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Barracuda now uses AI to protect businesses from real-time spear phishing

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MUMBAI, INDIA: Barracuda Networks announced the availability of Barracuda Sentinel, a comprehensive cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) solution for real-time spear phishing and cyber fraud defense. It utilizes AI to protect people, businesses, and brands from spear phishing, impersonation attempts, business email compromise (BEC), and cyber fraud.

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Spear phishing is rapidly becoming the most devastating cybersecurity threat. Tens of thousands of companies and individuals have fallen prey, sending wire transfers and sensitive customer and employee information to attackers impersonating their CEO, boss, or trusted colleague. The FBI reports that organizations have already lost $5 billion due to BEC. Beyond the financial impact, these attacks can cause irreparable damage to an organization’s reputation and brand. Because the attacks are highly personalized—and typically contain no malicious attachments or links—existing security solutions fail to detect them.

“Spear phishing is rampant. It’s no longer just the large enterprises or C-suite that need to be on high alert—everyone is a target,” said Asaf Cidon, vice president of content security services at Barracuda Networks. “We see novel combinations of highly personalized tactics—spoofing your domain, impersonating your CEO, engaging in convincing conversations with your employees. In today’s dynamic threat environment, the best defense includes a combination of people and technology. Barracuda Sentinel leverages artificial intelligence to give customers—people—a comprehensive way to stop spear phishing and cyber fraud attacks in real time.”

Barracuda Sentinel combines three powerful layers of artificial intelligence technology, domain fraud visibility, and anti-fraud training, into a comprehensive solution that guards against these personalized attacks. Barracuda Sentinel directly connects to communication platforms, such as Microsoft Office 365, which allows immediate access to current and historical data required to understand an organization’s existing communication patterns and prevent impersonation attempts.

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It examines information from multiple signals to learn the unique communications patterns of each company and to analyze the content of the messages for sensitive information. Barracuda Sentinel combines this messaging intelligence to determine with a high degree of accuracy whether an email is part of a spear phishing attack.

Barracuda Sentinel also gives companies visibility into domain fraud and protects against spoofing by setting up DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance). DMARC allows companies to monitor emails sent from their domain, ensures deliverability for legitimate email traffic, and prevents unauthorized messages from being sent from company domains. Barracuda Sentinel delivers visibility and analysis of DMARC reports, which prevents spoofing-based spear phishing and brand hijacking.

The solution leverages intelligence gathered from its machine learning engine to identify high-risk individuals within an organization. Once identified, Barracuda Sentinel offers a set of tools to periodically and automatically train and test the security awareness of these employees with simulated spear phishing attacks.

Barracuda Sentinel works alongside existing email security solutions, including native Microsoft Office 365, Barracuda Essentials, or other email security solutions. Barracuda Sentinel’s API-based architecture is designed to make it easy to extend protection beyond email, to additional communications platforms such as G Suite, Slack, social media, and others.

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