M365 Direct Send Feature Can Permit Phishing
Recently, thanks to Varonis Threat Labs (https://www.varonis.com/blog/direct-send-exploit), PCCC has been seeing phishing campaigns abusing Direct Send, a built-in feature of Microsoft 365.Direct Send is meant to allow devices like scanners and some applications to send emails within an M365 tenant WITHOUT authentication.
To protect your organization from this particular phishing campaign, PCCC recommends enabling the "Reject Direct Send" feature in M365. If you are using Direct Send, please contact Raptor Support to discuss other options to stay protected.
To Disable Direct Send in M365, here are the Powershell commands for IT Administrators:
- Run PowerShell as Administrator
- Run the command: 'Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned'
- Run the command: 'Install-Module PowershellGet -Force'
- Run the command: 'Install-Module -Name ExchangeOnlineManagement -Force'
- Run the command: 'Connect-ExchangeOnline'
- Login to the with an M365 Exchange Account with Admin Privs
- Run the command: 'Set-OrganizationConfig -RejectDirectSend $true'
- Verify Direct Send is disabled. Run the command: 'Get-OrganizationConfig | Select-Object Identity, RejectDirectSend'
Trash Folders will be Automatically Trimmed on PCCC cPanel servers on 10/31
On October 31, PCCC plans to implement automatic trimming of the Trash folders on our cPanel servers: cpanel.pccc.com, cpanel2.pccc.com, and cpanel3.pccc.com.This is similar to the currently existing trimming that is performed for the Spam folders on our cPanel servers.
Upcoming Raptor Features
Continued Improvements to Raptor Remark Tags
In the last quarter and into the future, PCCC is committed to continued work on improving our Raptor Remark Tags in order to help better protect Raptor users.Features Added Last Quarter
Raptor Web UI Improvements
Improving the web interface for the Raptor Dashboard so that customers are able to access valuable information as needed is important to PCCC.As such, in this last quarter, we have worked to improve how some stats are shown in the dashboard such as the Outbound Stats that are present for any customers that send email through our servers as their Outbound Relay service.
Improvements to [New] Remark
The [New] Raptor Remark that PCCC added to our common Raptor Remarks Subject tags last quarter has been seeing improvements based on real world data in which [New] can be applied or does NOT apply.One such situation is for Newsletters. As the [New] tag generally works by determining if there has been correspondence between the recipient and the sender, with Newsletter, it is VERY rare to respond to them directly. As such, the [New] tag doesn't apply to incoming Newsletter emails.
Update to SpamAssassin 4.0.2
PCCC uses Apache SpamAssassin quite heavily in our Raptor product and has multiple members on the Apache SpamAssassin Committee. Primarily our CTO Giovanni Bechis is the PMC Chair and Kevin A. McGrail is on the PMC Committee Roster.As such, PCCC updated to Apache SpamAssassin version 4.0.2 in the last quarter. The version 4.0.2 update came with multiple improvements though PCCC would like to highlight the improvements to the Redirector detection and TxRep plugins allowing us to scan mail faster and help ensure Email Security grows stronger. We will be upgrading to version 4.0.3 soon with a few small bug fixes and enhanced ARC signature handling.
Did You Know? Raptor Feature Corner
Raptor Newsletter Archive
For this quarter, we wanted to celebrate that the Raptor Quarterly Newsletters have been sent out for the last 2 years.That's quite a few newsletters and we know that a number of users have received ALL of those newsletters but will hopefully be here to receive the future newsletters for a long time to come.
If ever someone wants to look back at ALL of the Newsletters that we have sent out quarterly since they began in the first quarter of 2024, they can look at our Raptor Newsletter Archive at: https://raptoremailsecurity.com/raptor-newsletter-archive/
Raptor Spam Stats Corner
Exactly how much spam do we see? (Pulled on October 01, 2025)
Highest Spam Percent in the Last 60 Days: 77.55%
Highest Spam Percent in the Last 90 Days: 79.77%
Average Spam Percent in the Last 30 Days: 37.77%
Average Spam Percent in the Last 60 Days: 37.53%
Average Spam Percent in the Last 90 Days: 35.94%
To see your domain Raptor Spam Statistics, you can navigate to raptor.pccc.com and enter your domain to be redirected to the server that you are deployed on.
Tip of the Quarter
When in doubt about an email, Ask for a second pair of eyes
Often people use their gut feelings as a marker on whether or not to trust things in their environment or if they should make certain decisions.In such a way, often your "gut feeling" about an email that came in might trigger some nagging concern or worry in your mind that something just feels "off" about the email.
In such situations, if you FEEL like something is not right with the email, the best thing you can do is have someone else look over the email as well, or even contact the person the email says it's from directly.
This has two major benefits being:
- Someone else looking it over might see something you consciously missed but that struck you as off subconsciously.
- It gives you a little bit of time to ensure you aren't reacting to an emotionally charged email but rather giving yourself a moment to consider things rationally.