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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 15 – Do not expire passwords

Research has found that when periodic password resets are enforced, passwords become less secure. Users tend to pick a weaker password and vary it slightly for each reset. If a user creates a strong password (long, complex and without any pragmatic words present) it should remain just as strong in 60 days as it is today. It is Microsoft’s official security position to not expire passwords periodically without a specific reason, and recommends that cloud-only tenants set the password policy… 

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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 12 – Turn on customer lockbox feature

Turning on the customer lockbox feature requires that approval is obtained for data center operations that grants a Microsoft employee direct access to your content. Access may be needed by Microsoft support engineers if an issue arises. There’s an expiration time on the request and content access is removed after the support engineer has fixed the issue. Today we are going to talk about the Customer Lockbox feature in Office 365. Some privacy regulations like HIPAA and FEDRAMP require procedures… 

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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 08 – Use Cloud App Security to detect anomalous behavior

Cloud App Security anomaly detection policies provide User & Entity Behavior analytics (UEBA) and advanced threat detection across your cloud environment. Today we take a look at Cloud App Security. I recently wrote a blog about the new activity policies in Cloud App Security, so if your organization uses Teams, you should definitely take a look a that one. The improvement action we’re talking about has no user impact and might no increase your score right away. But if you… 

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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 06 – Enable policy to block legacy authentication

Today, most compromising sign-in attempts come from legacy authentication. Older office clients such as Office 2010 don’t support modern authentication and use legacy protocols such as IMAP, SMTP, and POP3. Legacy authentication does not support multi-factor authentication (MFA). Even if an MFA policy is configured in your environment, bad actors can bypass these enforcements through legacy protocols. In this blog post, we take a look at legacy authentication and how to block it on your tenant. Legacy protocols are not… 

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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 04 – Ensure all users can complete multi-factor authentication for secure access

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) helps protect devices and data that are accessible to these users. Adding more authentication methods, such as the Microsoft Authenticator app or a phone number, increases the level of protection if one factor is compromised. In this blog post, we take a look at the different ways to make sure that your users can register for multi-factor authentication. Enabling Multi-Factor Authentication is a no-brainer giving the fact that your identity is your key to almost all your… 

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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 02 – Require MFA for administrative roles

Require MFA for administrative roles Requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all administrative roles makes it harder for attackers to access accounts. Administrative roles have higher permissions than typical users. If any of those accounts are compromised, critical devices and data is open to attack. In this post, we take a look at enabling MFA for your administrators. As stated in the description, users with administrative roles are interesting targets for hackers. Of course, it is recommended to enable MFA for… 

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Microsoft Secure Score Series – 01 – What is Microsoft Secure Score?

What is Microsoft Secure Score? Microsoft Secure Score offers a list of actions and recommendations to strengthen your security on your Office 365 workloads. Each completed action will impact your overall score. It covers SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Information Protection, Azure AD, Microsoft Defender ATP, and Cloud App Security among other things. It is not 100% waterproof, but it will give you a great baseline to start with. It will help you to protect your environment… 

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