An Introduction to Proofpoint

Watch to learn more about how Proofpoint makes your email inbox more secure!

Below is a transcript of the video.

Hey there, I’m Chris Wilson, Cobb Technologies’ Director of managed services, and in this video, I’m going to teach you a little about your new Proofpoint email security product.

Proofpoint scans every email sent to your account and quarantines the ones that seem malicious, whether they include suspicious language or have been sent from a known scammer. Proofpoint will also try to grab emails that are clearly spam advertisements.

Every day Proofpoint will send you a Quarantine Digest listing every suspicious or unwanted message that was quarantined away from your inbox. However, if you didn’t get any spam or strange messages that day, you will not receive a Quarantine Digest.

Now, let's go over why you have an email filtering solution.

Why do we have an email filtering solution?

In the current business cybersecurity climate, email is one of the most popular vectors for cyberattack. In my experience, email is the most common and successful method of attack.

I met a young lady that sent $250,000 in an ACH transfer as a result of a bad email.

I met another sales rep that bought $2,000 worth of target gift cards because he thought his boss told him to.

And I've seen numerous folks get their email credentials compromised off of false office 365 sites. It’s very common - you’ll get an email asking you to log into office 365, and the website you’re logging in to looks just like the Office website, but it’s really a false version of their site, and you're giving your username and password away to a bad guy.

We don’t want that to happen, so we’re implementing Proofpoint. This solution also has the added benefit of automatically filtering out a lot of spam messages.

What are we trying to block?

We're trying to block spam. We're trying to block malware. We’re trying to block bulk mail messages, viruses, phishing attempts -that is, cybercriminals pretending to be people they’re not- and even suspicious links.

How do I know what messages were caught?

Here’s where we’ll go into detail about the Quarantine Digest.

If you get an email message that gets caught in your quarantine, you will get what's called a Quarantine Digest. Like I said earlier, it’s an email that comes to your inbox, and it will contain a list of all the quarantined messages you have received.

Quarantine Digest

Here’s what the Quarantine Digest looks like - big thanks to David for loaning us one of his digests to use for this video.

If you'll notice on the top right corner there, it says “sign in to your account.” You can sign in to your account using that link whenever you want. The link is evergreen, meaning that it will work no matter how old it is - so if you don’t have the ProofPoint website bookmarked, you can go into an old digest email, click on that link, and use that to get into your digest.

But… you don’t necessarily have to log into your digest to interact with quarantined messages.

This is the digest itself. The digest is a listing of email messages that have been put in “Email Jail” until they get bailed out by you or are forever laid to rest.

On each message, you're going to see a list of actions to the right. The first one I have highlighted here is “preview”. “Preview” renders a web version of that message that's totally safe - you can take a look at it and see if it's maybe something you wanted to receive.

Just below the “preview” is the “release message button”. Clicking this will release the message from the Email Prison. It'll land in your inbox within a few moments.

Our next one down is “release and approve” - so this one is just like “release” in that it releases the message to you, but it also adds the sender of that message to your own personal white list. That white list makes sure that messages coming from that person won't get blocked again.

Lastly, with “block”, you can block any future messages from that sender. I don't see people use this feature a lot because of the fact that the messages are basically already blocked by the quarantine feature, and get deleted within 30 days if you choose not to look at them.

Now, the Quarantine Digest comes every day, and it shows you all the messages that were quarantined since the last Quarantine Digest message you got, as well as every other message that is sitting in the quarantine box. This means that you get 30 days of reminders that there are messages quarantined that you can release or perform some other action on.

Let’s say someone sent you an email, but you can’t find it in your inbox, and you’re pretty sure it got quarantined/ To look at the quarantine list on demand, click on that “sign in to your account” option up top there.

When you click on that link, you’ll be sent to the ProofPoint website where you can enter your credentials. You can also choose to “sign in with Microsoft” and use your Office 365 account to sign in instead, if your organization is using Office365.

Once you’re in, you’ll see this tool here, where you can look at the messages that were in your digest. We can see right here that it's set for “inbound mail”, and we can see right here that it's looking at quarantined messages. So if I just click “search”, it's actually going to reveal the quarantine messages that are in your box. From here, you can select a particular message and you can choose the “release from quarantine” or “the release and approve option” to release that message into your inbox.

Contact Info

If you have questions about ProofPoint, please head over to our website at cobbtechnologies.com, or you can email our SIMS center at the address on screen, and we’d be happy to help!