The 5 Conversations I want to have at CB Connect 2019

In a few weeks, I’ll be attending CB Connect in my hometown of San Diego, CA. If you’ve read my earlier blogs, you know I’m passionate about this event because it brings together some of the best and brightest in the security space to network and collaborate on solving some of our industry’s...

Partner Perspectives: Awake Security and Carbon Black Deliver Comprehensive Threat Detection and Response

Rudolph Araujo is the Vice President of Awake Security. Even relatively unsophisticated attackers today use tools, tactics and techniques that make them difficult to uncover. For instance, the use of non-malware tools, such as PowerShell, psexec and Python, places a burden on security teams to...

8 Ways to Avoid the Cybersecurity Grinch This Holiday Season

'Tis the season to be jolly…unless you work in cybersecurity. According to the Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit TAU, organizations should expect to see a spike in potential cyberattacks starting with Black Friday/Cyber Monday and continuing through the holiday shopping season. TAU’s analysis...

Carbon Black Awarded 5-Star Rating in CRN’s 2019 Partner Program Guide for the Third Consecutive Year

We are proud to announce that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has given Carbon Black a 5-Star rating in its 2019 Partner Program Guide for the third consecutive year! According to CRN, this annual guide identifies the strongest and most successful partner programs in the channel today,...

Modern Bank Heists: The Bank Robbery Shifts to Cyberspace

The financial sector has long been the target of some of the world’s greatest guilds of thieves, none perhaps more popular than the Dillinger gangs of the 1930s. In the second annual “Modern Bank Heists” report, Carbon Black collaborated with Optiv to survey CISOs at some of the world’s largest...

TAU Threat Intelligence Notification: Java Embedded MSI Files

Summary Application whitelisting provides environments with access controls to stop unauthorized software from executing. This is accomplished by utilizing file and folder attributes including but not limited to file path, filename, digital signature, publisher, cryptographic hash and product nam...

5 Questions to Ask About Your Security People in a World Saturated by Security Tools

Definition of tool - 1a: a handheld device that aids in accomplishing a task b1: the cutting or shaping part in a machine or machine tool 2: a machine for shaping metal : MACHINE TOOL 2a: something such as an instrument or apparatus used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of ...

Top 5 Threat Hunting Myths: “Threat Hunting Isn’t Worth My Time”

The cybersecurity landscape is in a constant state of change and, as many organizations have learned, it’s no longer a matter of if you’ll face a cyberattack, but when. In today’s world, attackers intentionally look normal to evade automated defenses. With the rise of ransomware, fileless and...

Carbon Black Report: A Case Study on No More IR Busy Work

From discovery to data acquisition to remediation, IR teams might spend hours of their precious time doing tedious labor — for instance, going in and grabbing an organization’s relevant forensic artifacts such as event logs one by one. What IR teams want to spend time doing: finding the bad guys...

Cb Defense Q3 2017 Release Future-Proofs Your Ransomware Defenses

We’re excited to announce the Cb Defense Q3 2017 release is here! Cb Defense has always been focused on bringing you the best possible prevention, built upon our unique streaming prevention platform, combined with our market-leading endpoint detection and response EDR capabilities. The Q3 2017...

How Carbon Black is Prioritizing Living Off the Land Attacks

What are Living Off the Land LoL Attacks? In recent years, Living off the Land Binaries and Scripts LOLBas have become increasingly popular tools for cybercriminals. These types of attacks leverage native, signed, and often pre-installed applications in malicious ways that their creators never...

Twitter Contest! Enter to Win a $250 Gift Card at #CBConnect19

To make CB Connect 2019 even more exciting, we’re hosting a Twitter contest to see who can rack up the most engagement on Twitter. If you want to participate, just share your thoughts about CB Connect 2019 on Twitter by telling us what you’ve learned, which sessions you liked most, who you got to...

“There Are No Hackers, There Are Only Spies”

In December 2015, I opened a letter from the Office of Personnel Management. The OPM oversees healthcare and insurance programs, administers retirement and benefit services, and assists federal agencies in hiring new employees and providing federal investigative services for background checks. Th...

Carbon Black Report Finds Tax Fraud & “Identity Theft On Demand” Continuing to Take Shape on the Dark Web

While online sales of identity and banking information have both been easily accessible to malicious actors for a decade or more, there has been a recent maturation in the dark web economy focused on tax identity theft. Carbon Black’s recent research into various marketplaces on the dark web foun...

Cybersecurity Teardown: Understanding Hash Values

We just started a new series called “Cybersecurity Teardown.” In this series, we’ll be ripping apart ideas and attacks, then reassembling them with a Carbon Black mindset. Each idea or attack will be broken down into three phases: What, Why, and How. In this first entry, I wanted to call your...

Partner Perspectives: Put Access Control in Context with ClearPass and Carbon Black

Paul Kaspian is a Senior Product & Solutions Marketing Manager for Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. Strengthen your security defenses by considering endpoint context in access control decisions. As enterprise security continues to evolve, organizations are constantly deploying new...

