Safelink: Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Safelink is there for you. Whenever a link is clicked from a URL in an email, Safelink immediately checks the URL to see if it is malicious or safe. If everything looks safe you will proceed to the webpage in your browser.

 

 

Open Safe Attachments for Office 365

Unsafe Attachments are simple to spot with Microsoft Defender for Office 365. This powerful tool provides an extra layer of protection for email attachments that are scanned. The native anti-malware protection in Exchange Online Protection (EOP) keeps attachments safe. This is done by using a virtual environment to check attachments in email messages before the emails are delivered to recipients (a process known as detonation). If something harmful is in the attachment it will be contained in the virtual environment.

The tool will first check if that destination domain is on either Microsoft's Block List, (or a custom Block List created by the organization). If the URL leads to an attachment, the attachment will be scanned by Microsoft for malware. If the URL is marked as insecure, the user is taken to a page displaying a warning message asking them if they wish to continue to the unsafe destination.

Safe Attachments protection for email messages are controlled by Safe Attachments policies. There is no default Safe Attachments policy, so to get the protection of Safe Attachments, you will need to create one or more custom 'Safe Attachments policies' with the help of your IT partner,
contact us here.

 

How does Safelink work?

As an example, let's imagine that yesterday, an admin in Bob's organization created a Safe Attachments policy for all employees. Today, Bob received an email message that included an attachment.

Bob is protected by Safe Attachments. It only takes about 30 minutes for a new policy to take effect.

The smart delivery action in Safe Attachments policies helps remove any email delivery delays. Which can be caused by scanning email attachments.

The body of the email message is delivered to the recipient with a placeholder for each attachment.

The email attachment 'placeholder' remains until the attachment is found to be safe. After checking it in the virtual environment, the attachment becomes available to open or download.

Keeping your company data safe

If an attachment is malicious, the message is quarantined.

Admins can create and assign quarantine policies. Applying Safe Attachments policies defines what users are allowed to do with quarantined messages.

Safe Attachments scanning takes place in the same region where your Microsoft 365 data resides.

For more information about data center geography, see where is your data located?