With the exodus from your business office to your home office, some vital security items like your business grade firewall, email prefiltering, and your VPN service may not have made the transition. Without those services at home, your workstation is more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Lately, we have seen many Microsoft email accounts compromised through phishing attacks. So how do you know if your Microsoft email account has been compromised? Here are some common symptoms of a compromised email account:
- Are you noticing missing or deleted emails? If you are discovering any missing email messages or if email is appearing and disappearing on your system you likely have an issue.
- Has email been sent from your email account that you didn’t send? Has the unauthorized mail been deleted from your Sent Items folder?
- Do you have new inbox email rules you don’t recognize? Typically, these rules forward emails to an unknown address and were not created by you or the administrator.
- Has your display name, telephone number or address been changed in the Global Address List?
- Has your mailbox been blocked from sending email?
- Have you noticed any unusual profile changes, like updates to your name, telephone number, or the postal code?
- Keep an eye for unusual credential changes, such as multiple password changes.
- Has mail forwarding been added recently to your account?
- Have you noticed any of the following: sign-in locations not familiar, sign-in times are not within the norm, sign-in success or failures many times and also unfamiliar?
If you notice any of the above symptoms, your Microsoft email account may be compromised. Please consult your IT specialist for assistance and further investigation.
