Microsoft 365 has become the central nervous system of modern business — and cybercriminals know it. Just as Windows became the primary target for attackers because of its market dominance in the 1990s and 2000s,
Microsoft 365 now finds itself in the crosshairs for having "won" the email and collaboration war.
With over 400 million paid Office 365 seats worldwide and countless organizations relying on its integrated suite of applications, Microsoft 365 represents the ultimate target-rich environment for threat actors.
The winner's curse: Success breeds risk
The parallel between Windows' security journey and Microsoft 365's current predicament is striking. Windows has become a prime target of attacks across the operating systems market not because it was inherently less secure than alternatives, but because attacking Windows meant accessing the largest possible pool of potential victims.
Today, Microsoft 365 faces the same winner's curse. Having successfully consolidated email, file sharing, collaboration and communication into a single ecosystem, Microsoft 365 has painted a massive target on its back.
This dominance creates a multiplication effect for attackers. A single successful campaign targeting Microsoft 365 can potentially impact millions of users across thousands of organizations. For cybercriminals operating on a cost-benefit analysis, the math is simple:
Why develop separate attack vectors for multiple platforms when you can focus your efforts on the one platform that reaches the most targets?
Multisurface threat vectors
Microsoft 365 presents a complex web of interconnected services that dramatically expand the attack surface. Each application — Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive — represents a potential entry point, and their tight integration means compromising one service provides pathways to others.
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