Vaikora › Blog › Product Updates

Your MX record is not the only place email security fails in Microsoft 365

Product Updates · Nov 13, 2026 · 4 min read

Most Microsoft 365 email security configurations inspect mail at the point of delivery. If a message passes your gateway, it lands in the inbox. What happens before that, and what happens to the signal afterward, determines whether you can respond or just review.

Cyren email security for Microsoft 365 works differently at both ends.

How the connection works

Cyren connects to Microsoft 365 through Microsoft Graph. There is no MX record change. Mail routing stays exactly where it is. The analysis runs on a virtual machine deployed inside the customer's own Azure subscription, so the message content never leaves the tenant.

This matters for two reasons. First, it removes a common objection during procurement: data residency and sovereignty concerns are answered by architecture, not policy documents. Second, it means deployment does not require a mail flow change, which reduces the operational risk of rollout.

The scanning VM reports into the customer's own Microsoft Sentinel workspace, so detections appear in the same environment where the rest of your security telemetry already lives.

What Cyren actually inspects

Cyren's detection engine draws on the GlobalView telemetry network, which processes over a billion email, URL and file transactions per day. That scale matters because phishing infrastructure follows patterns. A domain registered this morning and used in a credential-harvesting campaign this afternoon will appear in GlobalView before it appears in most indicator feeds.

Cyren detects phishing and malicious infrastructure during the staging phase, before campaigns are weaponized. In practice, this means a URL in an email can be flagged based on infrastructure characteristics (registrar, hosting pattern, certificate behavior) rather than waiting for it to appear in a known-bad list after victims have already clicked.

The inspection covers:

• Email headers and routing metadata
• URLs embedded in message body and attachments
• File attachments against malware signatures and behavioral patterns
• Sender reputation based on GlobalView telemetry

Where the signal goes after detection

Detection without enforcement is a report. Cyren pushes indicators into CrowdStrike Falcon and SentinelOne for automated enforcement, so a confirmed malicious sender or URL does not stay in a dashboard. It becomes a blocked indicator across endpoint controls.

The Microsoft Sentinel integration ships as a packaged solution through the Sentinel Content Hub: a CCF connector, analytic rules, hunting queries and workbooks are included. A SOC analyst does not need to build correlation logic from scratch. The analytic rules are written against the data Cyren sends, so the first detection can trigger an alert the same day the solution is deployed.

This packaging also means the signal is queryable. If you need to investigate whether a specific domain appeared in email traffic before a lateral movement event, the hunting queries give you a starting point in KQL without manual log parsing.

Where Vaikora fits into this picture

If your environment includes AI agents that process email content, classify documents, or act on instructions derived from inbound messages, Cyren's signal feeds directly into a problem Vaikora was built for.

An AI agent reading a phishing email and acting on a malicious instruction embedded in it is a real attack path, not a theoretical one. Vaikora sits inline between the agent and the tools it calls, and enforces an allow, block, modify or require-approval decision before each action executes. When Cyren flags a sender or domain as malicious, that signal can inform the policy Vaikora evaluates at runtime. An agent instruction that references a flagged domain can be blocked before the tool call runs, not after.

Every Vaikora policy decision is written to a SHA-256 hash-chained audit log, so if an agent was blocked from acting on a compromised instruction, that decision is part of the record.

What to check in your current setup

Before assuming your Microsoft 365 email security is covering the gaps described here, verify three things:

• Whether your current solution requires an MX change, and whether that creates a path attackers can route around by targeting backup MX records.
• Whether detections from your email security tool are reaching your SIEM as structured, queryable events, or landing as flat log files that require manual parsing.
• Whether any AI agents in your environment can receive and act on email content without a runtime policy gate between the message and the action.

The Microsoft Sentinel Content Hub is the right place to start for the detection and visibility gaps. The agent control question requires a separate answer.

More from the Vaikora blog