A new alert feature is being developed by Microsoft that will notify companies when an employee has been targeted by a hacker from another nation. The alerts will be added to the Microsoft Defender for Office 365 dashboard (formerly Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection).
The feature was added on Saturday to the Microsoft 365 roadmap.
The idea behind the feature is based on previous research. Since 2016, Microsoft has been tracking government-backed hacking groups and the attacks they orchestrate against Microsoft email accounts.
If a user is targeted or compromised by such an attack, Microsoft sends them an email about the incident, along with basic advice to follow to secure their inbox and devices .
Microsoft said in 2019 that it typically notifies about 10,000 users annually about national-level attacks.
However, the problem with this notification process is that it relies on users reading the email and taking appropriate action, which is not always the case. Users don’t read their emails every day, or it can sometimes take hours for a user to receive the notification when they have a large inbox, giving attackers to steal sensitive documents.
For organizations that are Microsoft Office 365 customers, the OS maker now plans to add these alerts to the Microsoft Defender for Office 365 dashboard, the cloud- scans a company's Office 365 accounts for threats.
This way, the alert will appear simultaneously to system administrators and security teams, who can take immediate action by personally calling affected employees, resetting their email account passwords, resetting other internal passwords, or initiating a broader security audit.
The company expects to have this feature ready by the end of the month. In addition to Microsoft, which is doing this for Microsoft Outlook, similar alerts for nationwide attacks are also available for Yahoo, public Gmail accounts, and G Suite accounts. Facebook is also warning users of government hacker attacks against social media accounts.
