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.

Learn more and request a free trial.

Barracuda: A Visionary in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Awareness and Computer Based Training

December 10, 2018 by Anthony Kros

Let me say something totally surprising: Email security is top of mind for everyone these days.

Shocking, I know.

Email is still the #1 attack vector. How do you ensure that your employees can distinguish a malicious email from a good one? Click To Tweet

Organizations want to ensure that malicious emails don’t make it inside the organization. Attackers want to do everything from installing bad software to taking over a user’s account, which makes sense considering that email still reigns as the number one attack vector. Many of you already rely on Barracuda to protect your end users from attacks. But are you thinking about protecting your organization from the people who are opening and reading those emails if malicious messages do happen to make it past your defenses? How do you ensure that they can identify a bad email from a seemingly good one?

Anthony Kros

Anthony (Tony) Kros is the Analyst Relations Manager for Barracuda. Connect with him on LinkedIn here.

https://www.barracuda.com

Gartner report sees greater reliance on Privileged Access Management tools

December 7, 2018 by Mike Vizard

We have met the enemy and it’s us. That’s a feeling many cybersecurity professionals well know. Most security breaches today have a lot more to do with misappropriated credentials than they do with hackers that have found a way around an organization’s defenses. It’s not that hackers don’t have the skills to accomplish that. It’s just a lot easier to accomplish the same goal by stealing credentials using, for example, a phishing attack that tricks unsuspecting users into giving up passwords.

That issue is front and center this week following the publishing of the first ever magic quadrant report specifically address privileged access management (PAM) software. The report forecasts that by 2021 a total of 40 percent of organizations that use formal change management practices will have embedded and integrated PAM tools within them to reduce the overall risk surface. That’s up from less than 10 percent in 2018. The report also notes that by 2021 over 50 percent of organizations that have adopted DevOps will be employing PAM-based secrets management technologies to better protect applications and the infrastructure they run on.

'It's a lot easier for cybercriminals to steal credentials than it is for them to find a way around a company's defenses.' ~@MVizardClick To Tweet

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard has covered IT for more than 25 years, and has edited or contributed to a number of tech publications including InfoWorld, eWeek, CRN, Baseline, ComputerWorld, TMCNet and Digital Review. He currently blogs for IT Business Edge and contributes to CIOinsight, The Channel Insider, Programmableweb and Slashdot. Mike also blogs about emerging cloud technology for SmarterMSP.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvizard

Email, supply chain and data breach risk dominates 2018 as a new regulatory era begins

December 5, 2018 by Phil Muncaster

As information security professionals approach the finish line of another year, it’s fair to say the past 12 months have once again been packed with incident. Just as cybercrime is no respecter of international borders, so it doesn’t usually conform to neat 12-month cycles. However, taking stock of the biggest trends and stories over the year can be a useful discipline in helping to drive a more strategic way of thinking going forward.

So what have we learned from 2018?

What have we learned from 2018? Email is still the #1 threat vector, delivering attacks phishing, BEC, crypto-mining, ransomware, and other attacks in ~ 1 of every 10 messages. via @PhilMuncaster Click To Tweet

Email still the number one vector

First, the stuff you already know. Email continued to be the number one threat vector this year, accounting for over 80% of threats spotted in the wild, according to most estimates. One firm claimed that as many as one in 10 emails are malicious. They deliver phishing attempts, BEC scams, crypto-mining malware, ransomware and much more. Over a third of global organisations Barracuda Networks interviewed for its Email Security Trends 2018 report said they’d experienced a phishing attack. That’s bad news when you consider that 93% of all breaches analysed by Verizon featured a phishing element.

Phil Muncaster

Phil Muncaster is a technology writer and editor with over 12 years’ experience working on some of the biggest technology titles around, including Computing, The Register, V3 and MIT Technology Review. He spent over two years in Hong Kong immersed in the Asian tech scene and is now back in London where information security has become a major focus for his work.

Follow Phil on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

http://www.barracuda.com

Threat Spotlight: New spear phishing attack gift card scam

November 29, 2018 by Asaf Cidon

When sending social engineering-based attacks, attackers have always used context and timing to their advantage. Combined with the psychological advantage of impersonating someone in a position of authority, the attackers can lure the target, often a low or mid-level employee, to take an action desired by the attacker by simply sending a well-timed email that has highly relevant contextual information —without requiring any type of malicious payload.

A great example of this approach is a recent large-scale impersonation campaign involving gift cards, which is the subject of this month’s Threat Spotlight. [Read more…] about Threat Spotlight: New spear phishing attack gift card scam

Asaf Cidon

Asaf Cidon is vice president of content security services at Barracuda Networks. In this role, he is one of the leaders for Barracuda Sentinel, the company's AI solution for real-time spear phishing and cyber fraud defense. Barracuda Sentinel utilizes artificial intelligence to learn the unique communications patterns inside customer organizations to identify anomalies and guard against these personalized attacks. Asaf was previously CEO and co-founder of Sookasa, a cloud storage security startup that was acquired by Barracuda. Prior to that, he completed his PhD at Stanford, where his research focused on cloud storage reliability and performance. He also worked at Google’s web search engineering team. Asaf holds a PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, and BSc in Computer Engineering from the Technion.

