What is spam?
Email spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email or unsolicited commercial email, is the practice of sending unwanted email messages, often with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients.
What is Proofpoint?
Proofpoint is a spam-blocking service which protects us from malicious email. The Proofpoint system inspects all incoming messages to the university and uses rules to determine whether or not a message is spam. Once examined, legitimate messages are sent on to the recipient's campus inbox, while suspected spam is quarantined. Each day, users receive an email, called the End User Digest, that contains links to each of the quarantined messages. Unlike the previous message, the digest allows the user to further manage their junk email from the email message. The success rate of spam blocking is very high with Proofpoint.
Why is the university using Proofpoint?
After evaluating numerous anti-spam services, The University of Nebraska Information Technology Services has found that Proofpoint was the most successful at blocking spam entering the university's email system. It also provides for greater flexibility in dealing with incoming and outgoing spam.
How does Proofpoint work?
All incoming and outgoing email is filtered by the Proofpoint Protection Service. Depending upon Proofpoint Protection Service rules and policies, messages that contain a virus or inappropriate content can either be deleted or "scored." In the case of spam, the message score indicates the probability that the message is spam. A message scoring 100 would have a 100% chance of being spam and a message scoring 0 would have a 0% chance of being spam. Messages scoring over 50 will be quarantined by the system. You can find the "score" of a message under the Score column in the Proofpoint Web App, which can be accessed by choosing "Manage My Account" in the End User Digest.
What is Phish Alarm?
Phish Alarm is a feature which enables users to use their Outlook program on their desktop or mobile device, as well as in Outlook Web Application, to report a phish quickly and without having to know who to send it to, or how to send it.
Why are we pushing the use of Phish Alarm university-wide?
- Simplified Reporting and Consolidation of Email Notifications: When people report a phish, we get on average 40 people reporting the same phish email, and we have to respond to each person. Phish Alarm will handle multiple reports of the same phishing email for one action.
- Identification of Advanced Threats: Phish Alarm Analyzer delivers highly responsive identification of phishing attacks in real time (i.e., zero-hour attacks).
- Reduced Helpdesk Calls and tickets: Phish Alarm reduces Help Desk calls by allowing employees to route suspicious emails directly to one mailbox, without having to know to forward the email headers.
- Actionable Information: ProofPoint analyzes the message and provides a report of the threats found and allows security analysts to focus on the threats, not responding to people reporting suspicious emails.
- Faster Response Times to Phishing: The emails are reported directly to Proofpoint where security analysts can address the suspicious emails.
- Integrates with Microsoft Outlook for Windows, Mac, Office 365, OWA, Outlook Mobile
- Business Intelligence: Phish Alarm features powerful reporting that allows easily accessible and sharing of valuable business intelligence to help gauge how successful the security awareness training program has been.
What is TRAP?
Proofpoint Threat Response™ is the first threat-management platform to extend orchestration and automation to include the capability to retract malicious emails that have been delivered to users' inboxes. Threat Response Auto-Pull is an entry-level version of the platform that moves malicious email out of users' hands and implements additional business logic to find and remove internal copies of the messages that have been forwarded.
For more information about email security, contact security@nebraska.edu