Given the significance of ransomware attacks, Toni El Inati – RVP Sales, META & CEE, Barracuda Networks, elaborates on Barracuda’s plan to demonstrate mitigating ransomware at the week-long technology show.
What does your company do and why is it important for you to be exhibiting at GITEX 2021?
Barracuda started with the mission of making robust email security available to all businesses. Today, we maintain our position as the leader in email security, while expanding our offers to protect employees, data, and applications from a wide range of threats. Barracuda provides easy, comprehensive, and affordable solutions for email protection, application and cloud security, network security and data protection. Today, we serve more than 200,000 global customers include several prominent organisations and entities in the Middle East.
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 most safely and securely. We have made strategic acquisitions, introduced innovative new solutions, and upgraded key solutions over the last year. GITEX will allow us to inform the market about the value that these investments deliver to our end customers.
What products or solutions will you be exhibiting throughout the weeklong technology show?
The latest Barracuda research found that ransomware increased 64% YoY and every 11 seconds, an organisation now falls victim to ransomware. Given the significance of this threat, a key focus for Barracuda at GITEX will be to demonstrate our proven approach to mitigating ransomware. This revolves around three fundamentals areas – Protecting user credentials from email attacks; Protecting applications and access, and Protecting data with secure backup.
We intend to also highlight our strong relationship with Microsoft and the value that it delivers to organisations as they embrace cloud solutions such as Office 365. This year, we released the latest version of Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup with a new platform that delivers a fast search and restores experience for Office 365 data, including Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive. This comprehensive, easy-to-use backup solution is fast to get up and running and includes capabilities like granular retention that aren’t included in Microsoft’s native functionality.
Which are the major cybersecurity trends influencing the Middle East?
There are several attack vectors that cybercriminals have been leveraging. Among these, key attack types Barracuda researchers have witnessed over the last year have been:
Social engineering attacks: An average organisation 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 of 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, organisations 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.
How does your offerings enable organisations to enhance their cybersecurity preparedness in the new normal?
Cybersecurity has been one of the few industry segments that has grown significantly since the onset of the pandemic. This if course relates to the heightened level of cybercriminal activity last the last 12. At Barracuda, we have been closely monitoring the threat landscape and we continue to offer best-of-breed solutions to counter new and evolving threats, and thus stay a step ahead of attackers in the new normal.
GITEX enables us to conduct demos and POCs for customers which allows us to create a deeper and more impactful engagement right from the onset. Our objective, therefore, is to offer these demos to as many customers and prospects as possible.
What special engagements or events are you planning to network and entertain with your partners and customers besides meeting them at GITEX Technology Week?
We are planning to host a dinner for our partners during GITEX week as a show of thanks for their support and commitment. Aside from this though, our focus is to maximise the value of our presence at the main show itself. GITEX of course represents a significant investment of budget, time, and effort to ensuring we do everything we can to have impactful and fruitful engagements with attendees is key.
Where can we find you at GITEX?
Key executives from Barracuda’s Middle East and international technical and sales teams will be present at our stand (A20 in Hall 2) at GITEX 2021.