Microsoft 365 Security Assessment Services
Identify and address critical security gaps in your Microsoft 365 tenant before attackers exploit misconfigured conditional access policies, excessive admin privileges, and legacy authentication protocols across Exchange Online, SharePoint, and Azure Active Directory.
Cyphere’s Microsoft 365 Security Risk Assessment delivers a review of tenant configuration, identity and access controls, email security posture, and DLP settings. Our consultants produce a prioritised remediation roadmap aligned with Microsoft Secure Score and recognised frameworks.
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What is Microsoft Office 365 Security Assessment?
Microsoft 365 Security Assessment is a technical risk assessment which is thorough evaluation of your Office 365 environment, designed to identify potential vulnerabilities and ensure your data is protected. It goes beyond basic configurations, examining everything from user access and permissions to data loss prevention policies and threat detection settings. This assessment helps you understand your current security posture, pinpoint areas for improvement, and ultimately, safeguard your valuable business information.
Importance of Office 365 Security Assessment
Office 365 is a powerful tool that provides all sorts of business services from email to cloud storage, and it’s much more than just another productivity suite.
It provides more than just email and office productivity tools – with over 200 million active users worldwide who are constantly growing their products’ capabilities there really isn’t much missing when compared to Microsoft on-premises solutions (such as Exchange Server).
Is office 365 email secure?
Whether it’s applications, devices or storage including backups, these are the three main categories where email data resides. It’s important to understand the cloud model concept. Our Microsoft 365 security assesses a number of areas including configuration assessment against the industry security benchmarks such as CIS and Microsoft 365 security best practices. Microsoft Office offers this product as part of a shared responsibility model in cloud computing. This means:
Cloud provider is responsible for security of the cloud Tenant or organisation client is responsible for security in the cloud
Common Office 365 Security Risks and Misconfigurations
- Incorrect System Access Controls: As we often find in our Office 365 pentests, misconfigured user access controls are a major vulnerability. This can expose businesses to a wide range of threats, making it easier for unauthorised access.
- Lack of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Administrator Accounts: This is a surprisingly common misconfiguration. Without securely configured MFA, administrator accounts are highly vulnerable to compromise, giving attackers significant control over your Office 365 environment.
- Password Sync Issues: Insecurely configured password synchronization can create security loopholes, especially if on-premises Active Directory isn’t secured effectively.
- Missing Mailbox Auditing: Without proper mailbox auditing, it’s difficult to track user activity and detect suspicious behavior within mailboxes, hindering incident response and investigations.
- Phishing Attacks: These remain a significant threat, exploiting human error to gain access to credentials and sensitive data.
- Exploitable Product Vulnerabilities: Even the platform itself can have vulnerabilities, as seen with recent issues like improper validation (CVE-2020-16875) and smart bypass problems (CVE-2020-171324), which increase the attack surface for Office 365 users.
This thorough Office 365 security review includes vendor cyber security best practices including but not limited to the following security review areas:
- Accounts and authentication policies
- Email cyber security configuration review and Exchange Online Protection
- Mobile Device Management Areas
- Data and secure storage management
- Application permissions
- Auditing configuration & monitoring controls
- O365 Active Directory related security concerns
CIS Controls, The Foundation For Office 365 Risk Assessment
We review security settings to restrict unauthorised access, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), conditional access policies, and identity protection.
We assess secure configurations for email, including anti-phishing, anti-malware, spam filtering, and transport rules.
We review secure configurations for file sharing and collaboration, including external sharing settings, access controls, and data loss prevention (DLP) policies.
We assess security settings for Teams, including guest access, meeting policies, and data governance.
We review secure configurations for mobile device management, including device compliance policies, app protection policies, and conditional access.
We review configurations for logging, alerting, and auditing to ensure adequate monitoring and detection of suspicious activity.
Benefits of Microsoft 365 Security Assessment
An Office 365 security assessment can help you ensure that your secure email strategy is effective by identifying gaps in your security posture and providing recommendations for improvement.
An Office 365 security assessment can help you validate the effectiveness of your Office 365 security controls by testing them against known vulnerabilities and best practices.
An Office 365 security assessment can help you ensure that you are using strong authentication and data encryption practices by reviewing your current security practices and providing recommendations for improvement. It is advised to enable multi-factor authentication.
An Office 365 security assessment can help you ensure that you have sufficient logging and monitoring to detect and respond to cybersecurity incidents quickly and effectively.
An Office 365 security assessment can help you review user permissions and add-ons to ensure that users only have access to the resources they need and that add-ons are not posing a security risk.
