CRN Exclusive: Malwarebytes Extends Endpoint Detection And Response Capabilities To Mac

Malwarebytes is expanding its endpoint detection and remediation capabilities to Mac environments in a move executives said will help partners increase sales and services opportunities.

Malwarebytes Breach Remediation for Mac is an enterprise-grade solution that offers malware detection capabilities, as well as remediation and incident response. The engine for the solution comes from the company's consumer Mac offering, which was added as part of its 2015 acquisition of AdwareMedic.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor launched the solution, unveiled Thursday, in response to a gap in the market for Mac security solutions, Tom Miller, senior vice president of worldwide channels, business development and sales, said in an interview with CRN. For partners, that means an added stream of security revenue for clients with Apple's Mac computers, as well as new opportunities for services around consulting and incident response, he said.

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"We have a great way to help build services. We have a great way to on-ramp customers [with detection solutions] and continue adding more value through upsell and cross-sell [of services]," Miller said.

Elsworth Anthony, product manager at DSolutions, a Montreal-based Malwarebytes partner, said in an email that the new solution helps the company provide its clients with "maximum protection in an ever changing landscape."

"It provides us with an advantage to present a true anti-malware solution to a market that has woken up to the notion that they too are no longer immune to today’s new threats. … We are now in a position to help businesses with Mac environments, particularly our Malwarebytes customers who have been waiting for this protection for their Mac environment," Anthony said.

In particular, Anthony said, the company's education clients will benefit from the new solution, as many of them are adopting more Mac computers. The solution's automation capabilities also help across that vertical's sizable networks, he said.

Those capabilities are important for partners to get in line before the Mac threat environment, which is fairly innocuous today, gets worse, Thomas Reed, director of Mac offerings, said. Today, the threats primarily include adware, which Reed called primarily a "nuisance," some Mac malware and potentially unwanted programs. In March of this year, those threats expanded to include ransomware, with researchers discovering KeRanger ransomware.

"People have certainly been predicting that Mac malware will get worse for years now and it has gotten a bit worse, but it hasn't picked up to the degree that some people had predicted. However, I do still agree that it's probably going to take off more and more as Macs become more numerous," Reed said.

Those are threats that partners want to be prepared for, Miller said.

"It's becoming a more and more important part of a business infrastructure. These kinds of tools to automate the capabilities to do incident response and EDR and hunt malware and proactive are going to be really important," Miller said.

The solution is generally available to partners Thursday, the company said.