I read an "Important Product update" this morning from VMWare Carbon Black Security.
"Carbon Black has decided to discontinue support for macOS on CB Protection effective with the release of macOS 10.16 (anticipated in the Fall of 2020). There were several factors contributing to this decision.
The first factor was the amount of expected change that would need to be made to the CB Protection Mac agent. Apple is completely changing the way that developers interact with the kernel. This requires a complete redesign of our agent to work on 10.16. As one might imagine, this introduces a significant risk to developing a stable and complete product in a timely manner.
An additional factor in deciding to discontinue support was that very few customers are using the product as intended, in High Enforcement. This is not surprising given the rapid upgrade culture of Mac users and the time it takes to make changes and validate the agent against new Mac kernels.
Given the lack of High Enforcement adoption, we feel that other products in our portfolio, like CB Defense, provide a better security posture for customers with Macs and hope that our customers will transition to our next generation antivirus solution
We will continue to support macOS 10.15 and its updates until the release of macOS 10.16 which we anticipate will be in the fall of 2020. After the release of 10.16 we will no longer support the CB Protection Mac agent on any version of macOS.
This was not an easy decision, but it was made in the best interest of our customers and the business. To discuss further, I will set up a call to discuss options, roadmap and how we move forward."
I find this to be extremely disappointing and frankly from a security perspective is a step in the WRONG direction. I understand the challenges they face as outlined in their notice, however, for those customers who ARE using the product as intended and running in High Enforcement this now means you need to scramble to find an alternative product. Sure you can purchase their CB Defense product but it doesn't provide you the same application whitelisting functionality that you get with CB Protection. On top of that you've already paid for licenses for CB Protection, i would hope that at the very least VMWare Carbon Black would be willing to transfer your licenses over to CB Defense at no cost.
Either way you're now being forced to loosen up your security because it's too much work for the vendor to maintain the Mac agent!
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