An Office 365 security assessment can help you minimise the chances of account takeover cyberattacks and ransomware by identifying and addressing any security vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit.
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"Highly recommend Cyphere for pen testing. The recommendations in the report were comprehensive and communicated so that technical and non-technical members of the team could follow them."
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"Cyphere were great in both carrying out our penetration testing and taking us through the results and remediation steps. We would gladly use them for future projects.
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"We had penetration tests service for PCI DSS compliance program from the Cyphere! Very professional, efficient communication, great findings that improved our system security posture! Highly recommended!
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"Harman and the team at Cyphere truly are experts in their field and provide an outstanding service! Always going above and beyond to exceed customer expectations.
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I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
Skilled Team
I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
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Cyphere undertook pen testing for us recently. The process was very smooth, and the team were flexible in working around our constraints. The report was clear, actionable and perceptive.
Outstanding Cybersecurity Partner
Cyphere has been outstanding partner to our agency. I've tried many in the past but they have been extremely meticulous in getting our systems secured.
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Cyphere has been an excellent partner and helped us achieve our goals with a great level of expertise, communication and helpfulness making the whole process easy to understand and complete.
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Harman and his team were excellent throughout, they understood and completed the tasks (external penetration test) within tight deadlines to a high standard.
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I had an amazing experience working with Cyphere! Their communication was top-notch, making the entire process smooth and efficient. I found their team to be incredibly responsive and attentive to my needs.
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Worked with team at Cyphere for a cyber security assessment, gap analysis etc. The team has delivered a very professional, efficient service at all stages of the process to date.
Follow best Microsoft 365 security practices
o365 security assessment findings are mostly around areas described under common misconfiguration. As a standard best practice checklist, an Office 365 installation should follow the following areas:
- Unified Audit Logging
- Multi-Factor Authentication
- Privileged accounts management
- Protecting against malware using features based on subscriptions such as anti-phishing, auto-forwarding, ATP safe attachments and ATP safe links.
Microsoft Office 365 provides cloud resources, securing it is your responsibility.
Office 365 Security Assessment Methodology
Our pentesting office 365 approach involves benchmark-based Office 365 configuration assessment as well as standard audit extended to include cloud environments, and optional add-ons such as cloud services Teams and Onedrive. An important element is to also make use of the cloud-specific cyber security risks reported under compliance center. We support industry-leading testing standards and methodologies for o365 pentesting:
- OWASP
- Mitre Att&ck Framework
- NIST SP 800-115
Generally, these include checks on the use of higher privilege administrator accounts, use of MFA, password policy, IAM policies, access keys, conditional access policies, credentials, administrator account usage policies and other security features.
Authentication and authorisation problems are prevalent cyber security risks and compliance centre issues that come in an Office 365 review.
This area in pentesting Office 365 involves checks around network security controls such as ingress, egress rulesets, flow logging, traffic restrictions, and least access privileges.
This phase covers API configuration, log file validation, encryption, access checks, and configuration management for account security and monitoring.
The monitoring phase is one of the critical tasks responsible for alerting relevant contacts during an incident. This involves reliance on the logging and related configuration parameters to ensure the right metric filters are in place.
Why Cyphere for Office 365 security review?
Our team of experts has deep knowledge of Office 365 security and has experience conducting CREST penetration testing and security assessments for various security regulations.
Our comprehensive security assessments cover all aspects of your Office 365 environment and related cloud services, including security controls, user permissions, and add-ons. Data breaches are far too common related to email accounts weaknesses, therefore, proactive approach is the only way forward.
Our security assessments provide actionable recommendations for improving your Office 365 security posture.
We are committed to providing our customers with the highest quality of service. We will work with you to understand your specific needs and provide you with a customised solution.
Post Microsoft 365 Security Assessment Support
At Cyphere, our commitment extends beyond simply delivering your Microsoft Office 365 security assessment. We understand that navigating the remediation process can be complex, which is why we provide comprehensive post-assessment support.
We’re here to help you:
- Plan Risk Remediation: We’ll work with you to develop a prioritised remediation plan, outlining the steps needed to address identified vulnerabilities.
- Triage Risks: We’ll help you understand the severity of each risk and provide guidance on how to effectively triage and address them.
- Provide Expert Guidance: Cyphere team is available to answer your questions and provide expert advice throughout the remediation process.
- Deliver Tailored Debriefs: We offer debriefs tailored to both technical and functional audiences, ensuring everyone understands the findings and the necessary actions.
Our goal is to ensure you feel supported every step of the way, empowering you to effectively strengthen your Microsoft 365 security posture.