Office 365 seeks to stop over 8 million business email phishing attempts with new low miss rate

2 min. read

Published on October 17, 2018

published on October 17, 2018

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Microsoft has released its report on Office 365’s phishing miss rate. According to their own statistics, the company has blocked approximately 5 billion phishing attempts on Office 365. This is though the analyzation of more than 400 billion emails the company says it scans each month.

The Redmond giant admitted in their blog post that when comparing their email account service with others, the company’s blocking of phishing emails wasn’t close to the high of other major email vendors during last year.

Microsoft show's how its miss rate for phishing emails was relatively high between November 2017 and January 2018 — Microsoft show’s how its miss rate for phishing emails was relatively high between November 2017 and January 2018

This led to the company to hire thousands of security experts and to put in an annual $1 billion budget for cybersecurity protection. Enhancements include the detection of domain spoofing and display name impersonation as well blocking of links the service considers to be unsafe. The company really goes in depth in their post.

Microsoft outlines some of the types of phishing attempts it protects Office 365 users from.

After a few months of improvement, the tech giant’s new statistics show that their security enhancements really paid off, and that their phishing miss rate was much lower than that of their leading competitors (although they didn’t specify which competitors were measured). Safe Links, the company’s URL link scanning service for Outlook, has protected users against 7 billion potential malicious links in 2018 alone.

Microsoft's new graft showing how Microsoft's phish-attempt blocking is now leading its competitors by a significant margin. — Microsoft’s new graph showing how Microsoft’s phish-attempt blocking is now leading its competitors by a significant margin.

Have you noticed improvement of Outlook’s phish-blocking when subscribed to Office 365? You thoughts are welcome in the comment box below.

Radu Tyrsina

Radu Tyrsina has been a Windows fan ever since he got his first PC, a Pentium III (a monster at that time). For most of the kids of his age, the Internet was an amazing way to play and communicate with others, but he was deeply impressed by the flow of information and how easily you can find anything on the web. Prior to founding Windows Report, this particular curiosity about digital content enabled him to grow a number of sites that helped hundreds of millions reach faster the answer they're looking for.