Endpoint security firm Carbon Black has today announced its acquisition of Confer, a next-generation antivirus (NGAV) company.
By adding Confer’s NGAV product (to be renamed ‘Cb Defense’) to its portfolio, Carbon Black aims to deliver the industry’s most complete, single endpoint security platform by replacing ineffective antivirus, locking down critical systems, and arming incident-response teams with the most advanced tools to proactively hunt down threats.
“Confer offers a NGAV solution that is lightweight, fast to deploy, and easy to manage,” Patrick Morley, chief executive officer of Carbon Black, told Infosecurity. “With the addition of Confer, we are further empowering our customers to secure their desktops, laptops, and servers from the full spectrum of modern cyber-attacks.
“By adding Confer’s NGAV product, Carbon Black is delivering the industry’s most complete next-generation endpoint security platform, designed to surpass legacy antivirus companies such as Symantec, as well as emerging endpoint solutions such as Cylance, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks."
Today’s cybersecurity war is waged at the endpoint, but what’s becoming ever-clearer is that traditional antivirus alone struggles to defend against a continually evolving endpoint threat landscape, often missing entire classes of modern-day cyber-attacks and leaving enterprises vulnerable to attack. As a result, more and more companies are turning to NGAV to help combat the issue and keep their data safe.
Speaking to Infosecurity Bob Tarzey, analyst and director at Quocirca, explained that whilst traditional antivirus still has its place in security, attacks are now so sophisticated that new approaches are also needed.
“Of course, many of these new threats should be blocked before they ever reach the endpoint, but some will. Carbon Black, with endpoint monitoring, white listing (from the Bit9 merger) and now NGAV certainly now has a broad endpoint threat mitigation capability,” he added.
Cb Defense uniquely combines behavioral-based prevention techniques with integrated detection and response capabilities to stop cyber-attacks. Its cloud-based, deep-analytics approach blocks both malware and increasingly common malware-less attacks that exploit memory and scripting languages such as PowerShell. Once malware is blocked, Cb Defense gives organizations visibility into how the attack happened, which enables them to proactively fix security problems.
“NGAV solutions need to take a far more innovative approach in stopping attacks and be much more effective than legacy AV” said Mark Quinlivan, co-founder and chief executive officer at Confer. “We built Confer to provide a sophisticated, lightweight yet simple solution that includes groundbreaking prevention, detection and incident response.”