Why Bitdefender - Bitdefender TechZone

Organizations looking to protect their resources and their customer's data from current and emerging cyber threats have many reasons to choose Bitdefender as their security provider.   We are innovators in the cybersecurity space with a track record of consistent top performance in prevention, protection, and detection and response technologies and services.

Bitdefender's GravityZone console stands out from the crowd, offering a one-stop solution for all your organization's security needs. It streamlines deployment and management across various systems - Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and Chromebooks, all from a single, unified interface.

But GravityZone does more than just streamline tasks. From this console, your security teams can effectively manage policies, perform risk assessments, deploy patches, oversee reporting and alerting, among many other tasks. It even facilitates thorough investigations and searches for potential security breaches throughout your organization - and all this without the need for any additional tools.

What sets GravityZone apart is how it simplifies your security management process. It effectively tackles "tools fatigue" that's so common in many organizations, freeing your IT staff to concentrate on other vital aspects of their work. With GravityZone, robust, comprehensive security management becomes less of a chore and more of a seamless, integrated process.

^{Figure 1:  From deploying the protection, to running tasks, reporting, assessing risks, patching and more, everything is handled through one unified interface.}

Out of the box, GravityZone provides more core features than many competitor offerings.  Along with our award-winning threat protection we deliver a host of tools designed to meet your everyday security needs.

Included is web filtering and content control that provide essential benefits to organizations. These tools enhance security by blocking access to malicious sites and reducing malware risks. They optimize productivity by curbing access to non-work-related websites, and help maintain legal and regulatory compliance by controlling exposure to certain web content. Further, they assist in bandwidth management by limiting high-bandwidth activities and prevent data leakage by restricting access to specific sites. The high degree of customization these tools offer enables organizations to create tailored policies to meet their unique needs and objectives.

GravityZone brings endpoint and user risk analysis to organizations at no additional cost.  Our Risk Management evaluates vulnerabilities in endpoints, including outdated software, unpatched security flaws, and risky configurations, helping organizations prioritize remediation efforts. Simultaneously, it can track user behavior, identifying patterns of behavior that could compromise the security of the organization. By unifying insights from both endpoints and user behavior, endpoint risk analysis creates a comprehensive risk profile, enabling an informed, data-driven approach to security, and helping to thwart attacks before they occur.

GravityZone stands out with its patented tamper-proof ransomware mitigation technology, which uniquely creates an encrypted backup of files under the threat of ransomware. If a ransomware attack manages to compromise files, our mitigation system immediately springs into action, safeguarding data by creating an instantaneous backup. Security teams can then restore this data, either back to its original location or to a location they prefer, effortlessly through the GravityZone console.

We differentiate ourselves from many providers by not relying on VSS Shadow Copy, a common target of modern ransomware attacks. Attackers typically either delete the VSS Shadow Copy backups or alter the volume size rendering it unusable. Ransomware mitigation strategies based on VSS Shadow Copy are, by their very nature, unreliable. Our approach goes beyond conventional methods, offering robust protection and easy recovery options to maintain your organization's operational continuity.

GravityZone’s Network Attack Defense (NAD) technology is a powerful tool designed to fortify endpoint security by scrutinizing network traffic in real-time. It operates at the host level, scanning the ingress and egress traffic for each endpoint to detect and thwart potential cyber threats. This technology is particularly adept at identifying and foiling activity that is often associated with a breach.  NAD prevents the initial access attacks that seek to infiltrate the network.  It blocks lateral movements, and discovery attempts whereby an attacker moves from one host to another within the network, often after initial compromise. It also efficiently blocks brute-force attacks, where an attacker attempts to gain access by trying numerous combinations of usernames and passwords. Furthermore, the technology is designed to counteract 'crimewave' attacks, large-scale automated cybercrime campaigns, and stifle attempts at credential access. By leveraging this technology, organizations can actively disrupt various stages of the cyber-attack chain, significantly enhancing their overall security posture.