Announcing “Cb Threat Hunters,” Carbon Black’s First Skill-Based Program

Carbon Black is excited to announce “Cb Threat Hunters,” the company’s first skill-based program debuting at Cb Connect 2018. Cb Threat Hunters gives you the opportunity to develop your threat-hunting skills to stay ahead of evolving attacks. With this program, our expert team will arm you with t...

Tips for Securing Remote Workers

As more and more employees are mandated to work from home, security and non-security professionals alike are left wondering what they can do to keep their data and systems safe. To help with this, we’ve compiled a list of some of the key things you can do to ensure your defenses are up—on or off...

How we Developed a Unified Binary Store (UBS): Part 2

As you may have seen in Part One of this blog, one of our engineering teams at VMware Carbon Black was tasked with building a Unified Binary Store UBS that would increase operational efficiencies and serve as a centralized source of data across products. We were able to build the platform in thre...

How We Developed Our EQR Plugins

Extensible Analytics with EQR’s Lightweight, Ultra-Performance Plugin System I’ve written a few posts now on the plans and development of EQR Event Query Router, the open-source tool we built to give data scientists the ability to execute large-scale queries on real-time big data streams without...

CB Customer Spotlight: Q&A with Ritter Insurance Marketing’s Dan McLellan

Dan McLellan is a Network Support Specialist at Ritter Insurance Marketing, and uses the Carbon Black community to increase his security knowledge and share information with his colleagues. Having access to insights from other security professionals has not only shortened the time he spends tryin...

BLITZ! Like a Great Middle Linebacker, An Agile & Strong EDR Solution Can Quickly Respond to an Offensive Attack

As we near the close of 2018, we should appreciate that cyberspace has become an increasingly hostile landscape. Geoplitical tensions are manifesting in cyberspace and cyber criminals have become increasingly punitive this year. We at Carbon Black have observed some interesting trends: Vapor Worm...

NRCC Email Hack Highlights Lack of Visibility & Proactive Threat Hunting at Political Organizations

Earlier this week, Politico reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee NRCC suffered a major attack prior to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, with thousands of sensitive emails from four senior aides exposed to an outside intruder. While the impact of this breach is still...

September 4, 2018 – Morning Cyber Coffee Headlines – “September” Edition

Good morning! Sit with Carbon Black this morning over a cup of coffee or tea and browse a few industry headlines to get the day started. We’ve got just enough information below to get you through that first cup…enjoy! September 4, 2018 - Headlines Carbon Black in the News: Carbon Black builds out...

Case Study: A Cryptomining Attack — With an Assist From Advanced Malware Techniques

In Carbon Black's Quarterly Incident Response Threat Report QIRTR, some of the world’s leading incident response IR professionals reported seeing an uptick in lateral movement, counter incident response, and island-hopping attacks from motivated nation-states. In the case study below, Kroll notes...

10 Endpoint Security Problems Solved by the Cloud – Managing Multiple Agents

So far in this blog series, we’ve discussed the state of endpoint security, and the challenges of keeping systems up to date and integrating multiple products. This installment will take a look at how the cloud solves our third challenge: managing multiple agents. Too Much To Keep Track Of A good...

What is the Cb Predictive Security Cloud (PSC)?

In today’s new reality, the device, and the people operating those devices, have taken center stage. Whether in your office or at a Starbucks, your endpoints now have access to some of your organization’s most sensitive data via cloud services, such as Salesforce.com, Office 365, and the Google...

Choose Your Own Infosec Adventure

I often reflect on how difficult choices in our industry can be. Do we invest more in prevention, detection or response? Do we automate or add more staff? Do we use a managed service or keep it in house? These represent some of the strategic decisions defenders are faced with on a yearly basis...

Evolving Threat Hunting with the MITRE ATT&CK Framework at CB Connect

Evolving Threat Hunting with the MITRE ATT&CK Framework – Join me at CB Connect San Diego! There are a number of techniques you can use to uncover security gaps leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK matrix. At CB Connect San Diego, our annual user conference June 4-5th, I will speaking on “How to Evolve Yo...

Excerpts from Moving Endpoint Security to the Predictive Cloud: Better Security

Carbon Black recently published a whitepaper on the reasons and benefits of moving endpoint security to the cloud; this is the first excerpt from that guide, which you can find here. For more information about how the Cb Predictive Security Cloud, Carbon Black's comprehensive endpoint protection...

Dark Web Ransomware Economy Growing at an Annual Rate of 2,500%

CryptoLocker. GoldenEye. Locky. WannaCry. It’s no secret that 2017 is shaping up to be the most notorious year on record for ransomware. Even a casual news consumer can identify several, if not all, of the menacing ransomware attacks that have cost worldwide businesses an estimated $1 billion thi...

Introducing Integrated Threat Intelligence from ThreatConnect on the PSC

To effectively defend against attacks, analysts must leverage details from multiple tools to gain an understanding of the actions they need to take to protect their environment. By integrating context from different tools and intelligence feeds into the alerts security teams receive, they have...

The Next Chapter in Our Story: VMware + Carbon Black

I am excited to share with you a significant milestone in Carbon Black’s history. Earlier today, Carbon Black entered into a merger with VMware, who as of moments ago announced its intention to acquire Carbon Black. You can also read the press release with more details here, but first I’d like to...

