Microsoft is giving 'Teams' better phishing protection

Teams is getting protection from phishing attacks

The Safe Links feature in Windows Defender will now work with Microsoft Teams, the company announced. The Redmond giant acknowledges that the way we work has changed and that a hybrid workforce is here to stay.

Keeping that in mind, Microsoft is extending its phishing protection via Windows Defender to its Teams chat application. The feature will scan all links that are shared within any conversations mode in Teams. This includes - Conversations, group chats, direct messages and channels.

Microsoft says that the feature already offers protection against malicious links and has detected nearly 2 million phishing URLs each month since its introduction in 2015.

A phishing link sent by a threat actor fools people into thinking its by someone else and gets the user to click on them and redirect them to a malicious website.

When any link is shared in Teams, Defender verifies them against a list of known malicious websites and URLs. If it finds a match, it will then warn the user with a dialog box telling them that the link is not safe.

"Safe Links for Microsoft Teams is available to customers who are using both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Defender for Office 365," says Microsoft in its blog.

"To configure Safe Links to protect users in Microsoft Teams, configure a Safe Links policy in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal."