With the ransomware threat continuing to grow and become one of the most critical issues facing your customers, you need to be equipped to have solid conversations about it with your customers and help them build robust strategies to prevent attacks – and Barracuda is perfectly positioned to help you do that.
So it’s worth spending a few minutes of your time reading this article and figuring out how you can build the points below into your next conversation with a customer.
Some argue Australia is a “sitting duck” for ransomware attacks. Cybercrime cost Australian businesses and individuals $33 billion in 2020-2021. Those that have fallen victim to attack this year include Nine Entertainment.
Criminals have refined their ransomware tactics, so their attacks are no longer isolated, but part of larger, more sophisticated attacks.
They encrypt and steal sensitive data from their victims and demand payment in exchange for the encryption key or a promise to not publish or sell the data to other criminals. Criminals cannot be trusted, so victims who pay are often contacted several months later and asked for another payment to keep the stolen data secret. Any data stolen in a ransomware attack is compromised forever, as many ransomware criminals will accept payment but sell the data anyway.
Barracuda has a broad portfolio of products and solutions that can provide multiple layers of protection (Defence-in-depth) against ransomware attacks, as well as give organisations the ability to fully recover from an attack, without paying a ransom. They include:
- Inbox Protection – 91 per cent of attacks start with an email. However, traditional email gateway solutions can only filter out certain types of malicious email. They can’t stop legitimate-looking email from internal email accounts that have been compromised. Barracuda Email Protection combines artificial intelligence and a global threat intelligence database to stop email threats that others can’t. Barracuda Sentinel can detect account takeovers or impersonation attempts to stop attacks in real time, by using AI to learn the various communication patterns between users and identify anomalies.
- Incident Response – No email defence solution can provide 100 per cent protection. So, when a malicious email ends up in a user’s inbox, it must be dealt with quickly. Slow, manual, unreliable incident response processes waste precious time and allow the attacker to further infiltrate the organisation, increasing the risk of a ransomware attack. Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response can send alerts to impacted users and automatically remove malicious emails from their inboxes, which saves time and money.
- User Awareness Training – When it comes to email-based attacks, humans are the weakest link. Criminals are very good at creating malicious emails that look normal and harmless, that entice users to click on a fake sign-in page, or open a malicious file attachment. Barracuda PhishLine helps organisations to educate and train their staff on how to spot suspicious emails and avoid becoming a victim. Email threat awareness campaigns can be up and running in under a minute with the Quick Launch process, or completely customised.
- Firewalling – Ransomware attackers can also infiltrate an organisation via their networks, public facing websites, API’s or web browsers. So, it’s very important to protect these attack vectors, using Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls, Web Application Firewalls and Web Security Gateways.
- Data Protection – The number one recommendation to protect against ransomware is to maintain a regular backup of your data to recover from. Microsoft also recommends that you use third-party backup for your Office 365 data as they only ensure the availability of the service, not the backup and recovery of your data. Barracuda Backup and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup provide multiple layers of defence against Ransomware attacks, such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) separation of the administrative role, IP restrictions to prevent access from unauthorised networks, maintaining multiple copies of the backup data, all of which prevent attackers from deleting backups.
Businesses of all sizes need assistance in building a robust strategy to counter ransomware. Barracuda partners can underpin that with a portfolio of defences that provide multiple layers of defence.
Visit https://www.barracuda.com/ransomware for more information or talk to us about how Barracuda technology assists a ransomware mitigation strategy.
