Flood control for your e-mails

Even though built-in Office 365 spam filters stop most spam, what gets through can be enough to cause significant damage

Not all companies see a problem with employees receiving unwanted e-mails. Those that use Office 365 may point out that it has built-in antispam filters, so they really don’t see any problem. However, even though Office 365’s filters keep out most of the trash, the few bits that get through are enough to cause significant damage to a company.

To begin with, the “spam industry” does not rest. Attackers constantly invent new methods and technologies to bypass filters. They send mail from different addresses to deceive reputation filtering, use automatic domain generation, and lots more.

The lucky recipients get messages that are just obtrusive advertising (although a flood of them can make you overlook something really important). But e-mail is also one of the most common delivery channels for all kinds of malware. And we are talking not only about mass mailings of ransomware or phishing links (the wider the campaign, the more likely it is to be noticed and filtered). If attackers single out your company as a target, they will create special e-mails that are not so easy to distinguish from real business correspondence. Especially if they are disguised as letters from other employees, or from the boss, even alert recipients may be taken in.

Therefore, standard filters need to be strengthened, and not just with additional barriers, but with full-fledged multilayered protective technologies. Incoming mail needs to be checked not only for content, but also for the presence of cyberthreats. In fact, machine learning is the right tool to solve both of these problems.

Both cyberattacks and spam constantly change and use new methods of disguise, so effective protection against them depends on the reliability and flexibility of self-learning systems, which experts must constantly improve. We call this concept HuMachine Intelligence, and it is the basis of almost all of our solutions, including antispam technologies. Thanks to it, our technologies get excellent results in independent tests. Furthermore, constant supervision by human experts of the mostly automated process of new e-mail threat analysis not only improves detection rate but also minimises false positives, thus preventing the accidental loss of business-critical information.

Until recently, those e-mail protection technologies were used only in solutions installed on premise, inside protected infrastructure. However, now many companies, especially small and medium-size businesses, are taking advantage of the cloud-based service Exchange Online, a part of Microsoft Office 365. Specifically for their protection, we are releasing Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365, significantly enhancing the efficiency of protection achieved with standard filters alone. After all, every additional bit of antispam efficiency rids companies of another wave of the spam and malicious messages that can potentially flood employees’ mailboxes. The decimal digits within 99.99% effectiveness really matter because the most dangerous threats hide there. That’s why our dedicated solution for Office 365 can become a critical factor in corporate e-mail protection.

To learn more about Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 and start your full-function, 30-day free trial, please visit cloud.kaspersky.com.

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