
That’s good, but it’s even better when tenants take hold of their own destiny and insist on MFA for all accounts. Microsoft says that enforcing Security Defaults for more tenants will offer protection to another 60 million accounts. Possibly even worse, only 34.15% of Azure AD accounts holding administrative roles are MFA-enabled. According to Alex Weinert, Microsoft VP for Identity Security, only 26.64% of Azure AD user accounts are MFA-enabled (September 2022). Even so, the curious thing is that the percentage of Microsoft 365 accounts protected by MFA is not growing as strongly as it should. In 2019, Microsoft said that MFA blocks 99.9% of account compromises. It would be nice if organizations then enforced multi-factor authentication (MFA) to make probing even more difficult. Combined with authentication policies, tenants should be able to deny attackers the opportunity to reap a rich harvest of account information gained through attacks like password sprays. Microsoft has done its best to remove a major source of account compromise (basic authentication for email protocols) from Exchange Online.

Register Today! Increase MFA Usage and Dump SMS Challenges TEC Talk: Five Things Microsoft 365 Security Administrators Should Do in 2023ĭon't miss Tony Redmond's free TEC Talk on this topic on March 23rd at 11:00 am EST. But the likelihood is that most tenants can improve their security posture, so treat this as a prompt to review and improve your arrangements. You might already be progressing in the five areas described below. Tenants must continually up their security game to stay ahead of new attack vectors.

Another of Microsoft’s laws is “Attackers don’t care.” In other words, attackers will keep on trying new ways to compromise tenants.


In either case, it’s wise to take the time to set some goals for 2023 to improve Microsoft 365 security and make your tenant harder for attackers to compromise.Īs Microsoft says in its ten immutable laws of cybersecurity, “Not keeping up is falling behind.” That’s why it’s important to look at infrastructures like Microsoft 365 annually to identify areas where improvements can be made. Microsoft 365 tenants might have a dedicated individual to manage security for the organization, or security might just be one of the multitudes of tasks assigned to the tenant administrators. Consider Security During PowerShell UpgradesĪs time advances, new threats, and challenges develop across the technology spectrum.Increase MFA Usage and Dump SMS Challenges.
