Here we illustrate the best possible workarounds to stop spam and phishing emails in Office 365 Outlook account.

Also Read :- Top Office 365 Security Issues & Concerns

Top 4 Preventive Measures to Stop Phishing

It is very difficult for a naive user to identify or detect the sophisticated phishing emails because it looks very legitimate. Fortunately, Office 365 provides various features to stop phishing attacks. Some of them are mentioned below:

#Solution 1: Enable Office 365 Advance Threat Protection

MS Office 365 provides us protection policies to prevent from phishing and i.e. Office 365 ATP Anti-Phishing Protection. You can enable this functionality to prevent mailbox from the suspicious mails.

Steps to Set Up Office 365 ATP Anti-Phishing Policies

  1. First go to “https://protection.office.com” and sign in with O365 account.
  2. Afterward, navigate to Office 365 Security & Compliance, and opt for Policy under Threat management.
  3. After that, choose Anti phishing or ATP anti-phishing.
  4. To add the new policy, you need to select + Create. Else, one can edit the already existing policy. To do this, choose the policy name from the Anti Phishing page and click on Edit policy.
  5. Now you have to Specify Name, Description, and Settings for your policy.
  6. Once you have done with all settings, choose this policy and save it.

Note:- ATP is included only with Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Business, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 Education A5. To know more about, what is inside an Office 365 plan, you can refer this blog- What Is Included in Microsoft Office 365 ? – Complete Guide

#Solution 2: Use Multi-Factor Authentication to Enable Phishing Protection

When attackers manage to get into your network through any phishing email. Still, user can save the O365 account by implementing multi-factor authentication. Using MFA, one cannot access the Outlook 365 account without entering the securing code.

Steps to Enable Multi-factor Authentication in Office 365

    1. Select Setup option from admin center.
    2. Opt for the View option under the section Make sign-in more secure.
    3. Afterward, choose the option Get Started from the following page.
    4. You need to check the following options:-
      • Require multi-factor authentication
      • Require users to register for multi-factor authentication
      • Block access if the risk is detected

 

  • From the Do you want to exclude anyone from these policies, admin can choose any users that you want to exclude from the drop-down list.

 

  1. At last, click on Create Policy. It will redirect to Make sign-in more secure page, where ‘Completed’ is written.

#Solution 3: Configure Your Email for Secure Data Flow

Domain Keys Identified Mail or DKIM is a technique that permits the receiver to check that an email was indeed sent and authorized by the owner of that domain or not. This technique is done by giving the email a digital signature. The DKIM signature is a header that is added to the message which is secure with encryption.

So, the administrator can whitelist various business domains to secure its organization or itself from phishing attacks coming from an external domain.

#Solution 4: Monitor Suspicious External Sites

Hacker and Cyber Criminals always create a fake website that used for phishing attacks, because it is the easiest way to look legitimate. So, to protect Office 365 from phishing always be on alert. Always analyse the URL of any link before clicking on it. Because, sometimes, the URL of the page is different from the original website page.

Workarounds to Stop Spam Emails in Office 365

If you are concern about the spamming in Office 365, then no need to worry about it. Thus, Office 365 built various spam filters to protect you and your organization from the attacks of spam emails. Some of them are mentioned below:

Connection Filtering: – When you use a connection filter, MS Office 365 checks the reputations of the sender before sending it to the mailbox. Besides this, you can create a list of safe sender in order to stop spam in Office 365.

Spam Filter: – With the help of Spam filtering, you can change what action to take on identified as spam. You can also turn on the advanced spam filtering option to get an aggressive approach to spam attacks.

Email authentication: – It is a technique that uses the Domain Name System to add verifiable information to email messages about the sender is called email authentication. With this option, you can use this technique to stop spam emails in your Office 365 account.

Final Say on Office 365 Outlook Phishing Protection

In this blog, we have discussed all the possible ways to stop spam and phishing emails in Microsoft Office 365 account. So, if you are one of those users who want to break off from spamming and phishing, then go through this write-up because it will surely help you to accomplish the same.

  author

By Mohit Jha

Mohit is a writer, researcher, and editor. Cyber ​​security and digital forensics are the two subjects that keep Mohit out of his seat. In addition, he hopes that the well-researched and thought-out articles he finds will help people learn.