Barracuda is pleased to announce the release of Barracuda Backup version 6.3. This release is currently in early availability (EA) and will be generally available (GA) in the fall. You can read the press release here and the release notes here.
This new release brings a handful of performance improvements and new capabilities to the Barracuda Backup. Here's a summary of the new features, with some help from the Barracuda Campus documentation:
[Read more…] about Barracuda Backup now has more features and greater capacity
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.
We have a dynamic and vibrant MSP community in the UK, and demand for simple and secure data protection solutions is growing rapidly. I look forward to expanding Barracuda’s channel in the UK to build this business, and engaging with MSPs to help them grow and add greater value to their managed services portfolio.
One of the police departments that was hit with ransomware in Massachusetts didn’t pay the ransom, yet were able to get their files unlocked. How did they do this, when even computer experts acknowledge the encryption is nearly unbreakable?
Locky was identified in mid-February, and within 2 weeks had become the second most prevalent version of ransomware around the world. Locky has been spread primarily through spam email with Word attachments. The attachment contains a malicious macro and is usually presented as an invoice. When the user attempts to open the Word document, the text is scrambled and the user is instructed to enable macros. Enabling the macros will allow the virus to contact a remote server, download an executable, and run the file. This executable is the Locky ransomware that will execute immediate and begin to encrypt the files on the computer and unmapped network shares.
Ransomware has been dominating the news for several weeks, and is likely to stay in the news for most of the year. Ransomware is a distinct type of cyber attack, in that it extorts payment from the victim in exchange for allowing access to something that was encrypted in the attack. The most prevalent type of malware used in this kind of crime is ‘crypto-ransomware', which normally encrypts the files on the compromised system, and then demands a ransom in return for the ability to decrypt and recover the files. The latest iteration of crypto-ransomware is called Locky, and is the most advanced version of ransomware we have seen in the wild.