Fraudulent mail that mimics a genuine person or company's address or domain. Defender for Office 365 is what supplies the countermeasures: user protection, domain protection, mailbox intelligence and in-message safety tips.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Impersonation in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Domain
A way of grouping workspaces by area of the business, in support of a data mesh approach. Items take on their workspace's domain, letting you filter the OneLake catalog by it, and certain tenant settings can be passed to domain admins; domains have no effect on access permissions.
- Microsoft 365
Formerly Office 365, Microsoft's software-as-a-service productivity suite. A Microsoft Entra tenant provides its identity, and its data is not governed by Azure RBAC.
- Chat message roles
Labels on chat messages: instructions go under system, the person's input under user, the model's previous answers under assistant, and results returned by a called tool under tool (or function).
- protection domain
An older disaster recovery grouping in Prism Element, holding VMs, a metro storage container or volume groups. Its schedule fixes the RPO for replication from one on-premises cluster to another.
- Mailbox intelligence
An anti-phishing option in Defender for Office 365 that builds a picture of who each user normally corresponds with, so genuine senders can be told apart from impersonators. It is enabled by default but does nothing until intelligence for impersonation protection is switched on as well.
Related terms
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365
Microsoft's protection service for email and collaboration tools. Its basic plan covers impersonation, Safe Attachments, Real-time detections and Safe Links; the higher plan layers on Attack simulation training, automated investigation and response, and Threat Explorer.
- Spoofing
A message whose From address uses a domain other than its real origin is spoofed. This differs from impersonation, where the identity merely looks similar; anti-phishing policies handle each.