365 Total Protection review < ProVirtualzone

Some months ago, I first reviewed the product 365 Threat Monitor App from Hornetsecurity. This blog post talks about their product, Hornetsecurity – 365 Total Protection review.

Before we go to the product review, who is Hornetsecurity?

Hornetsecurity is a cloud security specialist that operates in more than 30 countries. Sold through Hornetsecurity’s international channel partner network, its premium services are used by more than 40,000 customers, including Swisscom, Telefónica, and KONICA MINOLTA.

What is 365 Total Protection, and what does it?

365 Total Protection from Hornetsecurity offers comprehensive protection for Microsoft cloud services – specially developed for Microsoft 365 and seamlessly integrated to provide comprehensive protection for Microsoft cloud services. Easy to set up and extremely intuitive to use, 365 Total Protection simplifies your IT Security management from the very start.

365 Total Protection doesn’t need any hardware, software installed, or any maintenance. All is done online by 365 Total Protection through your Microsoft 365 accounts using advanced protection mechanisms.

365 Total Protection has three different suites, each with varying features enabled. The price is per email user.

Some Example Features:

Email Live Tracking – Real-time mail flow analysis email Live Tracking with user-defined settings offers users a complete overview of all emails addressed to them.
If an incoming email has, for example, been classified as Spam, you will receive comprehensive information and can individually determine any further interaction.
This means that you can always quickly find any email you are searching for, and delivery options can be defined for the future.

Content Control – Centrally managed Content Control protects your email communication from receiving or sending unwanted or unauthorized file attachments in keeping with your company policy.
When running Content Control, umbrella terms and categories (e.g., .docm or .exe) may be blocked. For a department such as Marketing, however, the receipt of media files and macros can, on the other hand, be necessary for daily business: In this respect, one can create a group for the Marketing department and adjust the settings in Content Control so that only potentially dangerous (e.g., executable) file formats are blocked for this group.

Spam and Malware Protection – Threat detection through in-depth analysis of incoming email (e.g., phishing or spam mail) constitutes a threat; attacks are immediately detected by the multi-stage filter systems of 365 Total Protection. Unwanted emails are directly rejected by the Threat Blocking function or detected in later analyses by Threat Intelligence and sent straight to Quarantine. In both cases, these emails will not be delivered to your mailbox.

You can check the full features for each level of 365 Total Protection HERE.

To start using 365 Total Protection, register for a trial. Test free of charge without any obligations

How can you start using 365 Total Protection?

It is just a few clicks to start using 365 Total Protection.

Start to fill in all the information to connect your Microsoft 365 tenant to 365 Total Protection.

Note: You need to have administrative privileges on your Microsoft 365 account to do these initial tasks.

Add your Microsoft 365 administrator credentials, accept the permissions to access your account, and you are connected.

365 Total Protection will start to synchronize with your Microsoft 365 account. After it is completed, add your Timezone and Language, and that is it.

After you finish your initial configuration, you will receive an email confirming that you are now using 365 Total Protection on your Microsoft 365 account.

Disclaimer: I am not using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for this configuration. Some of the 365 Total Protection service options should not be available since it needs an FQDN to change MX Records, DNS, etc., to have complete email security protection.

You can see the main GUI board from the 365 Total Protection.

You must now configure your 365 Total Protection service to handle your Microsoft 365 emails.

In this manual, you can have all the information with all the options to fully configure your 365 Total Protection.

I start by configuring the emails.

The first option is to configure your MX records to direct emails to 365 Total Protection first, and then the tool forwards emails to your Microsoft 365 email account.
I cannot do this in my example since I am not using an FQDN domain.

In the second option, you configure the outbound traffic. It is the same as the previous one, but now 365 Total Protection checks the email before it sends. We need to authorize and accept this procedure in Microsoft 365 account.

The last option regarding setting your email account is to add an Add-in to your Outlook. You can perform some of the 365 Total Protection and check reports with Add-in.

As I stated above, when using 365 Total Protection, your options and features depend on the service tier you choose.

I can’t go through all those options here —the blog post would be enormous— but besides reading the manual to check all the options and reports you can use and configure in your 365 Total Protection, I will quickly outline some of those options.

The first option that I want to show you is the user/group roles that you can create to manage 365 Total Protection. Here you can assign any user role or group. Or you can connect your 365 Total Protection to your LDAP server.

Using this option, you can fully use your User/Groups permissions roles from your domain to access the service.

The Security Settings is a vital section because it is where you can enable the security of your emails.

SPF(Using Sender Policy Framework): This is an email-authentication technique you can prevent spammers from sending messages on behalf of your domain.

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail): This option adds an email authentication signature that allows the receiver to check that an email was indeed sent and authorized by the owner of that domain(you can use it for incoming and outgoing emails) and that the message was not changed during transit.

DMARC(Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): Using DMARC, your organization can protect your user’s emails from phishing and spoofing attacks.

In the Security section, you can also set Content Control of your emails: What type of files/attachments are allowed on outgoing and incoming emails.

Other options in the Security section are:

Archiving
The default archiving period for all domains is 10 years.

Continuity Service
Your emails are sent to an additional POP3 mailbox to ensure email traffic in the event of main system failures.
Clean emails are stored for three months.

Email Encryption
As the subtitle suggests, here is where we can encrypt the email on the communication path from sender to recipient.

In the Domains section, you can see your domain(s) and if it was verified by 365 Total Protection. Verified means that all the MX records are correctly set, and the tool can handle all the email traffic without any issues. Click Trigger verification to check your domain.

In this section, you can also add or delete domains (depending on your licenses).

Once your domain and emails are configured, you can start live tracking your incoming/outgoing emails.
You can see all processes per email and/or per email account in this option.
The Audit option allows you to track any activity changes done on the 365 Total Protection tool.

The Email Live Tracking module contains all emails that the 365 Total Protection tool Archiving service has archived for the selected period.

The Email Live Tracking module is divided into the following sections: filter, email view, and category statistics.

Conclusion:

With this last option, we conclude this review of 365 Total Protection.

Implementing the service is not very difficult, but it could take some time to adjust. It is fully featured since many options and features are available.

If you do not have much experience with email security, you should request help from Hornetsecurity support to fully configure and secure your service.

As we can see in the above options and features, 365 Total Protection can manage your Microsoft 365 email account and secure all your company emails. You also have access to reports for everything done by the service.

Regarding your domain outgoing/incoming emails and the archiving of those emails(with a maximum 10 years): In these days of so many ransomware attacks, most of them start with a simple email. Having a tool like 365 Total Protection that checks and validates your emails is a massive advantage to secure your company and your data.

We know that is not enough to protect you against users’ mistakes, but this first level of security that prevents users from receiving this type of email with malware and phishing goes a long way to increasing your security.

I hope this review did help you understand what 365 Total Protection is and how it works.

Use the free trial and test the product to see for yourself.