Barracuda Spam, Malware, and Advanced Threat Protection

Barracuda's Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) combines behavioral, heuristic, and sandboxing technologies to protect against zero-hour and targeted attacks. ATP automatically scans email attachments in real time; suspicious attachments are detonated in a sandbox environment to observe behavior. In addition to blocking the attachment, the results are integrated into Barracuda Real-Time System providing protection for all other customers.

The Barracuda combats phishing attempts by combining anti-fraud intelligence, behavioral and heuristic detection, protection against sender spoofing (i.e., spammers spoofing valid email addresses), along with domain name validation to detect and block phishing attempts.

For protection against social engineering attacks, review our Impersonation Protection.

Barracuda leverages the cloud for dynamic, real-time threat analysis, attachment sandboxing, and URL protection to prevent malware from affecting email users.

A popular method that attackers use to deliver malware relies on URLs that contain malicious code, which can be invisibly downloaded and can trigger a much larger attack. Link Protection automatically rewrites these URLs so that Barracuda can sandbox the request at click time to block malicious links. Rewritten URLs do not expire and function indefinitely.

More sophisticated attackers make clever modifications to URLs so they look genuine, but are not. The most common technique is omitting letters or using convincing “typos” that even users who check URLs before clicking often miss. Barracuda’s Link Protection includes typosquatting detection, which automatically identifies and redirects these URLs to our sandbox at click time to block malicious activity.

With a long-standing heritage in spam protection, Barracuda remains the leader in identifying and blocking spam. A comprehensive set of security layers ensures that organizations remain productive in the face of evolving threats.

Barracuda identifies email from known spammers and determines whether domains embedded in email lead to known spam or malware domains. It leverages industry-leading techniques that protect against attempts to embed text inside images with the intent of hiding content from traditional spam filters.

As virus attacks become more sophisticated and complex, email infrastructure requires advanced virus protection. The potential for the destruction and release of information or the disruption of a network severely impacts productivity and can lead to financial loss.

Barracuda scans email and incoming files using three powerful layers of polymorphic virus scanning technologies. It also decompresses archives for complete protection. Powerful virus definitions are automatically updated to maintain the most up-to-date protection against email-borne viruses.

Not every attack is focused on planting a virus or getting users to send their credit card number or to click on a malicious link. Often, the objective of the attack is focused on disabling a network or mitigating its effectiveness. As a cloud-based service Barracuda Email Protection is positioned to stop spammers before they overload an email server.

Outbound filtering prevents organizations from being put on spam block lists and prevents outbound attacks originating from inside the network. Employees can inadvertently cause internal systems to become a source for botnet spam. Using a subset of its defense layers, Barracuda’s outbound filtering stops outbound spam and viruses.

Barracuda Email Continuity Service ensures that email operations continue by failing over to a cloud-based email service in the event primary email services become unavailable. During email server outages, an emergency mailbox allows users to continue sending, receiving, reading, and responding to email.

Barracuda Email Protection is integrated with the Barracuda Cloud Control web-based management portal, which leverages Barracuda’s global cloud infrastructure and provides a global view to centrally manage all of Barracuda’s solutions through a “single pane of glass” interface. Barracuda Cloud Control also allows administrators to centrally manage policies and configuration. The simple interface makes it easy for organizations to implement and manage the service with minimal IT overhead.

Our email protection leverages Barracuda Central to identify email from known spammers and determine whether domains embedded in email lead to known spam or malware domains, and it is continually updated with intelligence on the latest threats across all threat vectors. Barracuda Central is our 24x7 centralized threat intelligence gathering organization, where the latest threats across all vectors are analyzed and added to our extensive databases. Over 200,000 organizations worldwide provide intelligence to Barracuda Central, and our email security is updated on a continuous basis.