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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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

Cybersecurity professionals should be resolved to prioritize efforts in 2019

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One of the most frustrating things about cybersecurity is the inordinate amount of time and effort gets applied to protecting assets that in the grand scheme of things don’t have much value. The reason this occurs is that most organizations are trying to defend every file equally versus focusing their efforts on the data that has the highest value.

The challenge cybersecurity professionals have, of course, is identifying what data that has the highest value to the business and then crafting cybersecurity controls commensurate with the actual value of that data.

Recent survey: Business managers must do a better job at communicating the value of data to their cybersecurity teams. Many IT professionals overestimate the importance of low-value data.Click To Tweet

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Five Pillars to a well-architected Azure security framework

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This post is the second in a series of eight on the five pillars to actionable cloud security.  For the rest of the series, visit the Five Pillars blog page here.

The cloud is transformational – but the cloud is different.  Companies migrating to the cloud quickly – and sometimes painfully – learn that translating their on-premises security framework to the cloud is more difficult than they presumed.  Not all on-premises solutions will work the same if at all in the cloud, cloud infrastructures themselves contain numerous security services that need to be incorporated, and the very mechanisms behind operating securely in the cloud are different than traditional on-premises solutions.

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CFOs in the crosshairs: how hackers make your profits their own

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In December 2015, a money transfer company Xoom was expecting to take a one-time charge of $30.8 million. So, when a CFO and finance staff received an email request with instructions to make the transfer, they promptly wired the money. Unfortunately, this request was part of an employee impersonation attack, with all of the funds transferred to a fraudulent account. As a result of this attack Xoom’s shares plummeted by 17% and their CFO took immediate resignation.

Free Barracuda webinar on understanding and preventing finance phishing fraud. Details in this Barracuda Blog post.Click To Tweet

CFOs and finance staff are one of the most targeted employees in the company when it comes to email fraud. Hackers choose Finance employees due to their access to company finances and other sensitive information. Most of CFO attacks begin with a targeted phishing attacks, where attackers impersonate other executives within the organization to request wire transfers.

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New Year, New Threats? Some 2019 Cyber Security Predictions

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The first week back to work after the Christmas break is usually a rude awakening from the previous few days feasting and fun. And when it comes to cybersecurity, the chances are you’ll be plunged straight back into it as the black hats look to exploit any weaknesses they can find. As we head into 2019 it will become increasingly clear that organisations must do better — with the people, as well as the process and technology — to manage cyber risk. If they fail, there are some regulators out there about to bare their teeth.

'As we head into 2019 it will become increasingly clear that organisations must do better — with the people, as well as the process and technology — to manage cyber risk. ' ~@PhilMuncasterClick To Tweet

As 5G lands, beware IoT risk

The Internet of Things (IoT) is already making a huge impact on society and business, embedded in everything from home devices to drug infusion pumps, manufacturing machinery and cars. As 5G drives an even greater proliferation of smart devices, there will be a two-fold threat to firms. First is the risk of Mirai-like IoT malware infecting unsecured consumer and SOHO-grade devices. The resulting botnets could drive an uptick in damaging DoS, crypto-mining, click fraud and much more. Nokia claimed in December that botnet activity represented 78% of malware detection events in communication service provider (CSP) networks in 2018, up from just 33% in 2016.

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