Barrcuda Networks Protects Against Phishing Schemes with New Anti-Spoofing Technique

Phishing schemes are often used to gather confidential information about an organization or its individual users. Such schemes typically involve emails in which the From portion of the email envelope is spoofed to appear as if it was coming from someone within the organization. When enabled, the Barracuda Spam Firewalls new anti-spoofing features will not allow an external email to appear as if it came from inside the organization. Any email that would have this appearance would be blocked or modified such that its origination outside the organization is visible. Recent highly publicized phishing scams, including those perpetrated against AOL, PayPal and eBay users have brought this growing problem to the forefront. However, it is the less publicized incidents that are quite common in daily business activities that can prove detrimental to many organizations. It is quite common for organizations to fall prey to phishers sending spoofed emails that appear to come from the victims colleague with a message appearing to regard official business matters (i.e., Hello! Per our discussion, attached is the outline of tomorrows meeting agenda). While the message seems harmless, the attachment often carries Trojans or viruses that could harm the network if opened. In other such incidences, victims may be tricked into providing password or other confidential information that could be used by the perpetrator to compromise the network. With the Barracuda Spam Firewall, this anti-spoofing feature can be enabled and disabled on a domain-by-domain basis by selecting a checkbox in the domain settings menu of the GUI. The anti-spoofing feature also allows larger organizations to specify a list of IP addresses that are allowed to have a From address that appears from inside the organization to support multiple sites and multiple email servers. This new feature will be deployed to all current Barracuda Spam Firewall customers within the next week and will be automatically included for new and future customers.