Microsoft Teams is becoming an integral part of the company's strategy when it comes to online collaboration and communication, both in personal and professional capacities. The Redmond firm regularly updates it with new features and is also providing deeper integration for the software in Windows 11. Now, it has introduced more protections against phishing in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft says that Teams is being heavily used in organizations and based on its surveys and statistics from the past 18 months, it can confidently say that hybrid work is here to stay. As such, it has become essential to provide companies with the latest security protections. To that end, Microsoft will now utilize Safe Links in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to protect Teams users from phishing attacks that use malicious URLs.
Safe Links provides time-of-click validation of URLs to scan URLs once a user clicks on them, and then issue a warning if it is malicious in nature. Microsoft says that this is an extremely important security check because according to its findings, attackers utilize over two million unique URL-based payloads each month, and over 100 million phishing emails are detected and blocked by the company's systems.
While Safe Links sounds simple on paper, the fact that it provides time-of-click scanning is quite important. This is because attackers sometimes send seemingly safe URLs to a target and then have them redirect to malicious websites after being clicked on. This is why a pre-click scan alone is not enough.
Safe Links is already available in Microsoft 365 apps on desktop, phone, and online and is also present in emails. Today, it is making its way to Microsoft Teams for customers who use Microsoft Defender for Office 365. IT admins can head over to the portal here to configure Safe Links policies for their organization.