Customers can augment those core features with powerful add-ons that cover patch management, full disk encryption, security for mobile devices, email security, full system integrity monitoring, security for storage and containers, and cloud workload optimizations designed to reduce the computing costs of securing the organization’s cloud environment.  With all GravityZone has to offer, it’s not surprising that we have been labeled the Best Return on Investment by AV-Comparatives.

_{Figure 2: Multi-tenant endpoint and user risk assessment is a core component of the GravityZone security solution.}

We aim to make detection and response capabilities available to companies of all sizes. GravityZone XDR combines Bitdefender’s award-winning detection and prevention technologies with powerful sensors covering systems, productivity applications, cloud workloads, identity, and networks.  Our native XDR solution offers security teams an unprecedented vantage point over an attack’s full trajectory — tracing its path from the initial breach, throughout lateral progressions, and more. It provides in-depth extended root cause analyses and elevates threat visibility beyond the traditional perimeter of endpoint security.

Starting with the GravityZone XDR Incident Advisor, security teams have access to a comprehensive one-page summary of what happened, how it impacted organizations, how the attack was executed, and what are the next steps.  Organizations gain immediate access to correlated event data, underpinning specifics, and a wealth of context. This facilitates swift identification and understanding of the interconnected actions constituting cyberattacks throughout their digital ecosystems.

The GravityZone XDR Graph view provides a visual representation of the attack, starting to the point of initial compromise, and expanding to show all impacted resources, and all network connections associated with the cyber attack.  Security teams can sort the information by time or kill chain and dig into every item on the graph to learn more about the systems affected, attack techniques used, remediation actions taken, and can also perform additional remediation actions right from the console.  These actions include machine isolation, deleting a malignant email across an entire organization to avoid further propagation of the threat, forcing a credentials reset or disabling a compromised account, and more.

_{Figure 3:  The GravityZone XDR Incident Advisor enables rapid understanding of security incident and event details, potential organizational impact, likely root causes, and recommended actions.}

Engineered with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence, GravityZone XDR not only illuminates behavioral patterns for critical decision-making but also intelligently minimizes the chances of false positives. Every incident receives an incident severity score based on several key factors.  The higher the incident severity score, the more potentially impactful the security event.  This allows security teams to focus their energy on critical security incidents, while ignoring low-impact occurrences.   This drastically reduces alert fatigue, optimizing your security teams' efficiency and responsiveness.

For organizations that want to offload their security management or wish to augment their existing security operations team, Bitdefender offers our Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. Our services provide 24x7 security monitoring, advanced attack prevention, detection, and response from experts you can hold accountable.  We include targeted and risk-based threat hunting by a certified team of security experts focuses on your users and systems, while threat intelligence experts keep watch on the outside world, looking for indicators of exposure and data loss.

With Bitdefender MDR, you benefit from GravityZone® Business Security Enterprise’s comprehensive feature set for endpoints and hybrid cloud workloads, with dedicated support and managed onboarding, plus all the security expertise in Bitdefender's security operations center (SOC), to get you up and running quickly.

Bitdefender Labs is at the heart of what we do.  It serves as a research institute, and a source for engineering innovations and threat intelligence.  We perform extensive research in cutting-edge fields such as machine learning, AI, and neural networks. This empowers us to stay at the technological forefront and drives our innovation in the cybersecurity space.

Our labs team is primarily engaged in technical analysis and security threat research. Its mandate involves exploration of current cybersecurity threats, vulnerabilities, and novel technologies, with an end goal of crafting robust countermeasures against cyber attacks. The team is comprised of security experts and research specialists that investigate newly discovered malware variants, exploitation techniques, hacking methodologies, and trending attack vectors. They also conduct surveillance on international cybercriminal activities, track botnet movements, and dissect Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) to decode their traits and devise effective defenses.

With a rate of discovery of over 400 new threats per minute and verification of 30 billion threat queries on a daily basis, Bitdefender Labs offers one of the most exhaustive real-time panoramas of the evolving threat landscape in the industry.  Over 180 top technology brands across different sectors use Bitdefender's technology in their own products and services to enhance the security they offer to their customers.  Bitdefender labs is an important resource in the ongoing fight against cybercrime.

