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A few weeks ago, Microsoft released a public preview<\/a> for Attack Simulator for Office 365 Threat Intelligence. On April 17th Microsoft announced that Attack Simulator is now generally available. Attack Simulator for Office 365 Threat Intelligence is available to all Office 365 E5 or Office 365 Threat Intelligence customers.<\/p>\n With Attack Simulator, customers can launch simulated attacks on their end users, determine how end users behave in the event of an attack, and update policies and ensure that appropriate security tools are in place to protect the organization from threats.\u00a0 The GA of Attack Simulator adds a new HTML editor so realistic looking HTML emails can be sent in simulations of spear-phishing.\u00a0 Also, two spear-phishing templates are available for immediate use in the spear phishing simulation.<\/p>\n Display Name Spear Phishing Attack<\/strong>: Phishing is the generic term for socially engineered attacks designed to harvest credentials or personally identifiable information (PII). Spear phishing is a subset of this phishing and is more targeted, often aimed at a specific group, individual, or organization.\u00a0 These attacks are customized and tend to leverage a sender name that generates trust with the recipient.<\/p>\n Password Spray Attack:<\/strong> To prevent bad actors from constantly guessing the passwords of user accounts, often there are account lockout policies.\u00a0 For example, an account will lockout after a certain number of bad passwords are guessed for a user.\u00a0 However, if you were to take a single password and try it against every single account in an organization, it would not trigger any lockouts. \u00a0The password spray attack leverages commonly used passwords and targets many accounts in an organization with the hope that one of the account holder uses a common password that allows a hacker to enter the account and take control of it.\u00a0 From this compromised account, a hacker can launch more attacks by assuming the identity of account holder.<\/p>\n Brute Force Password Attack: <\/strong>This type of attack consists of a hacker trying many\u00a0passwords <\/a>or\u00a0passphrases<\/a>\u00a0with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nAttack Simulator includes the three attack scenarios\u00a0from our public preview.<\/h4>\n