Flexible and Controlled Openness: Carbon Black’s API Approach

At Carbon Black, we believe that making our customers successful requires both an open platform and the control they need to build endpoint protection into the ideal security processes they’ve designed for their specific organization. From maintaining relationships with our 100+ integration...

CB Customer Spotlight: Q&A with University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s Ammar Ammar

For years, Ammar Ammar had been working his way across the IT landscape in various roles, but it was an interest in security that made him take a different step in his career path. That change led him to his current role as an IT Security Analyst at the University of Tennessee Health Science Cent...

Partner Perspectives: Endpoint Phishing Incident Response with Cofense Intelligence and Cb Response

Mike Saurbaugh is the Director of Technical Alliances for Cofense. Hunting Phished Endpoints with Cofense Intelligence™ and Carbon Black Ransomware, business email compromise BEC, malware infections and credential-based theft all primarily stem from a single vector of compromise - phishing...

How The ATT&CK™ Framework Can Mature Your Threat Hunting Program

The truth about threat hunting is that it’s a process that matures with your security team. The more you learn more about the threat landscape, the more you can operationalize that knowledge. Because of this, it is important to work within a framework that can help you track the growth of your...

SANS THIR Summit Wrap Up – “We Have 15 Minutes”

Heading back to San Diego before I get on another flight 30 hours later. Lots of people say "what are you crazy? Why do that?"…to which I say: "we cannot achieve any mission without sacrifice." Going to events like the SANS Threat Hunting IR summit remind just how many dedicated people we have on...

Excerpts from Modern Bank Heists – Overview

Carbon Black recently published a report on the newest threats facing the financial world, and how to counteract them. For more information about how Cb Defense, Carbon Black's NGAV + EDR solution, helps enterprises address their endpoint security challenges, check out our weekly Cb Defense Live...

Carbon Black Given 5-Star Rating in CRN’s 2018 Partner Program Guide

We are proud to announce that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has given Carbon Black a 5-Star rating in its 2018 Partner Program Guide. According to CRN, this annual guide is the definitive listing of partner programs from technology vendors that provide products and services through the IT...

“The 101” – Episode 11 – What is the Difference Between Commodity and Advanced Malware?

We’re back with another episode of The 101! This weekly security series aims to define endpoint security one question at a time. Tune in each week as we tackle a new term, concept, or comparison in our ongoing effort to provide clear definitions. Over the past two months we’ve talked a lot about...

Cb Defense Praised in Independent Tests, Product Reviews

Earlier this week, Carbon Black announced the Q3 release of Cb Defense, which features breakthrough streaming ransomware prevention as well as live response capability. Following this announcement, three independent security organizations published reviews and reports confirming the efficacy of C...

How to Become a Master Threat Hunter

Editor’s Note: The text appears in the free eBook: “Threat Hunting for Dummies.” After you’ve been threat hunting in an environment forsix months, a year, or more, you’re going to become a senior in most circles. You’re expanding your skills and knowledge, you’re building and using tools, and...

TAU Threat Analysis: Bundlore (macOS) mm-install-macos

The mm-install-macos variant of the Bundlore family of macOS adware has been around for many years in many variations and delivery methods. Recently, a variant with a novel installation method was discovered. Although most of the installation details were the same or similar to the samples analyz...

How we Developed a Unified Binary Store (UBS): Part 1

Like most technology companies, VMware Carbon Black has a combination of acquired and built technologies that all utilize their own data stores. As our products have evolved to include the benefits of a centralized cloud offering, our data stores needed to similarly evolve. A new goal was formed:...

Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) Threat Intelligence Notification: OSX.Yort

In March of 2019 Kaspersky published an article about the Lazarus APT group continued targeting of financial entities. Their report noted that this new campaign being tracked was targeting both Windows and macOS users. The campaign used both malicious PowerShell scripts on windows as well as macO...

Developer Day 2019

Carbon Black is proud to announce its second annual Developer Day to be held on June 3, 2019, one day prior to the annual CB Connect 2019 user conference. Customers and partners worldwide will converge at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California, to hear from Carbon Black employees and...

Excerpts From: Do More with Less—How Endpoint Security in the Cloud is Helping Companies Stay Secure

If you're responsible for security at your company, you know that you're held back by things like limited budgets, a lack of skilled personnel, and too many security products complicating your stack. In Carbon Black’s recent webinar, we discussed how endpoint security in the cloud can simplify yo...

Partner Perspectives: How TrapX & Carbon Black Use Deception Technology to Better Protect Your Enterprise

As organizations continue to move toward digital transformation, the digital workspace ecosystem of IoT devices, endpoints, and networks continues to grow and evolve. This new landscape creates many opportunities for potential attackers. Security becomes even more important for everyone in this n...

Mass-Scale Ransomware Attacks Providing Hackers the Ability to Earn Quick Money

During the past six months, the Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit TAU analyzed more than 1,000 ransomware samples, categorizing them into 150 families, and found the following: Attackers are looking to make quick, easy money with unsophisticated malware combined with sophisticated delivery method...