What Microsoft Defender for Office 365?

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a security solution designed to protect your organization from various cyber threats, such as phishing, malware, ransomware, and business email compromise. It provides advanced protection for your email and collaboration tools like Microsoft Team.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is simply a service that helps to Prevent attacks regarding to Office 365 applications and services.

Microsoft Defender for Office has three main types:

Exchange Online protection,

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan1 and

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan2.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps to Protect against attacks like Phishing, Spams, Malwares, Email Spoofing and the likes.

Key Features of Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

Anti-Phishing and Anti-Malware:

Anti-Phishing: Uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to detect and block phishing attempts. It protects against various types of phishing, including spear phishing and business email compromise.

Anti-Malware: Provides multi-layered protection against malware, including viruses, spyware, and ransomware. It uses heuristic detection to identify and block both known and unknown threats.
Anti-Spam: This feature helps protect your organization from unwanted and potentially harmful emails by using various filtering techniques.
Safe Links and Safe Attachments:

Safe Links: This feature scans URLs in emails and Office documents to ensure they are safe. If a link is found to be malicious, it is blocked, protecting users from phishing attacks and malware.

Safe Attachments: This feature checks email attachments for malicious content by opening them in a virtual environment (a process known as detonation) before they reach the recipient This helps prevent malware from spreading through email attachments.
Threat Investigation and Response:

Automated Investigation and Response (AIR): This feature automates the investigation of security alerts and provides recommended actions for remediation. It helps security teams respond quickly and efficiently to threats.

Threat Explorer: A tool that allows security analysts to investigate and analyze threats in real-time. It provides insights into the volume of attacks, threat families, and attacker infrastructure.
Attack Simulation Training:

Simulated Phishing Attacks: Allows organizations to run simulated phishing attacks to test and train employees on recognizing and responding to phishing attempts.

Training Campaigns: Provides targeted training to users based on their performance in simulations, helping to improve their security awareness and reduce susceptibility to attacks.

To Configure Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

Login to Microsoft Defender Portal. Go Tp Email & Collaboration, click the dropdown and Select Policies & Rules to Setup the policies.

On the Policies & rules pane, Click on Threat Policies, On the Threat Policies pane, navigate to Policies and Select the policy you want to configure. In this Project, we are starting the setup with Anti-Phishing Policy.

Next, Setup the Anti-Phishing Policy. Anti-Phishing Protect users from phishing attacks and configure safety tips on suspicious messages.

By Default, Microsoft 365 includes built in features that protect users from Phishing attacks. to set up Anti-Phishing policy, you either customize the default policy or create a new policy with higher priority. In this project we are creating a new Anti-Phishing policy. When you create a new policy, it overrides the default one.

To setup this policy, click on Create and fill in the required details and click on next

Under, Users, Groups and Domains, choose Domains because it captures every member of the organization using this domain and click on Next.

Set the Phishing threshold & protection to what your organization require. Here i set it to Aggressive. Under Impersonation, enable the key users and domains you want to protect including trusted domains and click on Next.