Implement ARC in Defender for Office and re-enable enhanced filtering for test group

Please see the following scheduled Information Technology Services (ITS) maintenance:

Date: Thursday October 5th                        

Start Time: 8:00pm
End Time: 10:00pm

The following work is being completed: Microsoft now allows for ARC (Authenticated Receive Chain) signing that would allow us to add our email filter (ProofPoint) as a trusted ARC signer. This should allow for the use of enhanced filtering on the inbound connector from ProofPoint which will allow for better use of Exchange protection. In addition to adding ProofPoint as a trusted ARC signer, enhanced filtering would also be enabled for the CDS group for testing. Enhanced Filtering would be expanded to the rest of WSU at a future date.

All affected groups: All email sent through ProofPoint would be authenticated by ProofPoint and the authentication information would be added to the message’s headers, additional authentication done by Defender would reference the previous authentication information and add its own.

All processes affected: All email would be able to authenticate through each service (ProofPoint, Defender) and the end result would be better authentication. The current situation would authenticate only at ProofPoint and changes made by ProofPoint can cause Defender to treat those emails as suspicious.

Duration of impact: About two hours.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None

Questions? Please contact mark.bradt@wsu.edu with any questions regarding this scheduled outage.