Barracuda

Security, Access and Reliability for Cloud-Connected Networks and Applications

Barracuda Email Protection

Comprehensive, elegantly simple protection against email-borne threats to your users, brand, and business.


Between 75% and 90% of targeted cyber-attacks start with an email. Email-borne attacks interrupt business operations, cause financial damage, and compromise business integrity. Barracuda protects you by extending traditional email security with a multi-faceted approach that protects all aspects of your email infrastructure.

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Cybersecurity is a game of confidence against the odds

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When it comes to cybersecurity there are really two forms of confidence that need to be instilled in any organization. The first derived from being certain that an appropriate level of defense has been implemented based on the risk the organization faces. The second is that the business itself is resilient enough to bounce back from that all but inevitable data breach.

The good news is cybersecurity confidence, on the whole, appears to on the rise. A survey of 303 security professionals published this week by Scale Venture Partners, a venture capital firm, finds 78 percent of respondents say their organization is well equipped to handle cybersecurity risks, a remarkable 17 percent gain over last year. Risks that survey respondents specifically said they are most confident of being able to handle are data breaches (84%) and insider threats (83%).

Good news! cybersecurity confidence is up 17% from last year, with most security professionals saying they are confident in their abilities to secure against data breaches and insider threats. Click To Tweet

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Cyber-criminals versus white hats: The battle continues in 2019

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It’s an epic confrontation seemingly without end. On the dark side: a sophisticated global underground economy worth potentially trillions of dollars. On the other: a balkanised group of law enforcement organisations, security researchers, vendors, academics, and national governments. Already this year, we’ve seen both sides make their first moves. The only thing that’s certain is that the CISOs stuck in the middle will continue to lose sleep over mounting threats.

As we move through 2019, IT security must become more proactive and business-aligned, because as good as law enforcement can be the underground economy will continue to undermine digital growth and corporate reputations.

It’s an epic confrontation seemingly without end. The only thing that’s certain is that the CISOs stuck in the middle will continue to lose sleep over mounting threats. ~Phil MuncasterClick To Tweet

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Digital business transformation requires zero-trust

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When it comes to cybersecurity the primary enemy is integration. Without integration, all our applications and systems would be inherently secure. Alas, most applications only provide business value when they are connected to another application. The inherent problem that creates from a cybersecurity perspective is any IT environment is only as robust as its weakest application link.

An Accenture Technology Vision 2019 report published this month highlights how problematic this integration has become. The report finds that only 29 percent of the 6,672 business and IT executives surveyed know whether partners are working as diligently on security and compliance as they are. Cybercriminals are constantly scanning for vulnerabilities within organizations that can treat as a gateway to penetrate a larger ecosystem. Even ecosystems manage by industry behemoths such as Apple and Google are vulnerable. It was revealed this week that more digital pirates are creating clones of applications that wind up being deployed on the Apple Store because the credentials of developers have been compromised. Google and Microsoft are dealing with a similar issue. Cryptominers have embedded their malware in applications being downloaded via Google Play and the Microsoft Store.

'Without integration, all our applications and systems would be inherently secure. Alas, most applications only provide business value when they are connected to another application.' ~ Mike VizardClick To Tweet

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Cybersecurity spending on the rise is both good and bad news

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A survey of subscribers to the eSecurity Planet web site published this week confirms that it’s the best and worst of times for cybersecurity.

The survey finds more than half of respondents (54%) plan to increase their IT security spending this year, with 30 percent aiming to increase their spending by 10 to 20 percent or more. The survey also notes that 57 percent of respondents report their organizations plan to hire additional security staff in the next 12 months. That signals there is some welcome relief on the way for hard-pressed cybersecurity professionals. It also indicates clearly that organizations are planning to throw a lot more money at a cybersecurity problem that continues to frustrate all concerned.

Recent survey: most organizations plan to increase their IT security spending this year, with 30% planning to increase by 10-20% or more. Click To Tweet

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Protect yourself from W-2 scams

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Tax season in the US is just a few months away, and companies are already working on compiling and distributing the W-2 forms and other tax-related information to prepare for filing.  As you may have guessed, the criminals are also thinking about tax season and working out ways to steal your identity, sensitive information, and hard-earned tax refunds.

If a W-2 attack is successful, the victim may suffer multiple incidents of identity theft due to the data being sold to other criminals via the dark web. Click To Tweet

Why the W-2 form?

