Bitdefender Year in Review: Top Cybersecurity Highlights from 2022

2022 brought another year marked by data breaches, ransomware attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities and privacy concerns. The outbreak of war in Ukraine intensified geopolitical pressures across the cybersecurity industry and larger macro trends such as inflation and economic instability created challenges for organizations of all sizes around the globe.

The race against cybercriminals is never-ending, but as we enter 2023, we wanted to take a moment to pause and reflect on our key accomplishments and most read blog posts from the past year.

Key accomplishments of 2022

BitdefenderLaunches GravityZone XDR to Improve Cyber Resilience

In April 2022, Bitdefender introduced GravityZone XDR (extended detection and response), a native XDR solution designed to provide rich security context, correlation of disparate security alerts, and rapid response to threats across an organization’s entire business environment. GravityZone XDR expands threat visibility and reduces attacker dwell time across infrastructure, workloads and applications by correlating threat detections from endpoints, productivity applications, clouds, identity sources, and network data into a single actionable view.

Introducing MDR Foundations: A Managed Security Service for MSPs

In July, Bitdefender introduced MDR Foundations, a new managed security service that provides 24x7 threat monitoring and response, intelligence-based threat hunting and elite security expertise designed specifically for managed service providers (MSPs) and their customers. MDR Foundations helps fill a serious security coverage gap for resource-constrained businesses of all sizes.

22 Ransomware Decryptors Milestone

In 2022, Bitdefender released its 22^nd ransomware decryptor tool free to the public, and the 23^rd has already been released in January, 2023. Bitdefender leads one of the cybersecurity industry’s largest ransomware decryptor programs and has saved victims more than an estimated $1 billion in ransom fees. We work closely with global law enforcement and the industry consortium NoMoreRansom to provide free decryptors that help victims recover their files without bowing to cybercriminals’ demands.

Bitdefender garners awards for technology leadership

Bitdefender has been a trusted cybersecurity leader driving innovation for more than 20 years and the industry accolades continued to roll in in 2022. We garnered numerous awards and earned top results in every major evaluation and third-party test in the cybersecurity industry, including:

MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation for Managed Services:

Bitdefender achieved 100% coverage of steps in the first MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation for Managed Services, an evaluation of 16 participating cybersecurity vendors in their ability to analyze and describe adversary behavior.

MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations for Enterprise cybersecurity solutions:

In the fourth round of the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations for Enterprise Cybersecurity Solutions, Bitdefender scored 97 percent in overall analytics insights and 95 percent in technique-level descriptions, the most in-depth detection metric identifying specific steps of how attackers breached the environment and moved laterally. The evaluations confirm that Bitdefender is a leader in providing highly actionable detections, enabling efficient security operations, and reducing alert fatigue.

AV-TEST:

Bitdefender earned three prestigious awardsincluding Best Protection for Windows (consumer), Best Protection for Windows (enterprise) and Best Android Security for Consumer Users from AV-TEST, a renowned independent IT security testing institution.

AV-Comparatives:

Bitdefender was the highest overall performer in AV-Comparative’s endpoint prevention and detection test and consistently earned excellent marks in subsequent tests for advanced threat protection and business security. Our repeat placement as a top performer among numerous, independent, third-party tests demonstrates not only our platform’s effectiveness but also consistency. Consistency is critically important for cyber resilience and provides one of the best insights into what an organization can expect from its cybersecurity solutions throughout the future.

VBSpam:

Bitdefender was ranked first in the Q4 2022 VBSpam test by Virus Bulletin, measuring email security solutions and how they update their services. Bitdefender was the only company out of 11 participants whose product excelled in all areas analyzed.

PC Mag:

Bitdefender was named a Best Brand for 2022 by PC Mag, a globally respected publication and authority on technology. Additionally, Bitdefender was named one of the Editors’ Choice for Hosted Endpoint Protection, for our GravityZone platform.

CRN 5-Star rating:

Bitdefender was honored with a prestigious 5-star rating in the 2022 CRN Partner Program Guide. The guide provides a definitive list of the most notable partner programs from industry-leading technology vendors that deliver innovative products and services through the IT channel. Only select vendors that deliver the best solutions and go over and above in their partner programs to help drive growth and positive change are awarded the 5-star rating.

