Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Information Security Office, has enabled a new email feature in an effort to improve the security posture of campus. Suspicious URLs sent via email are now being redirected to a cloud hosted web security proxy, which will block URLs that it deems malicious.

If you click on a link that has been blocked, you will be presented with the following warning message:

As stated in the warning message, if you have questions, please contact your departmental help desk or the UT Service Desk. You can reach the UT Service Desk by sending an email to help@its.utexas.edu or by calling 512-475-9400. 

**NOTE**

Cisco operates a service that assigns reputations to web sites based on their content and how they are used in email. A bad reputation can mean that a URL is malicious (phishing, malware, etc.), or just spammy but otherwise harmless. Reputations are given a numeric value between -10.0 (terrible) and +10.0 (awesome), so there’s a big range for variation. We use Cisco’s recommended thresholds for deciding which URLs are definitely bad, but we use less aggressive thresholds than Cisco’s recommendation for deciding which are suspicious but not definitely bad.