VMware and Carbon Black announce new app security solution
VMware and endpoint security firm Carbon Black announced they are building on their partnership with a new security solution, which combines the former’s AppDefense with the latter’s Cb Defense. The purpose of the solution is to enhance app protection, thwarting threats to apps inside software-defined data centers.
The distribution and agility of apps has made them increasingly difficult to secure in recent years. Conventional security solutions lack the agility needed to stay up to pace with the rapid evolution of apps, opening up the window for security breaches. According to statista, during the third quarter of 2017, approximately 323.2 million web app attacks were directed toward websites in the U.S., followed by Brazil with 28.6 million attacks.
“This new solution provides an unprecedented level of security for applications running on VMware and will help businesses around the world (who are running more than 60 million virtual machines) achieve the highest levels of security,” wrote Tom Barsi wrote, senior vice president of business development at Carbon Black, in a company blogspot. “It is also the industry’s first security solution that fully leverages the unique properties of virtualization plus streaming prevention to prevent, detect and respond to advanced threats.”
As previously noted, the new solution integrates VMware AppDefense with Carbon Black’s Cb Defense. VMware AppDefense leverages virtualized infrastructure to monitor apps in addition to detecting and automating responses to attacks that attempt to manipulate those apps. Carbon Black’s Cb Defense uses streaming prevention to monitor malicious behavior on a device, protecting against both malware and non-malware based attacks. The collaboration between the two companies builds upon a previous agreement in which VMware AppDefense customers were able to use Carbon Black’s Predictive Security Cloud (PSC) reputation services. The name of the combined solution — whose name has yet to be revealed — will be made generally available February 2018.
According to Barsi, the new solution combines three key elements to improve cloud and data center security: enforcing known good app behavior, detecting unknown threats, and automating and orchestrating responses. By enforcing good app behavior, the solution has an authoritative understanding of how data center endpoints are meant to behave and is the first to know when changes are made. In regards to detecting unknown threats, the solution leverages app context to perform advanced behavioral threat detection, providing additional protection beyond least privilege. With respect to automating and orchestrating responses, the solution provides a complete understanding of app context during investigation, using virtual infrastructure to provide a library of responses.
“Carbon Black and VMware will deliver a new model for security that marries complementary components, combined in ways that fully leverage the unique properties of virtualization and cloud to help protect organizations that was previously not possible,” said Tom Corn, senior vice president, security products at VMware. “With this new joint solution, data center endpoints can be strengthened with system integrity and least privilege, critical applications and data are safe from both non-malware and malware attacks and Security Operations will be empowered to react faster and more effectively than before.”
