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This blog is part one of a three-part series detailing the journey we’re on to simplify configuration of threat protection capabilities in Office 365 to enable best-in class protection for our customers.
Effective security is a never-ending battle to achieve balance between security and productivity. If we apply too many security controls to an environment, we limit the ability of its users to function efficiently. And if we err on the side of restraint, we do not hinder users in any way, but we leave the door open to threats. Email security is complex and ever-changing. With over 90 percent of threats surfacing through email, it’s critical that organizations are empowered to configure security tools in a way that works for their environment.
Configuration is key
We’re committed to offering Office 365 customers the best email protection by continually focusing on improving the effectiveness of our solutions both within Exchange Online Protection (EOP) as well as Defender for Office 365. EOP has a rich legacy of policy granularity and customizations that help customers meet their unique needs. As we’ve built and innovated on Microsoft Defender for Office 365, we have applied those same principles to the new advanced protection capabilities we offered as part of Defender for Office 365, while still respecting many of the EOP settings.
This deeply customizable protection stack within Office 365 has allowed customers over the years to implement policies and rules that fulfill an endless list of requirements. The drawback here, however, is that as customizations are added, they require regular review, upkeep, modifications, and even removal over time. In the absence of that continued focus, there is a high risk of creating an overall reduced state of protection. And while that might sound counter-intuitive, we see this very often. Here are some examples of how these configurations can inadvertently get out of hand:
- An organization in Europe had configured 198 domains to be allowed to bypass our filters
- A firm in India had over 900 URLs stipulated to bypass by our detonation service per week
- An enterprise in Asia had over 50,000 known phishing URLs configured to bypass our filters
In each of these cases, the result was an increase in phishing campaigns making their way to end users. And these are just a few examples of what we see as a widespread problem – custom policies and configurations put in place with perhaps the best of intentions but without considering the immediate or long-term security impact of creating them or keeping them in place permanently.
Across Office 365, we estimate that 20% of phishing mails are delivered to user mailboxes as a result of poorly configured (often legacy) policies that haven’t been revisited for a long time. It was clear that we needed to help customers through this. It wasn’t sufficient that we educate customers of the problem, we had to actively help with getting customers to a more secure state. That started a series of efforts for the past many months that have resulted in capabilities, tools and changes in the product that we’ll walk you through in this blog series. But before we get into it, it might help to get a better appreciation for how the problem arises in the first place.
How did we get here?
The natural question to ask is, how did we arrive at a place where customer configuration could be a problem?
Historical settings can age
In some ways, Exchange Online represents the final frontier. The promise of the cloud is a world where upgrades to Exchange no longer occur every few years. Over the lifespan of Exchange, many customers have migrated with existing mail flow configurations and transport rules from Exchange 2010, to Exchange 2013, and ultimately ending up with Exchange Online in Office 365. Many of our customers reading this may have relied on Exchange versions long before Exchange 2010!
And these configurations and rules may have been implemented at a time where the worst thing that could happen as a result of an overly permissive policy was a spam email getting through. All of that has changed over the past few years.
New attack scenarios
Just as technology has evolved, so have attackers. A lot has changed since we first launched our advanced email security solution in 2015. Since then, email borne attacks have been increasing exponentially both in volumes and complexity. We’ve seen phishing evolve to become only the entry point for much more sophisticated attacks, like business email compromise. We’ve seen attackers pivot away from malware in favor of attacks that help them establish persistence through account compromise and external forwarding. We know that attackers are savvy cybercriminals that will continue to evolve their techniques to take advantage of email users. And one common path they look to exploit are these aging and overly permissive controls or poorly protected pockets within the organization.
New security controls
As the threat landscape evolves, so do our protections. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 employs a multi-layered protection stack that is always being updated to meet the needs of our customers. As we introduce new capabilities and make improvements to existing ones, it’s important that our customers are able to take advantage of these capabilities. That sometimes requires frequent evaluation of settings to ensure the latest protections are turned on. Failing that discipline, it’s possible that the latest protections are not being applied to all users in the organization.
Naturally, these three challenges signify the importance of secure posture. It’s more important than ever that configuring protection against threats is easy to achieve and maintain.
Figure 1: The new and updated layers of the Defender for Office 365 protection stack
So how can we solve this problem?
