In a continued effort to protect UNBC users, ITS has enabled the Safe Links & Safe Attachments features in our Microsoft 365 tenant.
What is Safe Links and Safe Attachments?
The Safe Links and Safe Attachments service are part of Microsoft's Defender for Office 365 system. Safe Links and Safe Attachments are designed to protect students, faculty, and staff from email phishing attempts, and links/web sites or email attachments that contain malicious software. The service will mostly be invisible to you because it works behind the scenes to protect you.
How do I know I am protected by Safe Links?
For received emails, Safe Links will re-write all URLs to begin with something like: "https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url . . .". This indicates that Safe Links has analyzed the link and is protecting you in the event the site detected to be is malicious.
URLs in Teams and Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) will not appear different, but if you click a link to open it in your browser you should briefly see a page with the text "Verifying Link..." before it loads the actual site.
The protection service is handled within Office 365 so it will most likely be transparent to you, the end user. If you click on a link in an email, Teams, or Office document that takes you to a site deemed Safe by Safe Links, you will be allowed access to the site and proceed normally. However, if a link is identified as malicious/phishing, then after clicking on the link a Safe Links screen will appear indicating the web site cannot be accessed. This protects you and your workstation from infection, data leakage and account compromise, and by extension it protects all of UNBC. The protection page looks like this:
How do I know I am protected by Safe Attachments?
The Safe Attachments service scans email attachments to detect if the attachment contains any malicious software. If none is found, the attachment is sent as normal. If malicious software is found, the bad attachment will be removed and the email sent to the receiver will contain a notice that the attachment was identified as containing malware and the attachment will have been deleted. An “un-delete” process is in place if the need arises. Please contact the service desk.