The BlackBerry Cyber Suite includes two brand new offerings, BlackBerry Protect Mobile and BlackBerry Persona Desktop, a UEBA solution. It also includes the existing BlackBerry Protect Desktop and BlackBerry Optics EDR.
On Tuesday, at the virtualized BlackBerry Security Summit, BlackBerry made a major new product announcement with the introduction of the BlackBerry Cyber Suite. The new offering, which combines two existing product sets with two newly announced ones, is the centre piece of BlackBerry’s unified endpoint security [UES] strategy. It’s also critical to the company’s plans going forward.
“We have created a very robust product offering called the UES – Unified Endpoint Security,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen stated in his opening keynote. “UES changes everything about how companies protect not only their assets, not only their data, but protect people also.”
Why does the company consider this a game-changer?
“It changes things because prevention is now possible with our AI and math models,” said May Mitchell, VP of Channel, Alliances and Field Marketing at BlackBerry. “It can learn and predict attacks before execution, and it can protect them from servers, desktops, and mobile devices.”
The BlackBerry Cyber Suite is comprised of four products. Two of them will be familiar to BlackBerry watchers: BlackBerry Protect Desktop, the endpoint protection solution originally developed by legacy BlackBerry, and the BlackBerry Optics EDR [endpoint detection and response] that came through Cylance.
One of the new ones is BlackBerry Protect Mobile for mobile threat defense. It is built on the BlackBerry Spark Platform, and detects mobile malware attacks at the device and application levels to provide protection without the need for human intervention. It alerts users before opening URLs and visiting spoofing websites that mimic legitimate pages. It also identifies malware from sideloaded applications, and can ensure that applications are only sourced through secure repositories.
“This has been in the works for quite some time,” Mitchell said. “The development came through the Cylance acquisition, and it has got great reviews from beta customers.”
The other new component of the suite is the BlackBerry Persona Desktop, a UEBA [user and entity behavior analytics] solution. It uses advanced AI, biometrics and machine learning to deliver continuous authentication that validates user identity in real-time and creates a real-time trust score. It can be used to determine users with likely stolen credentials, and spot unusual behavior from employees that could be malicious actions.
“It is able to notice things like how an individual is typing, differences in keystrokes, or how the person uses their mouse,” Mitchell noted.
BlackBerry Persona Desktop executes all the actions within the endpoint itself, without having to share data back to the cloud, so it can respond very quickly and enable protection within minutes of a compromise.
While the Cyber Suite boasts multiple new bleeding edge features, it is being targeted at the broad security market, particularly customers now using legacy suite solutions.
“We are looking at the endpoint protection space, which IDC defines as worth $12.8 billion – without EDR or MDR,” Mitchell said. “There are still a large number of customers who rely on signature-based AV. Many of these customers have been thinking about moving on, and those are the people we want to reach with this.”
In terms of a strong partner fit, Mitchell expects this to appeal to the MSSPs within BlackBerry’s ecosystem.
“We have over 400 MSSPs who do level 1 and level 2 support,” she said. “It is the fastest growing group of partners within our ecosystem. This is something that they can take and wrap it in with their other services to provide managed security.”
