Collaboration Tools Usage Is Growing… and So Is the Threat Of Phishing Attacks

Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams are now a big part of everyday working life – we use these tools constantly to communicate with employees across our organization. Here are just a few data points showing the recent growth of Teams:

• Microsoft added 95 million users in 2020. It was one of the fastest-growing apps of the pandemic
• It currently has 145 million daily active users, up from 75 million last year
• From March to June 2020, Microsoft Teams noticed 894 percent growth (more than Zoom)
• Over 500,000 organizations use Microsoft Teams as their default messaging platform

However, in today’s hyperconnected world, collaboration tool communications do not stop there – these tools are now being used to communicate and collaborate with external organizations like vendors, partners, customers, and more. In fact, Microsoft recently announced their enhancement that allows MS Teams users to chat with any Teams users outside their organization: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-users-can-now-chat-with-any-teams-user-outside/ba-p/3070832

Unfortunately, just like email, collaboration tools were not designed with security in mind. So that invoice you are getting from your vendor over a Teams chat may very well have embedded malware that is slipping right past your security defenses. Phishers have taken notice and can now attack one of the companies in your supply chain with the ultimate intent of getting past your own company’s protections.

This is not just a theory we are throwing out there to scare our blog readers. During our conversations with customers, we frequently hear their concerns about how the security gap associated with collaboration tools is becoming more obvious by the day. So, we took this feedback and created a new solution designed to protect against this emerging problem. We call it “IRONSCALES Complete Protect™.” Building on our years of experience in protecting Microsoft Office 365 email environments, with Complete Protect™ we are now able to detect and remediate malicious links and URLs coming into and being shared within your Microsoft Teams environment. Deploying Complete Protect™ can be done in just a couple of clicks, just like our Email Protect™ solution is done today.

For more details, please review the comprehensive list of features in the Complete Protect™ package here.

To learn more about IRONSCALES’ award-winning anti-phishing solution, please sign up for a demo today at ironscales.com/get-a-demo.