Carbon Black Takes a NGAV Leadership Position with Confer Acquisition: Targets Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, Cylance, and CrowdStrike with Disruptive, Zero-Gap Protection

WALTHAM, Mass., July 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Carbon Black, the leader in next-generation endpoint security, today announced its acquisition of Confer, a next-generation antivirus (NGAV) company. Carbon Black is recognized for its market-leading application control, incident response, and threat-hunting products that serve more than 2,000 organizations globally. By adding Confer's NGAV product, Carbon Black delivers the industry's most complete endpoint-security platform. Confer's software solution will be renamed "Cb Defense."

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

Today's cyber security war is waged at the endpoint. Incumbent AV providers regularly miss critical malware threats. As noted by Gartner in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms: "44% of reference customers for EPP solutions have been successfully compromised." In the wake of traditional AV proving to be ineffective, emerging endpoint players have entered the market. However, 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 at Enterprise Strategy Group. "With the addition of Confer, Carbon Black is offering such a next-gen platform to address the ever-evolving threat landscape."

Cb Defense Redefines Next Gen AV

"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."

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. This visibility enables businesses to proactively fix security problems.

Cb Defense 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, Cb Defense can be completely managed from the cloud through an easy-to-use, web-based interface.

Carbon Black Endpoint Security Platform

With the acquisition of Confer, customers will have access to a single platform designed to replace ineffective antivirus, lock down critical systems, and arm incident-response teams with the most advanced tools to proactively hunt down threats. The "Cb Endpoint Security Platform" is the only solution that provides the flexibility and security required to grow and evolve with an organization's security needs.

The Cb Endpoint Security Platform is designed to:

• Stop the Most Attacks. Using a combination of endpoint data and the Cb Collective Defense Cloud, the Cb Endpoint Security Platform stops more attacks than both traditional AV and competing NGAV products. It blocks both malware and malware-less attacks.

• See Every Threat. The Cb Endpoint Security Platform continuously records all endpoint activity, giving organizations full visibility into how cyber attacks happen. By capturing and analyzing behaviors, it pinpoints potential exploits and provides complete visibility into each threat.

• Close Every Gap. With complete threat visibility, the Cb Endpoint Security Platform enables organizations to proactively fix security problems in their environment by leveraging a full suite of remediation capabilities.

Cb Collective Defense Cloud

Confer's cloud-based analytics engine will become part of the "Cb Collective Defense Cloud," adding significant depth to the Cb Endpoint Security Platform. The Cb Collective Defense Cloud provides an assessment of what's safe and what's not, based on advanced-analytic techniques applied to data from millions of endpoints.

The Cb Collective Defense Cloud:

1. Continuously records data from more than seven million endpoints protected by Carbon Black products.

2. Enhances and enriches the data with threat intelligence from dozens of sources including Carbon Black's Detection eXchange and partner feeds.

3. Applies rigorous analytic techniques including machine learning, artificial intelligence and behavioral analytics to massive datasets of attacks, threats, behaviors and anomalies.

4. Streams context and insight to Carbon Black's offerings where attacks are blocked at the endpoint.

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.

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. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

About Carbon Black

Carbon Black has designed the most complete next-gen endpoint-security platform, enabling organizations to stop the most attacks, see every threat, close security gaps, and evolve their defenses. The Cb Endpoint Security Platform helps organizations of all sizes replace legacy antivirus technology, lock down systems, and arm incident response teams with advanced tools to proactively hunt down threats. Today, Carbon Black has approximately 2,000 worldwide customers, including 25 of the Fortune 100 and more than 600 employees. Carbon Black was voted Best Endpoint Protection by security professionals in the SANS Institute's Best of 2015 Awards.