Pre-GITEX Interview with Toni El Inati from Barracuda Networks

Toni El Inati, RVP Sales, META & CEE, Barracuda Networks, was interviewed by TECHx prior to the Gitex Technology Week. Let’s take a peek at what Barracuda Networks has been up to recently.

TECHx: How excited are you for GITEX Technology Week? What are your hopes from this year’s event?

Toni: GITEX gives us the unique opportunity to meet a large number of our customers and partners at a single location – something that has been notably missing over the last year. With the UAE and Qatar once again opening up borders, this year we look forward to once again welcoming our Qatari customers. The country represents a significant market for Barracuda, so this opportunity is indeed very important to us.

Over this last year, Barracuda has grown its regional team in countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, and Morocco. Because of travel restrictions, I haven’t had the chance to meet many of the new members face-to-face. From a team-building and company culture perspective, GITEX will therefore prove invaluable. We intend to fly in key Barracuda executives from across the region – making sure of course that they travel and attend in the most safe and secure manner.

TECHx: How are cyber security solutions evolving in the market today? What are the most significant trends in the region that you see emerging?

Toni: Cybersecurity has been one of the few industry segments that has grown significantly since the onset of the pandemic. This of course relates to the heightened level of cybercriminal activity last the last 12 months. At Barracuda, we have been closely monitoring the threat landscape and the key attack types our researchers have witnessed over the last year have been:

Social engineering attacks: An average organization is targeted by over 700 social engineering attacks each year of which phishing accounts for the large majority (49%), followed by scamming (39%). The majority (43%) of these phishing attacks impersonate Microsoft, while WeTransfer (18%), DHL (8%), and Google (8%) are also popular brands with attackers. Email remains a top threat vector as 1 in 10 social engineering attacks is business email compromise (BEC).

Ransomware: Barracuda researchers saw a 64% increase in attacks, year over year with attacks on corporations and businesses making up over half (57%) of all ransomware attacks. The cost of ransomware is also increasing as 8% of the incidents had a ransom ask less than $10 million, and 14% of the incidents had a ransom ask greater than $30 million.

Automated attacks on applications: Organisations are struggling with bad bots, broken APIs, and supply chain attacks. In our recent ‘The state of application security in 2021’ study, we found that on average, organizations were successfully breached twice in the past 12 months as a direct result of an application vulnerability. 44% of respondents said bot attacks contributed to a successful security breach that exploited a vulnerability in the organization’s applications. Businesses are struggling to keep up with the pace of these attacks, particularly newer threats like bot attacks, API attacks, and supply chain attacks, and they need help filling these gaps effectively.

TECHx: Given the increase in assaults during the epidemic, how is Barracuda Networks assisting companies in combating the menace of ransomware?

Toni: Effectively mitigating the threat of ransomware calls for a multi-layered approach and at Barracuda, we have a clearly defined, 3-step defense strategy. In line with this, we offer the following solutions which together deliver robust protection against ransomware:

Protect user credentials from email attacks: Barracuda Total Email Protection combines the traditional email gateway with AI-enabled phishing and account takeover protection to detect and stop these costly attacks.

Barracuda security awareness training and phishing simulation provide all necessary tools to train your users to recognize and report phishing emails, which will prevent email fraud and data loss.

Protect applications and access: Barracuda solutions such as our Web Application Firewalls provide powerful, comprehensive application security that is easy to deploy. In addition to protecting the application itself, it is also important to protect access to the application.

Barracuda provides a Zero Trust Access solution that can protect access to your applications and workloads.

Protect data with secure backup: Barracuda’s backup solution runs on a hardened Linux platform, which makes it less susceptible to ransomware attacks and does not present as a network share, which makes it harder for attackers to access.

Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup can protect your Office 365 data, while Barracuda Backup protects your onsite data with encryption and controls access to your data with role-based access control and multifactor authentication.