Protect your c-suite with priority account protection

Priority account protection helps IT and security teams ensure a high quality of service and protection for the critical people within your organization. Tagging an account as a priority account enables the extra protection tuned for the mail flow patterns targeting company executives, along with extra visibility in reports, alerts, and investigations.

What you need

  • Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 (included as part of E5 plans)
  • Sufficient permissions (Security Administrator role)
  • 5 minutes to perform the following procedures.

Tag Priority users

  1. Identify the users, groups, or domains you would like to tag as priority accounts.
  2. Sign in to the Microsoft Defender portal and navigate to Settings on the left navigation bar.
  3. Select Email & collaboration on the page that loads and then select User tags.
  4. On the User tags page, select the Priority account tag, and then select Edit.
  5. On the flyout that appears, select Add members.
  6. Search for the users you wish to tag, select one or more users, and then select Add.
  7. Review the members you selected, and then select Next.
  8. Select Submit to confirm the changes.

Confirm priority account protection is enabled for tagged users

  1. Sign to the Microsoft Defender portal.
  2. In the navigation bar, select Settings.
  3. Select Priority account protection.
  4. Make sure protection is set to On.

To learn what priority account tags are see Manage and monitor priority accounts - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs.

Next Steps

Review the differentiated protection for users tagged as Priority accounts.

PowerShell configuration

If you want to achieve these steps via Exchange Online PowerShell, you can do this using the following commands:

  • View a list of priority accounts: Get-User -IsVIP | select Identity
  • Add user to list of priority accounts: Set-User -VIP $true -Identity <Identity>
  • Remove user from list of priority accounts: Set-User -VIP $false -Identity <Identity>