Defending Office 365 against MFA bypass using IMAP

So, you have deployed Office 365, you’ve setup multi-factor authentication and deployed password managers so that your users can safely use MFA where it is supported but fall back to app passwords where it’s not. Great stuff… except by default you aren’t quite as secure as you would think!

Default Office365/Exchange Online Config

Now this is great for HTTP based communication methods. but email isn’t restricted to HTTP only. When we investigate the default deployment configuration we see that IMAP and POP3 are both enabled. The below screenshot shows the default mailbox feature configuration:

Now as we know, both IMAP and POP3 do not support a second or multi-factor authentication by default, so in the GUI you should disable those (unless you have a really specific business reason that means you MUST use these) Read more “Defending Office 365 against MFA bypass using IMAP” →