The Blackhole of Office 365: 45-day Security Challenge

[Steve_Johnson]

At this very moment, your inbox and social media account are probably cluttered with promises for the latest quick fix or magical pill that turns you into a lean, mean version of your self in just 30 days. In the same vain, many organizations have adopted a similar approach for outsourcing their infrastructure and applications to the 'cloud' in an effort to 'slim down'. As I described in last years article, "When increased ROI also increases the Risk Of Infection (ROI)", many organizations moving to the cloud believe that they are also outsourcing the application security risk to those providers as well and how easy it is for hackers to target Office 365 environments. Like many of these programs, the short term gains may be coming at the price of your (company's security) long-term health.

Did you know? By default, Microsoft Office 365 only provides basic protection against known malware.

Abstaining from the cloud is probably not an option, but protection from unknown malware is. I'm proposing a 45-day Security Challenge for organizations utilizing Office 365. As an API solution, it's simple to deploy, does not require any MTA or proxy re-routing and will take you approximately 15-20 minutes to protect a subset of mailboxes OR your entire organization with no downtime or chance for outage. It's called 

Sandblast for Office 365.

The 45-day Security Challenge

• Engineering Support. A complimentary technical resource to help get you up and running. Or, if you prefer, we can provide you a step-by-step guide to do it yourself. (You will need to administrative credentials for your company's Office 365 account.)
• Detect, Prevent, Clean or all the above. Choose how you deploy for your environment. Detect will give you the visibility of email threats found. Prevent will provide active defense from even Patient-0 entering your organization. Clean will apply Threat Extraction for all incoming attachments which extracts active content from files or flattens to PDF thereby removing any potential threats.
• No sales calls. It's yours to try for 45-days. If at the end of 45-days you want to make it a permanent solution, it's up to you to reach out to us. Alternatively, if you decide this isn't for you, just delete your account.
• Bridging the gap. Check Point has you covered. Whichever organization is most in need based upon the most threats found will be protected for the next six months until a permanent solution is put into place (even if you choose another vendor solution).

Getting Started

Send me a LinkedIn message, shoot me an email (stevej at checkpoint.com), or leave the comment "45-day cleanse" on this article and I'll assign a technical resource to get you started.

Remember, in just 15-20 minutes I guarantee that your organizational security health will immediately improve.

Your truly,

\stevej

Stephen Johnson

Head of Advanced Threat Prevention, Americas