Ithaca College

Over the break Information Technology implemented two new security features as part of the college email service to help protect against malicious attachments or emails that contain links to malicious web sites.

Safe Links provides protection against phishing messages that contain links to malicious web sites. Links in email we receive from external sources will be replaced with links to Microsoft’s safelinks.protections.outlook.com domain. When you click the link, Microsoft will check the original destination site against their database of malicious sites before redirecting you through to that original site. If Microsoft deems the site malicious (or if we’ve added it to a block-list), you’ll instead be directed to a warning page.

Safe Attachments provides protection against malicious email attachments received by Ithaca.edu email accounts. In addition to basic anti-virus style checking that Microsoft has been doing on attachments prior to delivery, they now check for suspicious behavior (such as a malicious macro) before delivering them. This extra security step is pretty quick, but messages with large attachments might take an extra few minutes to be delivered. These are just a few of the many security enhancements that we’re working on. More information about additional security features will be forthcoming shortly.

Information Technology Service Desk
104 Job Hall
servicedesk@ithaca.edu
607-274-1000