Barracuda ESG were physical or virtual appliances designed to protect email servers from spam, virus, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks. The product line is discontinued.
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KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training
Score 9.1 out of 10
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KnowBe4 is a security awareness and compliance training and simulated social engineering product. It is used by organizations worldwide to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk. The product includes a comprehensive suite of awareness and compliance training, real-time user coaching, AI-powered simulated social engineering, crowdsourced anti-phishing defense and an AI suite that enhances human risk management through personalized training and automation. With…
KnowBe4 has considerably more content and delivers it in a better manner than Barracuda does. KnowBe4 also came in cheaper than the alternatives that we were considering.
KnowBe4 showed superior content and integration with our technology stack. Their overall platform is easily configurable and doesn't tie into an SEG as most of the other offerings do. Allowing us to be flexible with our use case and continue to train no matter our selection of …
Good combination when using their other products like an incident response. When using automated workflows, this makes creating sender policies a breeze. Unfortunately, this can also be done too well as it may filter out valid emails and to resend or place them back into users' mailbox isn't an easy thing to do even if you attempt to resend through the Email Security Gateway.
I don't have any frame of reference for comparison, but the training that I have used has proved impactful for my staff. Since starting KnowBe4 training, we've seen a great increase in the number of phishing attempts, but also a great increase in the number of attempts that have been recognized by staff, and we have thus not been the victim of phishing or other cyberattact vectors
ESS has a simple interface for both users and administrators.
The "Manage Quarantine" button in each email is a direct sign-on link, so users don't have to remember their password to manage their quarantine (this is GOLD, Jerry!).
The baseline functionality (catching spam/malware/phishing/malware attachments/malformed PDFs etc) is super-solid, with few false positives and few false negatives.
You need to take time in adding your contacts to a whitelist so that you don't miss an email.
I recommend changing the time interval; Barracuda notifies you that you have quarantined emails as we were only getting 1 per day and we missed some urgent emails.
The quarantine folder is web based, we'd prefer it to have been an add-in for Outlook.
The provided templates for phishing simulations are mainly available in English. There are also some templates available in our native language, but their number is small. We have seen other platforms offer way more phishing simulation templates in our language.
Although there is a really huge number of training videos available, some of them are outdated and no longer have much to offer. Some cleaning up could help in this direction.
Although there a some games / puzzle like trainings available, we have seen other platforms offer more and better ones (on the other platforms had they had almost no videos at all...). It would help significantly to also invest in enriching the provided puzzles / games.
We have seen other platforms offer games, where, for example, employees of the company can compete against each other while working together in groups to achieve a common goal (e.g., eliminate a fictional security threat that has "hit" the company. Plan the steps needed to be taken, take the steps one after another and have a chance to see the impact each action has. At the end the team that has suffered the least cost to end the threat is the one that wins. Just an example. The point is to make this challenging, using gamification and to make the employees part of the prevention force of the company against cybersecurity threats.
Between the ease of use, cost effectiveness, functionality and continued improvements Knowbe4 continues to make it would be pretty hard to find another competitive product that wraps it all up like KnowBe4 has. Not saying it couldn't happen, but haven't seen anything that competes at this point.
Setting up the Barracuda for use with Microsoft 365 provides issues that Barracuda seems to have no fix for. I mentioned these issues to their support, because I am constantly reminded of them by their system, and I was told that those errors are normal for our setup and to ignore them which is frustrating to me.
KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training is simple to use, simple to administer, effective, with quality content. It is easy to take the training and we have the reminders set so that the longer a user puts the training off, the more frequently they will receive reminder emails. Eventually they get emailed every day until they take the training. But with a simple click, they can get into the training content.
There have only been a handful of outages in the 2 years we have had the product. Even during those instances, parts of the system were still operational
The WebUI is the only piece I find lacking on the Barracuda ESK. Its is not the fastest and is fairly utilitarian in its approach. The Outlook plug-in, while not in wide use here, causes zero slowdown in Outlook or the Barracuda ESG.
Pages load quickly, filter/sort quickly, and don't slow down or freeze. Everything is smooth and very easy to use. There are a places in the UI where you can forget how to get there, but other than that everything is great. We have had no issues using any part of the website.
Barracuda Email Security Gateway support is great at responding and escalating cases when needed. Timeliness is key when dealing with email attacks, spoofing or malware. Barracuda also has great resources for end-user training as our end users are our first line of defense in combatting attacks on our company. Training end-users pays off in time spent dealing with any email attacks
Tech prod support is great! I did have to ask for a new customer success rep, needed a more experienced person to match my 12 years of experience running Cybersec training programs. Would suggest that more matching of rep level of knowledge to client level knowledge would help.
confusing question. I inherited this application so I didnt get any formal training other than the person who was leaving. The CSM provided some later on when I asked in a zoom call
The implementation went really well and KnowBe4 was there the whole time on setup to make sure things were setup correctly. The only thing we had to figure out on our own was to script users automatically being added to security groups. So that when they sync to knowBe4 from AD they are placed into the same/correct groups.
Barracuda integrates well with Office 365 and mail flow is great. It was the first solution we found that was part of a greater suite to fit all the requirements we had. With the Email Security gateway being in the cloud, it required no extra hardware but also nothing new installed on an endpoint as some solutions require.
KnowBe4 offered a significantly more favorable cost-benefit ratio compared to other solutions. Its seamless integration with our existing infrastructure—particularly Active Directory and email systems—was the most compatible with our operational and security requirements.
The product scales greatly. As long as you upgrade the license to support the number of users you are needing, adding in those new users is easy. Also getting those users set up with trainings/campaigns is very easy as well
The team was great to work with and took their time to ensure that we knew what we were doing with the product and that it was set up to meet the specific needs of our organization. This wasn't just a cookie-cutter deployment, but rather they focused specifically on our needs.
The gateway learns current scam which can prevent unmeasureable damage. As a government organization attacks on our network affect public safety.
Previous gateways I have managed have required significant amounts of time grooming. The Barracuda gateway has freed up a great deal of my time due to its intelligence and intent scanning.
I have very few incidences where a legitimate malicious email will pass through the filter. Just one of these emails can wreak havoc on an organization.
With the implementation of KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we have reduced a lot of issues of social engineering attacks like Phishing attacks, Smishing attacks, Vishing attacks, and a lot more. After implementing the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we have seen a significant decrease in the clicking on a phishing email. Now users are aware of phishing attacks and they know how to react to them.
With KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we got another tool Phish Alert Button that we have installed on the user's outlook and after providing training on these topics, now we are receiving a lot of spam report emails are users are protecting them from clicking and just reporting it to the IT team.
With the Phishing test, we are seeing the growth and analyzing how our users will react in the case of a real phishing attack, and with this, we are providing more training to them and going with them as per the test report. This whole process is making our company more stronger against any type pf social engineering attack.
After implementing KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we have seen a lot of improvements in the account compromise case in our company because users are not clicking on fake links now.
