Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (Plan 1) Faculty (formerly Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection) helps protect mailboxes, files, online storage, and applications against new, sophisticated attacks in real time. It offers holistic protection in Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business.

In order to purchase Microsoft education SKUs, customers must meet the qualifications described in the Microsoft Qualified Education User Definition document. There are separate versions for academic customers in the United States and Canada.

By protecting against unsafe attachments and expanding protection against malicious links, it complements the security features of Exchange Online Protection to provide better zero-day protection.

Safe Links functionality expands on this by protecting your environment when users click a link. While the content is being scanned, the URLs are rewritten to go through Office 365. The URLs are examined in real-time, at the time a user clicks them. If a link is unsafe, the user is warned not to visit the site or informed that the site has been blocked.

Advanced threat reporting and message trace allow you to investigate messages that have been blocked due to unknown viruses or malware, while URL trace capability allows you to track individual malicious links in the messages that have been clicked.