In recent months, the number of scam and phishing attacks have increased, and these attacks continue to grow more sophisticated. Regretfully, some in the TTU Community continue to fall prey and click on malicious links and give up their eRaider credentials, thus placing institutional data and information resources at risk. To provide additional protection for faculty, staff and student accounts, as well as institutional data and information resources, the TTU IT Division has implemented Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for all TechMail accounts, effective Wednesday, 10/18, in concert with National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
ATP checks links and attachments contained in all incoming email to determine if they are malicious. Additional information about ATP:
- The system is fully automated. No action is needed on your part.
- As part of protecting users from malicious websites, links will appear slightly different:
- Links will be prepended with https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url= when you hold your mouse pointer over them.
- When you click a link, the URL will be checked against a known list of malicious sites. If the site is known to be malicious (i.e. the link could be asking you to provide login credentials), you will be notified by one of the following messages:
- If known to be malicious by ATP, the message will read “This website has been classified as malicious.”
- If known to be malicious by TTU, the message will read “This website has been blocked per your organization’s URL policy."
- Otherwise you will continue to the original site.
- This scan is almost instantaneous, and you may not notice. ATP will also scan all email attachments, and remove those that are determined to be malicious. Messages containing large attachments may be delayed slightly, typically less than one minute.
Thank you for your partnership as we work to further secure our community and our data and information resources. You may find additional information about ATP online at https://www.askit.ttu.edu/atp. For any questions or additional information, please contact IT Help Central at (806) 742-4357 (HELP) or via email at ithelpcentral@ttu.edu.
