Barracuda Networks Adds Ability to Scan Outbound Email Messages
Barracuda Networks has added an ability to analyze outbound messages for anomalies to its email protection platform.
In addition, Barracuda Networks is now providing organizations with an option to integrate its Email Protection Platform with email using systems from Microsoft and Google via application programming interfaces (APIs)
Finally, organizations can also take advantage of prevention, detection, automated incident response and email authentication via lower-cost value plans, in addition to being provided with access to complementary onboarding and set-up services.
Brian Downey, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks, said the ability to analyze outbound messages is critical in an era where cybercriminals now routinely commandeer email systems to launch phishing attacks against individuals that have a relationship with an organization they trust. Cybersecurity teams can now more easily identify those instances using a set of machine learning algorithms that Barracuda Networks has extended to now analyze outbound and inbound messages, he said.
Business partners and customers, along with various regulatory bodies, are holding organizations more accountable for cybersecurity, including any damage inflicted by systems they are expected to secure. Cybercriminals today routinely use stolen credentials to log into systems. It’s incumbent on cybersecurity teams to discover their activity, which fortunately machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) are going to make easier to discover.
Of course, cybercriminals are also taking advantage of many of those same AI technologies to inflict more damage faster at significantly higher levels of scale. The intensity of the cat-and-mouse game that cybersecurity adversaries and defenders play is only going to increase.
In the meantime, email remains a favorite attack vector for cybercriminals. A recent Barracuda Networks report revealed the company analyzed 69 million attacks across 4.5 million mailboxes in a single year. Those attacks are increasingly difficult for end users to recognize as cybercriminals leverage AI to better hone their social engineering techniques. Additionally, they now regularly include QR codes and bit.ly links that divert end users to sites where their login credentials are then stolen. Those attacks are so relatively simple that there isn’t much of a need to invest in building complex malware to compromise an IT environment.
The challenge is, as always, making it simple enough for organizations of any size to protect their email systems that are core to their business workflows, said Downey. Many of those organizations don’t have cybersecurity specialists, so the email security platform needs to be simple enough for anyone of almost any skill level to deploy and manage, he added.
Of course, there are plenty of other messaging platforms that organizations are starting to employ alongside traditional email, but organizations are still sharing thousands of emails every day. Responsibility for securing the platforms used to send those messages generally falls to large understaffed cybersecurity and IT teams that are hoping end users won’t in the first place ever see a malicious email that once inadvertently clicked unleashes a wave of havoc. Given the number of email messages being sent and received and the number of attacks being launched, the chances there will be an email-related security incident are still a lot higher than anyone cares to really admit.
