IT Professional Colleagues:
We wanted to make you aware of two security feature changes coming to the Exchange Online Environment on March 15.
UITS will be notifying Exchange users of this change, as well as the migration of student accounts into Exchange for email next week. Please note that student accounts will not be moved to Exchange until mid-May.
The new security features are called Safe Links and Safe Attachments. UITS staff have tested these features and found them to be barely noticeable in terms of how email functions. They also offer good protection from bad actors. Implementing Microsoft Safe Links and Safe Attachments features will provide additional protection against phishing and diminishes our reliance on digital certificates. In fact, IU constituents can stop looking for the digital certificate on email that they receive as a way of discerning if those emails are phishing attempts.
We’ll be activating these two services for all Exchange Online users on March 15. This KB document offers a deeper description of how Safe Links works [1]. Basically, links in non-Outlook clients will appear longer than usual. Safe Links can help protect users from malicious links that are used in phishing and other attacks.
Similarly, Safe Attachments provides an additional layer of protection for email attachments. Specifically, Safe Attachments uses a virtual environment to scan email attachments before they’re delivered to recipients. Again, the disruption to users is minimal, but you might notice that attachments may be briefly inaccessible during scanning.
More information about Safe Attachments is also available in this KB document [1]. You can see a list of known issues for both services here [2].
–IT Community Partnerships on behalf of Enterprise Microsoft Administration
[1] About Microsoft 365 security: https://kb.iu.edu/d/bhia (log-in required)
[2] Known issues with Microsoft 365 security: https://kb.iu.edu/d/bhib (log-in required)
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