There are known attacks against Office 365 that can compromise associated email accounts. Basically, hackers take over someone else’s email account through Office 365. Hackers may send out spam to directly to attack an individual or company. Another common attack is to contact a company’s customers while impersonating high-level employees to get the customer to reroute financial transactions or to confirm/send sensitive data to the hackers.
One of the main symptoms of a compromised email account in Office 365 may include server side rules that redirect email into a Deleted Items folder or other folders like the Junk folder or the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feed folder. These emails often go unseen by the actual email account user and permit the hackers access to information in the incoming emails.
Fortunately, there are some preventative steps that can be taken to reduce the ability of hackers to compromise via Office 365. The main security implementation that we highly recommend is to enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all Office 365 accounts. There are additional settings and configurations Vermont Panurgy can assist you with to log and audit account usage, which will better enable us to track any attempted hacks.
If you use Office 365, please contact us to make sure you are protected again such attacks. We are here to answer any questions or concerns you may have.