The cybersecurity vendor is also debuting new bundles and complimentary support for partners, according to Chief Product Officer Neal Bradbury.
Barracuda Networks is rolling out a set of new email security capabilities aimed at protecting against top threats including account takeover, along with new bundles and complimentary support for partners, Barracuda Chief Product Officer Neal Bradbury told CRN.
The updates, which Barracuda planned to announce Tuesday, come as phishing and social engineering remain among the most-pressing cyber threats for organizations — with many email-derived attacks now believed to be enhanced with the help of GenAI tools.
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Barracuda’s latest updates to its SaaS-based Email Protection offering will bring new features for securing against account takeover attacks as well as bring simplified threat response and mitigation capabilities to a broader set of customer tiers, Bradbury (pictured) said in an interview.
For instance, capabilities for proactive account compromise prevention and threat response are now included at the lower tiers for the first time, he said.
The move is “bringing this functionality to our entire install base, including those that are cost-conscious with security and don’t have massive budgets,” Bradbury said.
In terms of new capabilities added with the latest Email Protection release, Barracuda is debuting account takeover protection that leverages analysis of outbound email activity in addition to inbound email monitoring, according to the company.
This means that through utilizing more behavioral signals from outbound emails, Barracuda can now detect and automatically shut down a greater number of account takeovers, Bradbury said.
For instance, the new capabilities can assess whether any changes have occurred in how many emails a user sends in a certain amount of time and whether the user is sending emails to someone they don’t normally contact, he said — and Barracuda has ultimately “retrained the machine-learning classifiers to be able to go and block those.”
Another major upgrade in the new update to Email Protection is around email threat mitigation, with Barracuda now giving IT administrators the ability to easily quarantine suspicious emails even at the basic tier of the platform, according to Bradbury.
Partner Perspective
One solution provider that has already been using the threat mitigation capabilities is Focus Technology, a Boston-based partner of Barracuda. Malakai Freeman, vice president of managed services and technology at Focus Technology, applauded Barracuda’s announcements of expanded Email Protection capabilities including around threat response and mitigation.
“Being able to just click a button and then have a potential threat removed from the inboxes of our customers — that’s been a game-changer for us,” Freeman said.
The expanded account takeover prevention capabilities are also expected to be a massive boost for Focus and its customers, which predominantly are organizations with between 100 and 200 employees, though Focus serves businesses of all sizes, he said.
For all partners, Barracuda is also rolling out new bundling options that make it easier to get up and running with Email Protection for securing customers, Bradbury said.
The new update “brings it all together in one pricing and packaging,” he said. “It combines a lot of the onboarding wizards that exist there as we move forward, and allows you to do almost an inline deployment.”
Meanwhile, in terms of support enhancements, Barracuda is now offering free onboarding and setup assistance to partners in connection with the Email Protection offering, which previously was a paid option, according to Bradbury.
Ultimately, Bradbury said, “we hope that with the newer bundles and the way that we have packaged a lot of these advanced technologies, it gives them a leg-up as they look at competing with other partners or other offerings.”