Over the past many months, we’ve been on an aggressive journey to eliminate misconfigurations across Office 365 – to give customers the right tools to achieve secure posture simply and maintain these configurations over time. There are two broad categories of focus:
Eliminating overly permissive configurations
First, it’s critical that these (often) legacy settings or other inadvertent rules and policies don’t come in the way of us being able to keep users protected.
Preventing inadvertent gaps in protection coverage
Second, we want to make sure that organizations can easily protect all their users with the very best of protections that we offer as and when we make them available. This is critical in a fast-changing threat landscape where we’re constantly innovating to ensure users are protected.
As we’ve approached tackling both classes of problems, we’ve applied the following principles:
- Give customers the awareness and tools to get secure
- Actively help customers ‘get to secure’ through changes in the product
- Help customers with the right tools/guardrails to stay secure.
Through this blog series we’ll show how we’re applying all three principles to help customers.
What we have accomplished so far
We’ve been hard at work over the last year to achieve these goals of raising awareness on configuration gaps and preventing these gaps from inhibiting effective threat protection. I want to share with you some of the enhancements we’ve released.
Preset Security Policies
In order to help customers understand the impact of misconfigurations, we needed to do something fundamental – we had to establish what the ideal configuration looked like. Last year we released preset security policies for Exchange Online Protection and Defender for Office 365. These policies provide a simplified method to apply all of the recommended spam, malware, and phishing policies to users across your organization. Since different organizations have different security needs, we released these presets in multiple variations, and allow customers to apply our standard or our strict presets to their users as they see fit.
We’ve seen tremendous adoption of preset security policies since they launched in 2020, with over 18,000 tenants enabling a preset policy in their environment. Preset security policies not only give customers a choice, but they also help them stay up to speed with changing recommendations as the threat landscape evolves. To learn more about preset security policies, check out our documentation.
Figure 2: Preset policies can be applied to users, groups, or domains.
Configuration Analyzer
Once we’d established the ideal configuration based on our own recommendations, we needed to give customers the ability to identify the instances where their configurations deviate from our recommended settings, and a way to adopt these recommendations easily.
In 2019, we launched ORCA, the Office 365 Recommended Configuration Analyzer. ORCA gives customers a programmatic way to compare their current configuration settings against recommendations via PowerShell. As a result of the overwhelming success of ORCA, last year we built Configuration Analyzer right into the product. Customers can now view policy discrepancies right from within the admin portal, and can even choose to view recommended adjustments to reach our standard or our strict recommendations.
We’ve seen incredible adoption of the configuration analyzer as well, with 290,000 policy changes made across more than 26,000 tenants since we launched the capability last year! With a few clicks, policies can be updated to meet the recommended settings, and as a result, it’s never been easier to keep email security configurations up to date. Learn more about configuration analyzer here.
Figure 3: Configuration Analyzer shows policies that do not meet our recommended settings.
Overrides Reports and Alerts
You’ll hear us refer to overrides frequently throughout this series. We define overrides as tenant level or user level configurations that instruct Office 365 to deliver mail even when the system has determined that the message is suspicious or contains malicious content. Examples of overrides could be an Exchange transport rule that bypasses filtering for a specific range of IP addresses, or a user level policy like an allowed sender or domain at the mailbox level.
The thing to understand about overrides is that they represent scenarios where policies are properly configured, but other settings have neutralized their effect. It’s important that we allow organizations to customize their Office 365 environment to meet their needs, but that doesn’t mean we feel comfortable allowing malicious content like malware or phish to land in the inbox of users.
We’ve added a view to the Threat protection status report that allows you to view overrides across your environment. By filtering the report to view data by Message Override, you can view overrides over time by type of override, like Exchange transport rule or user safe sender, and you can dig deeper in the details table to identify the causes of these overrides.
Figure 4: The Threat protection status report shows overrides by type and date
What comes next?
We’ve shared in this blog the steps we’ve taken to shed light on configuration gaps, and to help customers understand the impact configurations have on their environment. In the next blog, we will share details about the capabilities we are building to eliminate the legacy override problem, and what you can do to minimize the impact these overrides have on security posture.
Do you have questions or feedback about Microsoft Defender for Office 365? Engage with the community and Microsoft experts in the Defender for Office 365 forum.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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