Bitdefender's robust Threat Intelligence is unique in the industry, cutting across consumer, OEM, and business product lines.  We have team across the world exclusively focused on monitoring cyber-attack trends and gathering threat intelligence.  This exceptional positioning enables us to understand and counter emerging threats with the highest efficacy.  We continuously share threat data to all our customers through the expansive Bitdefender Global Protective Network and use this knowledge to develop transformative cybersecurity solutions. Bitdefender's robust threat intelligence is unique in the industry, cutting across consumer, OEM, and business product lines.  We have team across the world exclusively focused on monitoring cyber-attack trends and gathering threat intelligence.  This exceptional positioning enables us to understand and counter emerging threats with the highest efficacy.  We continuously share threat data to all our customers through the expansive Bitdefender Global Protective Network and use this knowledge to develop transformative cybersecurity solutions.

Bitdefender consistently outperforms our competitors in independent testing.  Since 2018 we’ve had the most #1 rankings in AV-Comparatives attack prevention tests, prompting them to categorize us as a Strategic Leader in the industry.  AV-Comparatives provide meaningful evaluations that examine the security solutions in relevant details. For example, drilling into the details in the aforementioned Advanced Threat Protection test, Bitdefender stopped most threats during the pre-execution phase of the attack – making our solution the most effective for preventing the detonation of malware.  These results prompted the AV-Comparatives team to comment, “A good burglar alarm should go off when somebody breaks into your house, not wait until they start stealing things”.

The evaluations also reveal how we provide the highest protection rate while also managing to keep negative side effects such as false-positives and performance impact to a minimum.  Bitdefender GravityZone offers a security solution without sacrifices or compromises.

While AV-Comparative evaluations focus on protection evaluation, we also outperform competitors in detection evaluations.  We excel in MITRE ATT&CK® evaluations by having among the highest analytical detections.  Our Managed Detection & Response (MDR) services have also been praised in MITRE analysis, where we detected 100% of the attack steps while providing actionable, summarized output with a clear timeline of the attack and recommended actions.

_{Figure 4: The AV-Comparatives Business Security Test for March – June 2023 show Bitdefender GravityZone provides the best protection among all vendors evaluated with 100% protection rate with low false alarms.}

Our commitment to adhere to the highest security standards has allowed us to continue to garner awards from the likes of Gartner, Forrester, AV-Test and more.

Bitdefender’s reputation for being leaders in cybersecurity has allowed us to collaborate with law enforcement agencies around the world to thwart criminal organizations responsible for some of the most damaging ransomware attacks, including Revil, Gandcrab, and many more. One of the ways we disrupt these Ransomware-as-a-Service groups is by releasing free ransomware decryptors anyone can download from labs.bitdefender.com.   These decryptors have allowed organizations to recover their encrypted data without paying out these criminal organizations for decryption keys – and in doing so, have damaged the trust relationships between the ransomware providers, and the cybercriminals that make use of this malware.

_{Figure 5: Through the release of the Gandcrab decryptors, Bitdefender was able to help dismantle the cybercriminal organization.}

Through our technology, services, research and collaboration with academia and law enforcement,  Bitdefender contributes to the preservation of digital integrity worldwide, and continues to be and important actor in the fight against cybercrime.

With Bitdefender, organizations of all sizes have a powerful, innovative, and forward-thinking ally that provides adaptive security solutions to safeguard their assets, data, and operations.  By choosing Bitdefender, organizations not only fortify their cyber defenses but also invest in a solution that is the culmination of relentless research, innovation, and commitment to excellence. With a proven track record across the consumer, OEM, and business market, and our continuing contribution to the fight against cybercrime world-wide, Bitdefender remains stands along as an organization that is always trusted.

To learn more about the technology behind Bitdefender GravityZone, we recommend reading the next article GravityZone Platform.