Stopping the hackers with one text message
Having your email account hacked is not only humiliating, it could cost you or your business a lot of money. Once into your account, the more sophisticated hacker will use that access to try to access other accounts you have access to, perhaps even financial accounts, understand your business relationships, and ultimately persuade someone to transfer them money. In business, a hacked email account represents a potentially serious data breach.
Even if you have a reasonably good password, it's possible it may have been leaked along with your username, and once in possession of the leaked password list, the hacker can get straight in without even guessing your credentials.
One of the best ways to protect your email accounts from hackers is to enable multi factor authentication. This adds another layer of protection to the email account so that not only do you have to log in with a username and password, but you also have to enter a code from a text message sent to your mobile, or a code in an app on your phone. This system is also called "2 factor authentication", and it's likely that you have already come across it with services such as Gmail, some banking services, and Amazon.
The good news is that if you have a Microsoft 365 account, this can be enabled at no cost to you, and if we manage your Microsoft 365 account we can enable this for all your mailboxes and support your users to set it up.
You may think that this extra layer when logging in is an unnecessary pain, but it really isn't. MFA is quite clever, and does not require a text message every time you log in. As long as you log in from the same machine and the same location you won't be asked every time; indeed it probably won't ask you again for at least a month or so. Only if you move location or try to log in from another computer will the system want to issue the MFA check again.
MFA at Microsoft 365 is very easy to set up once enabled: you simply tell Microsoft your mobile number and off you go. If you'd like support with setting up MFA on your Microsoft 365 mailboxes, get in touch! See also our Microsoft 365 services and how to make a secure password.