Brian Reid – Microsoft 365 Subject Matter Expert

Category: malware

  • Direct Send – What It Is, and What It Isn’t

    Direct Send – What It Is, and What It Isn’t

    There are a number of posts online panicking about “Direct Send” and how its the worst thing ever. These appear to have started following Microsoft’s publication of an article on how to turn it off – but lots of the articles get the basic principles wrong and therefore provide poor and inaccurate advice. The blog…

  • Blocking More Obvious Phish – Attachment Filtering

    Blocking More Obvious Phish – Attachment Filtering

    One relatively easy way to block some categories of phishing email is to block the attachment type that is sent with some of these messages. For example, I have had a few of these recently: Hovering over the attachment I see the filename, and it ends .shtml. This attachment is for server-side HTML (SSI includes…

  • Unexpected Security and Compliance Center Changes

    In the last few days the layout of the Security and Compliance Center with regard to the Threat Management section appears to have changed. In the middle of the week just gone, and for a long while previously, you could access Mail Filtering, Anti-malware, and DKIM from Security and Compliance > Threat Management and see…

  • How To Run an Advanced Threat Protection Proof of Concept

    I put the following post together as I was asked this question from Microsoft themselves! This post covers what you need to put in place, and how you can test some of it (as testing the blocking of malware involves sending malware first!) First, lets take a look at the Advanced Threat Protection steps for…

  • Malware Filter Policy Updates in Office 365

    Updated October 2024 In March 2017 I wrote a blog post that showed how to take the attachment filter list from Edge Server and add those attachment block types to EOP, as EOP had a very small list of attachments. In June 2017 in one of my client tenants I noticed this precanned list of…

  • Installing and Updating Microsoft AntiMalware in Azure

    The Microsoft AntiMalware agent is a virtual machine extension in Azure that adds support for build in antimalware management within your virtual machines hosted in Azure. The agent can be added easily when you are creating a new VM, which we will show first below using the resource manager model, but also can be added…

  • Getting Started with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

    Announced a few months ago, Advanced Threat Protection became generally available on 1st June. I have been involved with trialling this product during the beta and so I thought I would note down a few thoughts on setting this up and what to expect now that it is publicly available. Advanced Threat Protection is an…

  • Updating Exchange 2013 Anti-Malware Agent From A Non-Internet Connected Server

    In Forefront Protection for Exchange (now discontinued) for Exchange 2010 it was possible to run the script at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2292741 to download the signatures and scan engines when the server did not have a direct connection to the download site at forefrontdl.microsoft.com. To achieve the same with Exchange 2013 and the built-in anti-malware transport agent you…