Published by Gbaf News
Posted on July 12, 2018
6 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Cybersecurity leader enables organizations to detect, investigate, and remediate Microsoft Office 365 credential theft, mitigating financial and data loss
Proofpoint, Inc., (NASDAQ: PFPT),a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, today announced the availability of Proofpoint Cloud Account Defense (CAD) to detect and proactively protect Microsoft Office 365 accounts, preventing attackers from causing financial and data loss.
Cybercriminals have pioneered a new way to compromise corporate email systems, this time by using brute force attacks to steal Microsoft Office 365 login credentials of corporate users and then logging in as an imposter on the system. These new hacking techniques work even if the company has deployed single sign on or multi-factor authentication (MFA) as part of their security system. Once the hacker has logged in masquerading as a real employee, they have a wide spectrum of choices while operating within a corporation’s email instance to cause financial harm and data loss. Available today, the new Proofpoint CAD solution helps organizations detect, investigate, and remediate these Microsoft Office 365 compromises.
CAD provides comprehensive user-centric visibility necessary to detect and investigate compromised accounts and thwart email account compromise (EAC) credential theft tactics including credential reuse, brute force attacks, and credential-stealing malware. EAC tactics, combined with business email compromise (BEC) social engineering, are hallmarks of groups like the 70+ cybercriminals arrested during the recent Operation Wire Wire federal effort that recovered approximately $14 million in lost funds.
“It only takes one compromised Microsoft Office 365 account to unlock access to a virtual goldmine of confidential data and access—and we have seen a major increase in organizations losing both money and data to these attacks,” said Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of Cybersecurity Strategy for Proofpoint. “Once an attacker compromises a trusted account, they can read a user’s email, look at their calendar, and launch internal phishing emails attempts from a trusted account. We’ve even seen these attackers go after targets with multifactor authentication by exploiting interfaces that do not support strong authentication in most deployments, such as Exchange Web Services and ActiveSync. Fortunately, CAD can detect these attacks by utilizing our extensive intelligence, stopping them before they can cause damage.”
Operating across the entire Microsoft Office 365 applications suite including email, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, the new CAD solution protects users, data, and financial assets on any network or device. CAD empowers organizations to take a proactive approach when addressing risks associated with Office 365 that often evade other security detection methods. This is especially critical due to Microsoft Office 365’s wide array of integrated third-party applications. With CAD, security teams can:
CAD builds upon Proofpoint’s extensive cloud-enabled portfolio of solutions that allow organizations to deploy and use cloud applications with confidence. For more information on Proofpoint Cloud Account Defense, please visit https://www.proofpoint.com/us/products/cloud-account-defense.
Cybersecurity leader enables organizations to detect, investigate, and remediate Microsoft Office 365 credential theft, mitigating financial and data loss
Proofpoint, Inc., (NASDAQ: PFPT),a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, today announced the availability of Proofpoint Cloud Account Defense (CAD) to detect and proactively protect Microsoft Office 365 accounts, preventing attackers from causing financial and data loss.
Cybercriminals have pioneered a new way to compromise corporate email systems, this time by using brute force attacks to steal Microsoft Office 365 login credentials of corporate users and then logging in as an imposter on the system. These new hacking techniques work even if the company has deployed single sign on or multi-factor authentication (MFA) as part of their security system. Once the hacker has logged in masquerading as a real employee, they have a wide spectrum of choices while operating within a corporation’s email instance to cause financial harm and data loss. Available today, the new Proofpoint CAD solution helps organizations detect, investigate, and remediate these Microsoft Office 365 compromises.
CAD provides comprehensive user-centric visibility necessary to detect and investigate compromised accounts and thwart email account compromise (EAC) credential theft tactics including credential reuse, brute force attacks, and credential-stealing malware. EAC tactics, combined with business email compromise (BEC) social engineering, are hallmarks of groups like the 70+ cybercriminals arrested during the recent Operation Wire Wire federal effort that recovered approximately $14 million in lost funds.
“It only takes one compromised Microsoft Office 365 account to unlock access to a virtual goldmine of confidential data and access—and we have seen a major increase in organizations losing both money and data to these attacks,” said Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of Cybersecurity Strategy for Proofpoint. “Once an attacker compromises a trusted account, they can read a user’s email, look at their calendar, and launch internal phishing emails attempts from a trusted account. We’ve even seen these attackers go after targets with multifactor authentication by exploiting interfaces that do not support strong authentication in most deployments, such as Exchange Web Services and ActiveSync. Fortunately, CAD can detect these attacks by utilizing our extensive intelligence, stopping them before they can cause damage.”
Operating across the entire Microsoft Office 365 applications suite including email, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, the new CAD solution protects users, data, and financial assets on any network or device. CAD empowers organizations to take a proactive approach when addressing risks associated with Office 365 that often evade other security detection methods. This is especially critical due to Microsoft Office 365’s wide array of integrated third-party applications. With CAD, security teams can:
CAD builds upon Proofpoint’s extensive cloud-enabled portfolio of solutions that allow organizations to deploy and use cloud applications with confidence. For more information on Proofpoint Cloud Account Defense, please visit https://www.proofpoint.com/us/products/cloud-account-defense.
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