In 2018, Microsoft has blocked around 5 billion phish emails and protected 7 billion URL clicks by safe links in Office 365. According to the newly released stats, the tech giant detonated 11 billion unique items by ATP sandboxing.
Since Office 365 is a leading email service provider, Microsoft keeps track on security of its productivity suite. The company analyzes over 6.5 trillion signals every day, and 400 billion emails every month, while detonating 1 billion items in sandbox.
From January to September this year, Microsoft analyzed over 300k phish campaigns and 8 million business email compromise attempts in Office 365 emails. Around 20% of the users who receive such emails, click on a malicious link within first five minutes.
Microsoft has been taking several big steps and improving capabilities of Office 365 to address impersonation, spoof, and phish content and internal phish emails sent from compromised accounts. In a blog post, Microsoft claimed that Office 365 is currently the best solution at phish catch.
From November 2017 to January 2018, Office 365 missed more phish emails than other vendors, but that has improved over the time.
The company is investing $1 billion annually in cybersecurity and having 3500 security professionals in place to address the rising wave of phishing campaigns.
Engineers at Microsoft categorize phishing emails and design capabilities accordingly for each type. These categories include domain spoof, content detonation, compromised and impersonation.
“When we began our journey of enhancing our anti-phish capabilities, we admittedly were not best of breed at mitigating phish. As we alluded to previously, transparency with customers is a core priority at Microsoft,” wrote Debraj Ghosh, Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Jason Rogers, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft, in a blog post.
The tech giant is leveraging advanced machine learning models, time-of-click protection, spoof intelligence for intra-org and cross domain spoof detection, rich insights, and more capabilities to enhance anti-phishing.
Implementation of these solutions have really worked for Microsoft. Office 365 now exhibits the lowest miss rate of phish emails.
Also read: Microsoft Ignite 2018: Top 8 announcements spanning AI, IoT, and Microsoft 365
“While the enhancements are interesting, ultimately, catch rate is the parameter that counts, and it is important to remember that no solution can ever stop all threats. Sometimes misses occur, and the most effective solution will miss the least,” added Debraj Ghosh and Jason Rogers.
Images source: Microsoft
