M365EXO-002: Anti-phishing policy audit
- Platform
- Entra ID / M365
- Category
- Advanced Threat Protection
- Severity
- High
- Zero Trust pillar
- Applications & Workloads (weight 2)
- Golden fixtures
- 3
- Branch coverage
- Observed: fixtures prove the verdicts they exercise
- Provenance
- baseline
What it checks
Anti-phishing policies use mailbox intelligence and impersonation detection to identify emails that spoof trusted senders or domains. Without properly configured anti-phishing policies, attackers can impersonate executives, partners, or trusted domains to conduct business email compromise and credential harvesting attacks. Advanced anti-phishing settings including user and domain impersonation protection are critical for defending against targeted phishing campaigns.
Recommended value
User impersonation protection enabled for executives and VIPs; domain impersonation protection enabled for all organizational domains; mailbox intelligence enabled
Remediation
Configure anti-phishing policies with impersonation protection for high-value targets including executives, finance team members, and IT administrators. Enable domain impersonation protection for all organizational domains and key partner domains, setting the action to quarantine impersonated messages. Enable mailbox intelligence and spoof intelligence with appropriate safety tips to warn users about potentially impersonated senders.
Fixture-proven verdicts
Every verdict below is proven by a golden fixture in the module's gating test suite. This table derives from the last green run; it cannot be edited by hand.
| Scenario | Expected verdict |
|---|---|
| clean | PASS |
| empty | WARN |
| throttled | Not Assessed |
Framework mappings
- CISA SCuBA
- MS.DEFENDER.2.1v1, MS.DEFENDER.2.2v1
- NIST SP 800-53
- SI-8
- CIS M365 Benchmark
- 2.1.2
- MITRE ATT&CK
- T1566