Carbon Black App Control is an application control product, used to lock down servers and critical systems, prevent unwanted changes and ensure continuous compliance with regulatory mandates.
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VMware AppDefense (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
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VMware AppDefense was a hypervisor-native workload protection platform for enterprise virtualization and security teams, used to deliver a secure virtual infrastructure and simplify micro-segmentation planning by providing application visibility, reputation scoring, and security. The product is discontinued, and no longer available.
Cb Protect is best suited somewhere where you want to maximize the lockdown of workstations. So moving past no local admin rights to blocking specific applications and peripherals. The idea would be to have a list of applications you want to run, and then anything else is not able to be used. As stated prior, if you have a very fluid environment where you are having all sorts of new applications installed frequently (I feel for you!!) this is still do-able, but it misses the general idea. I think especially in environments that are more sensitive to new applications, like banks, healthcare systems etc, this is a good fit. The ability to look at application levels, drift, unapproved software etc is very useful.
Being a VMware product, AppDefense has the advantage of compatibility with all of the VMware product feature updates and patches ( ESXi, NSX, vCenter, etc.). Paired with Carbon Black, it's resource overhead is well-tuned compared to traditional antivirus products.
I think that the AppDefense approach is clever and sets it apart from other products. Having a baseline of normal behavior that I can see is something I haven't seen in another product before.
AppDefense doesn't overload my systems with performance draining agents.
AppDefense integrates with VMWare products I have or plan to purchase.
Access to AppDefense support has been better than any other VMWare products.
The product is still quite new, and there seems to be a lack of technical information available for both the E.U. and support staff. That being said, the support staff that I have worked with have always been very knowledgeable and ensure that they see a ticket through to completion.
The big difference between Protect and Barkly/AMP is how exactly it goes about what it's doing. Protect is application whitelisting and program reputation. So the way it's protecting you is using a proprietary reputation service, and hash values to identify applications, and then hitting a list of whitelisted programs to decide if you are able to run that or not, based on the policy you are in. There is a LOT of value in that. We actually are working on transitioning to Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). The main reason is cost (about the same cost as Cb Protect, but with (most of) the featureset of all 3 Carbon Black products for less than 1/3 of the total spend. AMP works differently, looking at a reputation service powered by Cisco's Talos cloud. You don't really have application whitelisting, but that also reduces how many "requests" you get for applications. So I'll have to find a different way to do whitelisting and USB blocking and the like, but I'm getting more visibility across my network and also built in antivirus (TETRA engine - ClamAV with some work). Barkly is an add that we are looking to put in as it looks at behavior of programs. So specifically it watches for privilege elevation and the like. Thus far all the big name problem children (WannaCry, other ransomware problems) have been caught natively in Barkly day 0.
We have several security applications, but none exactly like VMware AppDefense. That is one of the reasons I like it, as it seems to take a different angle on monitoring and protection. The other apps monitor different things, but one thing AppDefense seems to have over them is a streamlined interface and not a lot of false positives.
As with everything now, automation is key. AppDefense effectively monitors the activity on all our VMs, freeing administrators to work on more projects
Makes it much easier to diagnose issues when system are not running as intended
