Barracuda Networks unveiled new threat detection capabilities fueled by multimodal AI that deliver context-aware protection against emerging attacks. The new capabilities give Barracuda’s platform the ability to protect against attacks with accuracy and speed by simultaneously correlating and analyzing diverse text and visual data types – including URLs, documents, images, QR codes and more. The new capabilities introduce a new integration with multimodal AI, technology that synthesizes and interprets numerous data streams in various formats, with ML classifiers and a purpose-built sandbox engine. Doing so delivers a faster, smarter and more adaptive defense layer that detects more than three times as many malicious files at eight times the speed of previous models. The capabilities significantly strengthen Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection, which provides layered security across the Barracuda platform. The new capabilities also enhance Barracuda LinkProtect, which inspects URLs for hidden threats, malicious scripts, suspicious redirects and other attacks using a virtual sandbox and secure, isolated browser environment. By incorporating multimodal AI, Barracuda can now detect not only known threat signatures but also subtle anomalies across multiple content formats that may indicate novel or zero-day attacks. The capability is particularly useful at a time when threat actors continue to blend social engineering, image-based lures and malicious links into more convincing and evasive campaigns.