Microsoft Defender for Office 365 receives highest award in SE Labs Enterprise Email Security Services test

In today’s evolving threat landscape, email represents the primary attack vector for cybercrime, making effective email protection a key component of any security strategy.¹

In Q1 2022, Microsoft participated in an evaluation of email security solutions, carried out by SE labs—a testing lab focused on assessing the efficacy of security solutions. In their latest Enterprise Email Security Services test, they evaluated email security vendors against a range of real-world email attack scenarios.

Today we are excited to share that Microsoft received an AAA Protection Award for Microsoft Defender for Office 365, the highest possible award that vendors can achieve in this test.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps organizations protect against advanced threats including phishing and business email compromise. It provides a wide range of email protection capabilities including protection from impersonation, spoofing, as well as holistic attack campaign views, using machine learning and other heuristics to identify phishing attacks across the entire organization.

Another core component of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is user training. Even at Microsoft, we continuously run exercises to educate our employees and senior leaders to raise their awareness to real-life phishing attacks, using the attack simulation training capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

In the SE labs report, Microsoft received a total score of 89 percent based on the evaluation of two key criteria:

• 97 percent of emails that contained threats were blocked
• 73 percent of legitimate email was correctly identified

The near-perfect score on containing threats demonstrates the industry-leading email security protection we provide and the effectiveness by which Microsoft Defender for Office 365 can protect customers from business email compromise. At the same time, the slightly lower score around legitimate email is due to the strong focus on executive accounts in the test, for which Microsoft configured an enhanced level of protection based on insights and best practices for how organizations actually use the service. This resulted in more blocked mail, but that we believe is appropriately cautious.

The Microsoft Defender for Office 365 engine is always learning from email traffic in the environment and adjusting as a result, but the highly configurable nature of Exchange Online also allows customers to tailor their experience. While in this test, we tailored the controls to the highest level of available protections, admins have a wide range of options to customize the delivery sensitivity and their preferred level of tolerance for potentially unwanted email.

The SE labs report validates that Microsoft Defender for Office 365, part of Microsoft Defender 365, is a leading choice for email protection, used by corporations worldwide. To learn more about how some customers are using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 today, read this customer story from St. Luke’s.

Microsoft continues to invest heavily to protect organizations from phishing and business email compromise with the backing of hundreds of researchers, engineers, and threat intelligence insights from billions of pieces of mail that Microsoft processes every single day and directly inform our machine learning engines.

Trust Microsoft’s XDR solution for protection against threats across Office 365 and more 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 provides comprehensive coverage, both through the lifecycle of an attack and across email and collaboration tools like email, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.

These capabilities are part of Microsoft’s extended detection and response (XDR) solution Microsoft 365 Defender, which helps organizations secure their users with integrated threat protection, detection, and response across endpoints, email, identities, applications, and data.

To take advantage of our industry-leading protection in your environment, get started today!

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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¹Internet Crime Report 2020, Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2020.