Hackers Targeting Office 365 Accounts – Are You Backed Up?

Hackers Targeting Office 365 Accounts

Barracuda released a report that stated 29% of organizations had their Office 365 accounts compromised in March 2019 alone. Throughout the month, more than 1.5 MILLION malicious emails were sent from accounts around the world. Unfortunately, this beloved productivity suite seems to be at ever-increasing risk for compromise. How are hackers getting into accounts? There’s a few methods:

1. Testing for old passwords or reused passwords from different services
2. Infiltrating via web and business applications that were already hacked
3. Performing a “brute-force” attack on the account

Once they manage to get inside, they lurk on the email account for a while. This is done to learn about the organization, its sensitive information, and essentially, anything they can use to make the attack even more damaging – from gathering information to perform what’s known as CEO fraud to setting up rules to delete traces of activity.

We saw the aftermath of an attack recently. A local business in Florida called us because their entire SharePoint was encrypted after a hacker managed to get through the system. They were surprised to find that although there is redundancy built into Office 365, there is no form of backups to recover.

Office 365 May Provide a High Degree of Security, But It Doesn’t Provide Automatic Backups to Keep Your Data Recoverable…

Office 365 is a fantastic platform for communication and collaboration – offering a bundle of services designed for many common workplace functions. It’s quite secure with over 180 MILLION users, and fortunately, it has a proven-track record for optimal performance. However, it’s still up to the users to make sure they’re keeping their data safe and recoverable. This is where a third-party backup service comes in handy.

Naturally, most people are shocked to find out that despite the many data security features, there is no backup. Office 365 offers unlimited archiving and very large storage containers to help you store a massive amount of information, and for sensitive data, there are various features available:

1. Version history
2. Legal hold
3. Recycle bins
4. Retention policies
5. Azure information protection

So why do you need a third-party backup solution? The answer is simple… Microsoft does keep your data safe as much as possible, but they can’t protect you from your own users or lack of awareness in terms of cybersecurity. There are quite a few scenarios wherein having a third-party backup solution is essential:

• Accidental file deletion as the recycle bin only protects you for so long before it’s deleted.
• Ransomware attacks as version history can be an incredibly time-consuming process and doesn’t always protect you.
• Compliance efforts as many industry-specific regulations require a specific backup process that’s not covered.

Alltek Provides Office 365 Backup That Keeps You Prepared for Any Instance of Loss or Deletion.

Our team of technology professionals offers a complete solution that supports all of the workloads within Office 365, including Exchange, SharePoint,Teams, and OneDrive. We ensure your files are backed up multiple times per day with various options available in regards to how long data must be stored. In addition, we can configure our backup solution to meet all of your compliance requirements.

Call 863-709-0709 Now to Speak with One of Our Technology Professionals About Office 365 Backup.