It’s a bit odd, but scam calls are not limited to phones any longer 📵
Increasingly, they are showing up in the tools businesses rely on every day.
To combat this, Microsoft is adding Brand Impersonation Protection to Teams. Designed to make day-to-day communications a bit safer.
The concept is simple.
When you get a call on Teams from an external contact whom you haven’t met before, Teams will automatically check if that caller is potentially impersonating a well-known organization.
It could be a bank, government department, or an established trusted brand.
Teams will show a warning before you answer the call, if something looks suspicious ⚠️
You can decide to block the call, take it, or end it, but it gives some extra context around making decisions.
The alert will stay visible during the call if the warning signs persist.
The aim is to reduce social engineering attacks. This is where criminals talk their way in, instead of hacking the systems through technical means.
They tend to use urgency and pressure to force you to act, before you think it through 🤔
This feature will be turned on by default, so you won’t need to remember to turn it on before calls.
Microsoft recommends that your support team is ready for questions. Team members may start seeing new alerts and want some clarity around their meaning.
This is one of several new security improvements coming to Teams. Others will include better detection of malicious links and dangerous file types being hidden in messages.
Teams is now used by hundreds of millions of people each month. It’s now longer just a place for meetings and messages. It’s an essential tool for many businesses. And attackers know it.
This update won’t eliminate scam calls altogether, but it will help people to pause and reassess when they are called to act.
🧐 When a call comes through a trusted platform, what causes you to deem it safe or approach it with caution?
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