The W-2 tax form is a responsibility of every employer engaged in a trade or business that pays for services performed by an employee, and nearly every employee in the United States receives one of these each year.  These W-2 forms detail the employee's name, address, Social Security Number, wages, tax deductions, and other personal information.  Cybercriminals and tax scammers want this information so they can steal your identity, file fraudulent tax returns or sell it on dark web.   With your W-2 in hand, these criminals can generate multiple streams of income from a single identity.  There are details here if you'd like to learn more about W-2 forms

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Come to terms with the real enemies of cloud security

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One of the biggest issues with cloud security arguably has very little to do with technology. Most breaches involving the cloud are generally the result of one misconfiguration or another. In theory, that should not be a big deal if the files being purloined are encrypted. But new research from Vera Security, a provider of information rights management tools, confirms what most cybersecurity professionals already know all too well. Only four percent of breached files were encrypted.

Most end users can’t seem to be bothered with encryption. Despite all warnings to the contrary, unencrypted data is strewn across the extended enterprise. In fact, only 35 percent of respondents to the Vera Security build encryption into security processes and procedures across the board, and only 26 percent employ digital rights management that could be employed to revoke access rights to a file.

Recent survey: only 35% of cybersecurity professionals build encryption into security processes and procedures across the company. ~ @MVizard Click To Tweet

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Time to end spurious debates over cybersecurity budget allocations

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A recent global survey of 450 security professionals conducted by ResearchScope finds organizations are increasingly augmenting their next-generation firewall (NGF)/intrusion detection systems (IDS) with investments in deception technologies that rely on traps and decoys to discover how malware is proliferating across their internal systems.

Main goals of cybersecurity pros: Stop threats from getting into the environment, and aggressively hunt anything that makes it past the perimeter. Click To Tweet

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Microsoft Office 365 outage? Ensure business continuity during downtime

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Yesterday, Office 365 experienced a significant outage for more than a day across Europe, leaving customers unable to log in to Exchange Online to read, respond, send, or receive new emails. This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has experienced outages. Just a few months ago, in November 2018, Office 365 users experienced issues trying to log in to their accounts.

With email being a primary communication tool for most organizations, email outages mean losses in employee productivity, communication, and revenue. Organizations that migrated to the cloud with Office 365 gave up control of their uptime and failover. When Office 365 goes down, their email communication goes down with it.

How Email Continuity Service can help

But it doesn’t always have to be this way. While the most recent Office 365 outage is unfortunate, organizations that have Barracuda’s Email Continuity Service in place have nothing to worry about. In the event of an Exchange server failure, or in this case an Office 365 outage, our Email Continuity Service allows IT administrators to failover to third-party cloud-based email servers to continue email operations until services are restored. 

During this failover time, Barracuda’s Email Continuity Service allows end users to send, receive, compose, and forward emails when email services are unavailable. This keeps the company moving and employees productive so that orders can be processed, customer and vendor communication can continue, and any other operations that require email continue seamlessly.

Barracuda Essentials includes Email Continuity Service, which ensures that email operations continue. An emergency mailbox lets users continue to send and receive emails, staying productive until your primary servers are back online.

Barracuda Resources

Barracuda introduces Forensics and Incident Response

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No defense can detect 100% of email attacks, when malicious emails get through admins need to react. For many organizations security incident response is a slow, manual process. Addressing incidents and clean up can take hours if not days. Admins need to identify and verifying security incident; search through the server for malicious messages; evaluate malicious messages and links; remove malicious email from user’s inbox and re-set passwords. Failure to go through a thorough incident response process often results in further spread of attack.

How did Barracuda make Total Email Protection even better? Check out the new Forensics and Incident Response features.Click To Tweet

Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response automates incidence response and provides remediation options to address issues faster and more efficiently. Admins can send alerts to impacted users and quarantine malicious mail directly from users’ inboxes with a couple of clicks. Discovery and threat insights provided by Forensics and Incidence Response platform helps to identify anomalies in delivered email, providing more proactive ways to detect email threats.

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3 Things that set Barracuda PhishLine apart from the competition

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January marks the one-year anniversary of Barracuda’s acquisition of PhishLine, so to mark the occasion we sat down with Dennis Dillman, VP of Product Management for PhishLine at Barracuda to discuss security awareness training, what sets PhishLine apart, and how the solution has evolved. [Read more…] about 3 Things that set Barracuda PhishLine apart from the competition