Connect with Asaf on LinkedIn.

http://www.barracuda.com

Time to remember to be thankful for cybersecurity professionals

November 21, 2018 by Mike Vizard

There’s usually a lot to be grateful for every Thanksgiving in the U.S. but one area that tends to be underappreciated all year long is cybersecurity. Most cybersecurity professionals labor away all year with little to no recognition for their efforts. The truth is it’s only when something goes horribly wrong that anyone in senior management wants to know who is responsible for cybersecurity. A team of cybersecurity professionals may have thwarted billions of attacks in a year. But it can feel like it was all for naught in one bad horrible day.

'A team of cybersecurity professionals may have thwarted billions of attacks in a year. But it can feel like it was all for naught in one bad horrible day.' ~@MVizard Click To Tweet

Of course, most breaches are not even the fault of the cybersecurity team. There’s not much that can be done when an end user opens an attachment or clicks on a link that results in malware being directly loaded on to their machine. A cybersecurity research report from Verizon notes that 97 percent of all malware arrives in one way or another via email.

Mike Vizard

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvizard

2 Ways to get even more out of your Barracuda partnership

November 21, 2018 by Ezra Hookano

At Barracuda, we value our relationships with our channel partners, and we want to make sure you’re getting as much as you can out of the relationship as well. Part of that commitment means keeping you up to date on the ways we’re innovating our offerings and programs to provide the solutions you need to meet your customers’ needs in ways that help you enhance your business.

We recently earned several industry awards that highlight two areas where we’re getting this right: email security and partner programs. [Read more…] about 2 Ways to get even more out of your Barracuda partnership

Ezra Hookano

As VP, Channels at Barracuda Ezra is responsible for the direction of Barracuda's channel sales organization and its channel community. He has 25 years of indirect sales experience and a strong record of success growing channel organizations for multiple companies.

http://www.barracuda.com

15+ years of botnets

November 19, 2018 by Christine Barry

As we were preparing to celebrate our 15 year anniversary, news broke that another large botnet is running around infecting home routers. This time it's an older vulnerability being used that should have been patched years ago:

BCMUPnP_Hunter finds its prey by scanning for vulnerable UPnP on TCP port 5431, followed by UDP port 1900 used by Broadcom’s implementation.

Home routers are a favorite vehicle for botnets because there are a bunch of them online and they are rarely updated or even thought of once they've been installed. Today's a good day to add “check on router” to your home maintenance checklist.

The BCMUPnP_Hunter #botnet hit the news last week. This blog looks at where it fits into the long and destructive history of malicious botnets. Click To Tweet

The news about BCMUPnP_Hunter caused me to wonder about botnets in general. How long have we been dealing with them, anyway? What was the first botnet? How did it work?

[Read more…] about 15+ years of botnets

Christine Barry

Christine Barry is Senior Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager at Barracuda. In this role, she helps bring Barracuda stories to life and facilitate communication between the public and Barracuda internal teams. Prior to joining Barracuda, Christine was a field engineer and project manager for K12 and SMB clients for over 15 years. She holds several technology credentials, a Bachelor of Arts, and a Master of Business Administration. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan.

Connect with Christine on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter here.

https://blog.barracuda.com

After 15 years the goal should be to make cybersecurity much less exciting

November 16, 2018 by Mike Vizard

For that last 15 years there has been one inexorable fact about cybersecurity that remains a constant. The size and scope of the attack surface that needs to be defended keeps expanding. Fifteen years ago, the issue was securing PCs accessing servers on a network. Today there are now millions of mobile computing devices accessing sensitive data using a variety of wired and wireless networks that all need to be secured. To make matters even more challenging, servers are now running both on-premises and in public clouds. The applications running in those environments are also becoming more complex thanks to the rise of microservices based on containers that will soon span hybrid cloud computing environments. Add in pending wave of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and it is abundantly clear managing cybersecurity is not for the faint of heart.

'It is abundantly clear managing cybersecurity is not for the faint of heart.' ~@mvizardClick To Tweet

Mike Vizard

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvizard

Fifteen years is a long time in cybersecurity

November 14, 2018 by Phil Muncaster

This month Barracuda Networks celebrates its 15^th anniversary. So it would seem like an opportune moment to take stock of the past decade-and-a-half to see how the threat landscape has changed. Over that time, it’s fundamentally been driven by two major inter-connected themes: technological change and the motivations of those doing the attacking. The former has opened up major new opportunities for the latter, drawing in an ever-more diverse spread of criminal, hacktivist, and nation-state actors.

'Over the last 15 years, the threat landscape has been driven by technological change and the motivations of the attackers, as the former has opened up major new opportunities for the latter.' @philmuncasterClick To Tweet

The good news is that as threats evolve we’ve become better and better as an industry at stopping them. The challenge is to ensure the majority of boards understand the importance of investing enough and in the right areas of people process and technology to adequately manage cyber risk.

Phil Muncaster

Follow Phil on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

http://www.barracuda.com

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