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Ask CyberGuru: Do I need to read the Office 365 Message centre emails?

cyberguru Support April 29, 2019April 24, 2019Ask CyberGuru, Message Center, Message Centre, Microsoft, Microsoft 365, Office 365

In this month’s Ask CyberGuru, we are asked “Do I need to read the Office 365 Message centre emails?, I seem to get them all of the time and they have no relevance to me?”.

As part of your Office 365 subscription, there are often changes, including new features, updates and products during the year. As part of this service, Microsoft send regular updates via email and through the Office 365 Message Centre. This message centre is to provide you with awareness of new features before they are introduced. You can read about these and correlate these to the roadmap, as well as how it will impact you, as well as what you can do to prepare for the change.

One of the recent emails sent referred to the new Microsoft 365 admin center becoming the common entry point for managing all your Microsoft 365 services. It makes mention that it is applicable to all clients. Depending on the feature, you may not be affected, or required to take any action but would recommend reviewing these briefly and contacting us if you have any questions or concerns.

As many of clients would be aware, we provide updates through our newsletter, blog as well during onsite or remote visits with you. We are always happy to be your reference point for new Office 365 features, however, Microsoft share these with you so that you can prepare for these if required. If you have too many emails, you can choose to set a rule to move these to a folder for later reference or unsubscribe altogether.

If you have a question you would like to ask CyberGuru, please contact us.

Happy Easter

cyberguru Announcements April 15, 2019April 24, 20192019, Easter, Happy

Reporting spam email to Microsoft with the Report Message add-in for Outlook

cyberguru Support April 8, 2019April 8, 2019junk, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 365;, Microsoft Outlook, not junk, Office 365, Outlook, phishing, Report Message add-in for Outlook, spam

Whilst the inbuilt spam and malware filtering built in to Microsoft Office 365 has considerably reduced the amount of unwanted spam email you receive in your email account, a small amount spam can still arrive, or an email may be mistakenly marked as junk when in fact it is legitimate. Fortunately, Microsoft has an addon you can use to further reduce the amount of spam or stop legitimate emails from being marked as junk by reporting this back to them.

Known as the Report Message add-in for Outlook, it enables you to report emails using one of three categories:

Junk is generally referred to as spam and are unwanted senders that may be advertising their products or services to you.
Phishing is a person or organisation claiming to be someone else to seek your personal information. The email may appear to be legitimate but in fact is not.
Not junk is a legitimate email which has been misclassified as Junk.

The Report Message add-in for Outlook can be used on both Outlook and Outlook on the web and enables you to report a message as either junk, phishing or not junk. You can also choose to report the message to Microsoft for further review and investigation.

We encourage our clients who are experiencing spam issues to look at implementing this as part of their cyber security strategy.

For more information and how to set this up, please feel free to contact us.

Don’t be an April Fool – Watch out for business email compromise!

cyberguru Support April 1, 2019April 24, 20191 April, April Fool, April Fools, April Fools' Day, BEC, Business Email Compromise, phishing, scams

We have seen an increasing number of reports for business email compromise affecting organisations, so we are calling on everyone not to be an April fool!

“Business email compromise” is a where a hacker gains access to a corporate email account by pretending to be a figure such as a business owner, manager or other decision maker to defraud the organisations or its employees, customers or suppliers of money.

Whilst these scams targeted businesses working with suppliers and businesses that regularly make electronic payments in the past, small businesses and not-for-profit organisations are no longer immune.

We are aware of several cases where a business owner was compromised through a fake email which included a link to download a file from SharePoint or Google Drive location.

Business email compromise - Example of fake Microsoft Office 365 email — Business email compromise – Example of fake Microsoft Office 365 email

In order to download the file, the owner was required to login to what appeared to be a genuine Microsoft or Google sign in page, but was actually fake. Once the account details were entered they were saved and sent to the hacker.

The hacker then used these details to log in and review the contents of the business owner’s email, often accessing their email or address book, to identify contacts from their business, and use their email to send a compromised email to either the accounts department or the business’s clients.

Business email compromise - Example of fake Energy Australia invoice — Business email compromise – Example of fake Energy Australia invoice

Business email compromise - Example of fake ASIC invoice — Business email compromise – Example of fake ASIC invoice

The emails sent to accounts and/or clients contain a fictious invoice requesting payment or another fake link to a Microsoft or Google login page as well, then both the CEO and accounts have been compromised.

In some cases, once the scammer had control of the email account used they set up rules to forward incoming email to an external email address of the hacker, automatically delete all email coming the inbox and remove the contents of the current inbox altogether so the account holder was unaware the new email had ever been received.

To protect yourself from such scams, we strongly suggest reviewing your protection strategies including staff education and training before you are compromised. If you receive an email from someone and are required to login to access a document or invoice and you weren’t expecting it, call the sender to confirm it is legitimate. It is important to quickly get onto it.

CyberGuru provides a range of services including consulting, support and training to protect against cyber threats such as these. If we can be of assistance, please contact us.