MailGuard Blog

Brandjacking - where cybercriminals impersonate the brands we trust, in order to fool us into clicking on malicious content - has affected some of the world’s biggest companies, past and present. 

Anyone can be a target of brandjacking scams.

Microsoft’s stature as a trusted household name makes them a lucrative brandjacking target for cybercriminals.

This latest phishing attack - shown in the screenshot above - uses the “Office 365” trademark to persuade recipients that the email is legitimate and get them to click on the “recover messages” link.

‘Alone we will fail,’ was the message from Alastair MacGibbon, Head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre and keynote speaker at MailGuard’s2018 Cybersecurity Awareness Luncheon.

On Tuesday 6 March, MailGuard collaborated with PWC and Microsoft to bring together CEOs and cybersecurity experts in a forum focussed on the rise of cybercrime and the challenges it presents for business.

This month, an Office 365 outage meant that many of Microsoft’s European customers were unable to log into their email accounts or access related services.

If you’ve recently migrated to Office 365, you may have experienced periods when your email was either unavailable, or performing slower than required.

If you’ve made the move to Office 365 as your hosted email solution, your email is likely to be filtered using its Exchange Online Protection (EOP), which works to intercept and remove malicious content before it reaches your inbox.

The features and benefits of Office 365 are undeniable, allowing business owners and employees to access email and data from anywhere in the world via the cloud.

However, organisations transferring their operations to the cloud face a number of security implications - in particular, data access and defence against cyber threats like spam and malware.

Fortunately Office 365 features a range of security benefits, shown below, which help to mitigate risk.

There’s little doubt that Microsoft’s Office 365 services have completely changed the way companies have looked at cloud services. Although others, like Google, offered cloud productivity like office applications and email first, it’s Office 365 that has turned interest in the cloud into deploying in the cloud.

A malicious email spam campaign has held businesses for ransom after downloading an email attachment purporting to be from Microsoft.