Webinar: Phishing got smarter. Keep up, with AI-powered security

When email gateway security got good enough to spot most malware-bearing malicious emails, cyber crooks got wise and added sophisticated phishing techniques to their repertoire. Because phishing emails don’t have any malicious code in them, traditional gateway defenses couldn’t detect them.

So, the security industry (with Barracuda leading the way, naturally) got to work developing new technologies and strategies for spotting and blocking these new threats.

Smarter users, smarter security

One important advance was the development of sophisticated new security awareness training solutions like Barracuda Security Awareness Training. After all, if you can’t keep phishing emails from reaching inboxes, ensuring that recipients can spot and report them is the next best thing.

But of course it’s not foolproof. Anyone can make a mistake when distracted or in a hurry. Heck, I’ve been working in IT security for more than 20 years, and just last week I clicked on a link in a text that I realized a few seconds later was an obvious phishing attempt.

So, in addition to smarter users, combating phishing requires smarter security. And that’s what’s driven the development of AI-powered inbox-protection solutions like Barracuda Phishing and Impersonation Protection.

These solutions use APIs and machine learning to analyze traffic patterns using a wide variety of parameters — e.g., sender, recipient, geolocation, time of day, day of the week, and many others — to identify anomalous communications that indicate malicious intent. This enables them to block the vast majority of phishing attempts.

The escalating arms race

Now, do you think the bad guys saw the development of AI-based anti-phishing and decided to give up and start earning an honest living? No, of course you don’t. As anyone could have predicted, they started coming up with new ways to evade even these solutions — meaning that those of us on the side of truth and justice have had to develop new capabilities to defeat them.

Get all the facts at a new webinar coming up on March 23. At the webinar, Product Marketing Director Olesia Klevchuk and Senior Product Manager Prebh Dev Singh will use real-world examples recently uncovered by Barracuda threat teams to provide a detailed explanation of how some of these new phishing attacks operate, including:

• Exploiting online tools such as Google Translate
• Embedding special characters that evade detection
• Using image-only emails with malicious hyperlinks built in

And they’ll show you how Barracuda developers have responded by adding new capabilities to our email protection solutions that can find and block these advanced phishing tactics — ensuring that you can keep your organization safe from credential theft, account takeover, fraud, ransomware, and data breaches that can result from a successful phishing attempt.