Some of the recent threat trends revealed by Barracuda Insight include:

• PDF files represent the highest volume of weaponized file types transmitted through observed attack surfaces because of their simple construction and easy transmittable abilities. PDFs scanned in the last three months showed nearly 41 million were part of an attack. PDFs often contain links to bad sites and active scripts.
• The most sophisticated attacks with the highest efficacy ride over embedded scripts such as JavaScript and VisualBasic. Recent findings revealed that over 75 percent of these scripts are malicious with JS often embedded in HTML, or other rich document formats such as rich text format and Office. A sample of 70 million Office documents scanned in the last three months found more than 4.7 million malicious or suspicious.
• Compressed files are an increasingly popular way for criminals to transmit disguised attacks and hide non-malware infections such as PowerShell scripts. An example of this took place in September of 2017 when Barracuda detected and blocked a massive ransomware campaign with over 27 million emails reaching customers in less than 24 hours.

Barracuda Security Insight expects these threat trends to continue with extensive use of weaponized file types to carry out massive attacks. In addition, the Equifax breach, which exposed sensitive information of some 145.5 million Americans, and other cybersecurity events have resulted in the significant loss of personally identifiable information. Barracuda anticipates an increased use of this information for both mass phishing and targeted spear phishing attacks.

“Organizations often become aware of vicious cyberattacks after the damage has already been done,” Fleming Shi, SVP of Technology at Barracuda said. “By offering a free global advisory platform like Barracuda Security Insight, we can help heighten security awareness by proactively identifying the most current threats that should be on everyone's radar. Those who use the platform can ultimately gain a better understanding of the threat landscape in real-time — an awareness that can lead to an overall improved security posture.”

Barracuda Security Insight includes real-time activity seen from the following traffic: email-borne attacks containing malicious links and attachments, malware, ransomware, and botnets; network perimeter, including zero hour vulnerability exploits, brute force attacks, DDoS, spyware, and spam; web access and browsing attacks involving ransomware, malware, and vulnerability exploits in the wild; and endpoints: such as malware, persistent spyware, botnets, ad and click fraud, IoT malware, and compromised dead apps.

Barracuda Security Insight is available via the Barracuda website and also provides an open API integration into applications from common web portals and dashboards, and digital assistants such as Alexa.