University of Eastern Finland is again a target of active phishing. IT Services seeks to develop actions again phishing and now we are deploying a Microsoft O365 information security feature, Safe Links. IT Services’ staff has used it already for some time and it seems to work effectively against phishing links.
Safe Links protects against phishing links in email messages and Office documents. For example, when the user clicks a link in an email message, the service checks the link’s UEF address before opening it. If the URL is blocked or determined to be malicious, the user gets a warning page, eg. “This website was blocked by your Office 365 administrator”.
Safe Links protection adds a certain starting string in the front of the link (eg. ”https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/”). For now we have not noticed that Safe Links protection had caused any negative effects to the use of the services. However, if you notice a case, where Safe Links prevents the use of some IT service, please contact Service Desk.