Week 32: Barracuda Email Security
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
Happy Tech Tuesday! This week, we go over Barracuda Email Security!
Wheeler currently uses the Barracuda Sentinel and Email Security Service to block a lot of dangerous phishing emails and quite a bit of spam, too. Throughout the last year, it has saved us from a few attacks through email. This document will go over the two leading services that provide us with some of the best email defenses available today.
Barracuda Sentinel
Barracuda Sentinel is the leading comprehensive AI solution for real-time defense against business email compromise (BEC), spear phishing, account takeover, social engineering attacks, impersonation, and other cyber fraud. It is powered by an AI that detects and blocks spear phishing and socially engineered attacks in real time and identifies which of you are at highest risk for being attacked. Messages identified as impersonation attempts, BEC, or spear phishing attacks are automatically moved to your Junk Email folder in your Outlook Inbox, and you and I will receive an alert about the potential threat.
Once potentially malicious or dangerous emails have been sent to your Junk Email folder in Outlook, you will receive an email from Wheeler CPA Helpdesk - Security Notifications <noreply@barracuda.com> like the one below for each email.
Barracuda Email Security Service (ESS)
In addition to this, for all regular spam emails (bulk email), we have a brand new, easy-to-manage Barracuda quarantine. This quarantine should not contain anything but spam - such as unsolicited advertising. However, you all will have access to your own quarantine, should you receive a notification that you have emails waiting. We will start the notification interval for every 4 hours and each of you are able to refine their own schedule from one-hour intervals up to 24-hour intervals, or turn them off completely.
The quarantine digest (summary) is sent when new quarantined email is saved in your Inbox since the last notification cycle. Every four hours, the quarantine notification service runs for all users. If there is no new quarantined email for you since the last notification interval, no quarantine digest is generated or sent to you for that period.
The links in the quarantine notification email allow you to access your Barracuda Email Security Service user account without entering your username and password. The link is valid for seven days. After that, you must manually login to https://ess.barracudanetworks.com with your normal Wheeler credentials. The Barracuda ESS web interface includes the Message Log from which you can manage your quarantined messages.
The links in the Actions column allow you to:
- Deliver – Click to deliver the message to regular Inbox.
- Allow List – Click to allow the sender. All future messages from the sender are allowed and go directly to your regular Inbox.
- Block List – Click to have the sender added to the block list.
Note that quarantined messages are deleted after 30 days.
The quarantine notification also includes a link to take you directly to the blocked message filter in the Message Log. Click the link to view blocked messages. Use your Wheeler email address (and password, if asked) to sign into Barracuda.
Message Log
Use the Message Log to manage mail. The Message Log page displays all email messages that come through the Barracuda ESS to your account. You can filter messages by All, Allowed, UI Delivered, Not Allowed, Blocked, Deferred, or Quarantined using the dropdown menu. Note that messages are deleted after 30 days.
Messages are blocked due to the following:
- Spam and virus policies set by me for the Wheeler domain; and
- Email address or domain block policies, as well as email from other users, set by me for the Wheeler domain.
Messages are deferred for various reasons. Click the Help icon on the Message Log page for more information as well as details on searching for and filtering messages.
For a short, 4-minute end-user training for the Message Log, please click the following link: https://campus.barracuda.com/to/12CC.
Please watch until the second part of the video starts at 4:18 as only the first part of this training video is relevant to our firm.