Carbon Black acquires Confer to deliver advanced NGAV

Carbon Black, the endpoint security provider, has announced the acquisition of Confer, a next-generation antivirus (NGAV) company. With this acquisition, Carbon Black hopes to deliver the “industry’s most complete endpoint security platform.” Although the terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the company revealed that Confer’s software solution will be renamed “Cb Defense.” Patrick Morley, Chief Executive Officer, Carbon Black, said:

“With the acquisition of Confer, organizations of every size can now address their endpoint-security requirements through a single platform. This extension of the Carbon Black platform is a significant step forward in our vision to create a world safe from cyber-attacks.”

Need for enhancing endpoint security

The company quotes Gartner’s 2016 report on Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms that noted: “44% of reference customers for EPP solutions have been successfully compromised.” Carbon Black explains that today’s cybersecurity war is waged at the endpoint. In the wake of traditional antivirus proving to be ineffective, emerging endpoint players have entered the market. However, according to Carbon Black, these players offer ‘incomplete, point solutions that miss entire classes of cyber-attacks.’ These omissions create a false sense of security and leave enterprises vulnerable.

“The emerging next generation endpoint security market is about more than prevention. Security vendors who offer a comprehensive security platform comprised of prevention, detection and response capabilities will lead the transition from prior generation solutions,” said Doug Cahill, Senior Analyst, ESG, an IT research, analysis, strategy, and validation firm. “With the addition of Confer, Carbon Black is offering such a next-gen platform to address the ever evolving threat landscape.”

How is Cb Defense an effective AV?

Carbon Black claims that Cb Defense is designed to combine 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, Confer.

We built Confer to provide a sophisticated, lightweight yet simple solution that includes groundbreaking prevention, detection and incident response.

Furthermore, the security company explains that the new AV uses a lightweight sensor that installs in less than a minute and consumes less than one percent of the CPU, disk and network. Once installed, it can be completely managed from the cloud through an easy-to-use, web-based interface.

How will the acquisition benefit Carbon Black’s security infrastructure?

With the acquisition of Confer, Carbon Black explains that its customers will have access to a single platform designed to replace ineffective antivirus, lock down critical systems, and arm incident-response teams with advanced tools to proactively hunt down threats. Also, Confer’s cloud-based analytics engine will become part of the “Cb Collective Defense Cloud,” that provides an assessment of what’s safe and what’s not, based on advanced-analytic techniques applied to data from millions of endpoints.

“Continuous interactions between the Cb Collective Defense Cloud and Carbon Black’s offerings strengthen the system’s ability to identify malicious activity and become more resilient over time,” claims the security company.

Confer Co-founders Paul Morville and Jeff Kraemer will be joining the Carbon Black product and engineering teams respectively. Confer employees will join the Carbon Black team.