Forum Discussion

StephanGee's avatar
StephanGee
Steel Contributor
Apr 22, 2020

Phishing Filter - M365 ATP - false positives blocked or clear spam messages get into inbox.

Hi everyone,

 

we are having problems with our filter. We used Sophos UTM before but switched our MX now to M365 as there are 99% of the mailboxes.

But we don't really get the logic behind the filtering service.

Yesterday a mail got through that was clearly send from outside of Office365 with the "from" mailadress of our CEO which got straight to inbox. We have setup SPF!

Also those fake Office365 always get through. Even with dynamite phishing.

Are there best practices available for setting this up?

 

Some examples which should go straight to junk or quarantine.

Do you other IT Pros have similar experiences?

 

Best regards

Stephan

 

 

12 Replies

  • StephanGee's avatar
    StephanGee
    Steel Contributor

    I have to push it back up.

    Literally any newsletter is landing now in quarantine due to Phish. This is an authentication result of one of them:

    spf=pass (sender IP is 185.71.127.155) smtp.mailfrom=u106878.rmh1.net; mycompany.com; dkim=pass (signature was verified) header.d=rmh6.net;mycompany.com; dmarc=fail action=none header.from=amcham.de;compauth=fail reason=001

     

    SPF right, DKIM pass. 

    Why not send this mail into "Junk" but into "Quarantine" where to user has to release it?

    Spam Level is "5" for this. 

    This takes up a lot of time ... my colleague also went through some support calls but this is just a waste of time.

    "It is what it is"

  • Best thing to do here is open a support case and work with the engineer to find out why the message was not blocked.

    • StephanGee's avatar
      StephanGee
      Steel Contributor

      VasilMichev 

      We implemented all best practices (if suitable).

      Now "internal mails" to external are filtered as SPAM (highest number 9).

      How can internal mail be marked as spam? They are normal responses to mails.

       

      These are filtered - but mails like these still coming through:

      At this moment our Sophos UTM was a better filter than Office ATP - as we needed about 20% of the resources to manage it.

      • StephanGee's avatar
        StephanGee
        Steel Contributor

        @Thijs LecomteStephanGee

        Is there any possibility to check how the SPAM score was calculated?

         

        eg.

        Score starts at 5

        SPF ok -1 points

        DKIM passed -1 Point 

        20 mails in the past 1h +1

        = 4

         

        ?

         

    • StephanGee's avatar
      StephanGee
      Steel Contributor

      VasilMichev 

      Yes i think i will do that. Because what Message Analyzer says - i would say 100% Junk. MS says -> straight to Inbox

       

  • Thijs Lecomte's avatar
    Thijs Lecomte
    Bronze Contributor
    Have you verified from the mail that was sent out from the CEO?
    have you checked headers to see where it was sent and why it might have passed your spam filter?

    I assume you haven't whitelisted your own domain?


    I highly recommend using the ORCA module to verify that your ATP is setup according best practices.
    https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/ORCA/1.6.3
    • StephanGee's avatar
      StephanGee
      Steel Contributor

      Thijs Lecomte 

      Hi. Thanks for your quick email. 

      I checked the message header and it was received from an internet provider (not ours) from Germany. So it should have been blocked.

      We did not add our domain on the allowed list ( i checked 😉 ) and the sender ip is not in our allowed IP list in the mail rule.

       

      Thanks for the tip with ORCA. I will check this tool.

       

      ---

      Cannot install it on my Admin machine though

      Name : ConsoleHost
      Version : 5.1.14409.1018

       

      Can be installed on my Win 1909 machine (but from there i am not allowed to perform this 😉 )

       

      Error:

      WARNING: Source Location 'https://www.powershellgallery.com/api/v2/package/ORCA/1.6.3' is not valid.
      PackageManagement\Install-Package : Package 'ORCA' failed to download.