Barracuda MSP Industry and Tech Blog

More than three-quarters of targeted cyber-threats start with an email, and according to a global research study conducted by Barracuda in June 2018, 87 percent of IT professionals said that their company faced an email-based security attack in the past year.

What pops up in your mind when you hear the word: community? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is your neighborhood, a book club, a support group, or maybe something entirely different. To us, a community is a group of people who are working together towards similar goals; people who want to learn, grow, and help others be successful in their endeavors.

One of the things that we want to instill in our partners, is that they aren’t alone in their day-to-day struggles and that we are here to help. That’s one of the many reasons why we started our Barracuda MSP Insiders Community! The hub is available to any Barracuda MSP partner, and it is always growing and changing. We asked Lindsay Faria, the director of partner marketing at Barracuda MSP, what she would tell a new partner joining us about this platform. Lindsay shared:

Domain Name System (DNS) server attacks are becoming a more prevalent threat than ever, and MSPs and their customers need to be prepared. According to a new study by EfficientIP, 77 percent of organizations surveyed reported experiencing a DNS attack thus far in 2018. The global frequency of these attacks is on the rise, as are the costs associated with them. The survey shows that the average cost of a DNS attack in the U.S. alone has climbed 57 percent over the past year to $654,000 in 2018.

Chances are, if you’re talking about cyber security, your SMB customers are probably overwhelmed. Cyber criminals are continually finding more and more ways to infiltrate networks—whether it’s through unsecured IoT devices, phishing emails, or an unpatched backdoor in the network—and your SMB customers are at risk. That’s where you can come in! 

Have you ever heard the phrase: “Content is king?” If you have a marketing background or have been trying to implement a marketing strategy for your MSP business, it might be a phrase you’ve run into more than once. If not, that’s okay! It’s not too late to start developing your content marketing plan.

It’s no secret that IT service providers are busy. You and your team are working hard to proactively protect SMBs’ business-critical data, safeguard their systems from the most recent threats, and get their systems back up and running if something does go wrong.

Being busy is a good thing, but it can mean you don’t get to devote enough attention to other areas of your business. For example, you might not have enough time to launch a marketing campaign about why it’s important for customers to protect their Office 365 accounts. That’s where your vendors—specifically Barracuda MSP—can lend a hand!

At the heart of most cybersecurity breaches is a faulty patch management process. A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of ServiceNow found that 57 percent of organizations that reported a breach suffered because a patch that was available to safe-guard against that vulnerability had not been applied. That means that 57 percent of those breaches could have been prevented easily!

Cybercriminals are master manipulators—and they are working harder than ever before. They are crafting believable emails, tricking users into entering their credentials, and even squatting on compromised accounts to get additional intel—to create even more believable attacks. And if that’s not bad enough, there is no sign of it slowing down.

Are you ready to protect and support your customers in a public cloud environment? As more SMBs move toward public clouds like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, they’ll soon be looking to IT service providers to help them secure their business-critical data in these environments.

According to a report from 451 Research, 90 percent of organizations are using some sort of cloud service, and 60 percent of workloads will be running in some form of hosted cloud services by 2019. This creates a tremendous opportunity for IT service providers to help customers not only move those workloads to the cloud—but also to protect them. With attacks on Microsoft Azure increasing 300 percent in Q1 2017, it might be better to take action sooner rather than later.

Web applications have become a key part of how businesses of all sizes operate, particularly as more data and apps move to the cloud. But they’re also vulnerable targets.

According to WhiteHat Security’s 2017 Application Security Statistics Report, 75 percent of attacks target applications, and 25 percent attack the network perimeter. But for most companies, security spending doesn’t match up to that reality. The report shows that 90 percent of security investment is in perimeter security, and just 10 percent of security investment is in application security.