Safe Links will scan the URLs shared by users in Teams for potential phishing threats and notify them. It’s available to all Teams users, where admins have to configure it for users.
Microsoft Teams Safe Links Feature
Last year’s pandemic pushing every corporate to adopt a new working style – work-from-home – has given rise to remote software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco WebEx, etc. And with more and more relying on them for their daily routines, threat actors are eyeing a great opportunity in them. As a result, there’s a steep increase in phishing campaigns of various kinds and other means to exploit vulnerable users. Also Read- Microsoft Integrates Teams Chat Feature in Windows 11 Taskbar And exploiting at least one such user from a big organization allows sophisticated hackers to take down the whole corporate network. Thus, considering phishing campaigns as a real threat, employees are advised to remain vigilant on any URLs or emails they’re interacting with. While they still do so, Microsoft has come up with a solution to help its Teams users fall prey to such malicious links. And this is by introducing Safe Links, an existing feature of Defender from the Office 365 suite. Enabling Safe Links will scan and analyze the URLs shared within Teams’ conversations, group chats, and channels in real-time for any potential phishing threat. Introducing this support to Microsoft Teams is sensible at this time, as the company ‘detonation systems’ spot almost 2 million unique URL-based payloads and block over 100 million phishing emails of such time every month. The Safe Links analyze the URL when it’s being clicked, as attackers are versed with sneaking techniques of sending benign links first and later redirecting users to malicious sites. Admins can enable this for their users as per the official documentation.
