Email First Contact Safety Tip: Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Exchange: First Contact Safety Tip
With the proliferation of phishing campaigns, it’s more than ever important to ensure community members know how to recognize e-mail phishing and sender impersonation. Microsoft introduced a feature called “first contact safety tips.” These safety tips appear in outlook web, desktop, and mobile clients and notify recipients the first time they get a message from the sender or if they don’t often get messages from the sender. This capability adds an extra layer of security protection against impersonation attacks.
Increasingly, the college is targeted by phishing attacks that leverage some form of email spoofing. Email spoofing involves an external email address impersonating a staff or faculty member to mislead, manipulate, and scam an unsuspecting victim. The purpose of this message is to make the recipient aware that the message originated from outside our organization. A sample message can be seen below.
Please note that we cannot turn off this security feature for individual accounts. Our goal is to protect the campus from phishing and spoofing attacks. These efforts require the participation of our entire community, as no one is immune from these attacks. There will be instances that you get this message from known recipients. There is no need to report this as Microsofts algorithms will pick this up and will remove the notification over time.
