Find Out What Threats Are Lurking in Your Office 365 Email

If your organization uses Office 365, Barracuda has a new tool you need to check out. Barracuda Email Threat Scan for Office 365 performs a non-intrusive scan of inboxes, sent mail, junk mail and deleted folders to identify any hidden threats.

You might think that you don’t need such a tool. Assuming you already have firewalls and antimalware solutions in place, it would seem like any threats should already be identified and eradicated. A survey by Barracuda, however, found that 93 percent of the accounts scanned actually had some form of APT (advanced persistent threat) present in the Office 365 email—just waiting to opened, clicked on, or forwarded within the organization.

“Both phishing and ransomware are increasing at the rate of several hundred percent per quarter, and we believe that trend will continue for at least the next 18-24 months,” said Michael Osterman, president and CEO, Osterman Research. “In fact, in a recent survey, nearly 50 percent of respondents indicated they had been hit by one or more ransomware attacks, and 34 percent had a phishing attack successfully infiltrate their networks in the last 12 months—representing significant risks for organizations today.”

The Barracuda Email Threat Scan tool works by actively verifying potential threats. The tool detonates suspicious files in a sandbox and looks for anomalous behavior. It also employs machine learning to identify common viruses and their polymorphic variants.

I have been an Office 365 user since Microsoft first announced Office 365, and I highly recommend Office 365 as the best and most cost-effective way to purchase and use Microsoft Office. As a small company, though, I only have five accounts set up in Office 365. I conducted the free scan and fortunately it came up empty. After scanning 30,151 emails and 13,367 email attachments it found zero threats.

Apparently that just places me in that 7 percent group that doesn’t have lurking threats hiding in the email. Your organization might not be so lucky. In fact, according to Barracuda’s statistics, there is a greater than 9 out of 10 chance that you won’t.

When threats are detected, Barracuda also provides the information you need to understand what the threat is, and the tools you need to remediate or remove the threat. Barracuda Email Threat Scan integrates with Barracuda Essentials for Office 365, and is available to Barracuda authorized resellers, MSP partners and customers at no cost for a limited time.

*Barracuda is a sponsor of TechSpective