Our consistent, stellar results in independent, third-party tests are one of the many reasons security vendors are choosing to license Bitdefender technology and integrate it into their offerings. In fact, among the other participating security vendors in the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations and AV-Comparatives tests, approximately one-third are running one or more Bitdefender technologies within their solutions, further validating the benefits of our technology and expertise.

Most-read Bitdefender blogs of 2022

As a pioneer in many critical areas of cybersecurity, with a world-class team of threat researchers, people turn to Bitdefender for expert insight and analysis on the latest threats and cybersecurity news. Here is a look back at our most popular blog posts of 2022:

Technical Advisory: CVE-2022-30190 Zero-day Vulnerability “Follina” in Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool

In May, Microsoft released a patch for the zero-day vulnerability “Follina” which allowed cybercriminals to remotely infect victims with malicious code by compromising Office documents. Reread this blog to learn more about the vulnerability, recommended security guidelines, and how to strengthen endpoint protection.

Security Advisory: A Risk-based Approach for Improving Your Cybersecurity Posture Due to the Invasion of Ukraine

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 heightened geopolitical tensions and increased both direct and indirect cybersecurity risks for organizations around the world. Read this blog to learn how to prepare your organization for wide-ranging risks.

Spam Alert: EU Business Register Scams are Back to Threaten Your Organization’s Wallet

Fraudsters behind the decade-old EU Business Register scam are wreaking havoc once again, targeting thousands of businesses and organizations across the globe. In the 2022 iteration of the scam, an email invites businesses to list their organization into a fictitious EU register “free of charge.” However, hefty fees are hidden in the fine print of the contract and organizations are threatened with legal action if they fail to pay. Read more to learn how to protect your organization from these types of scams.

Technical Advisory: Zero-day Critical Vulnerability in Log4j2 Exploited in the Wild

In December 2021, Apache disclosed CVE-2021-44228, a remote code execution vulnerability assigned with a severity of 10 (the highest possible risk score). The source of the vulnerability is Log4j, a logging library commonly used by a wide range of applications. The vulnerability wreaked havoc throughout 2022 and though a patch has been pushed out, there are likely organizations still running applications that have not been updated. Read this blog to learn what actions you should take to protect your organization.

MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations 2022 – Why Actionable Detections Matter

With so many cybersecurity offerings available on the market, it’s important to validate capabilities through independent, third-party testing. The MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations are unique in the way they emulate the full behavior of sophisticated threat actors if they were to get passed prevention layers. Additionally, MITRE does not publish scores, rankings, or ratings. Instead, the evaluations show how each vendor approaches threat detection in the context of the ATT&CK® knowledge base. This blog explains how to make sense of the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations and what organizations should look for when evaluating solutions.

What Are the Biggest Cyber Threats of the Future?

Cybercrime has been on an ascending pace since the widespread adoption of commercial and residential Internet. Along with a sharp increase in the number of cyberattacks, there’s also a growing diversity in the types of cyber threats, making it difficult to effectively protect important data moving forward. Read this blog to learn how to future-proof your cyber defenses.

Bitdefender Achieves Highest Score in AV-Comparatives Security Report

Bitdefender was named a Strategic Leader in AV-Comparatives’ “Enterprise Prevention and Response CyberRisk Quadrant™” report, achieving the highest score possible (100%) for speed in preventing attacks and a 99.5% mark for combined prevention and response capabilities. The report also found GravityZone to have the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and highest ROI. Read on to learn more.

Bitdefender Launches GravityZone Extended Detection and Response (XDR) to Improve Cyber Resilience

GravityZone XDR combines advanced threat protection with out-of-the-box analytics and rich security context for correlation of disparate alerts, quick triage of incidents, and attack containment through automated and guided response. Read this blog to learn what makes GravityZone XDR unique in the market.

How Quantum Computing Will Impact Cybersecurity

Experts estimate that within about a decade, quantum computers will be able to defeat currently existing encryption methods. This blog describes how the age of quantum computing will affect cybersecurity and how organizations like Bitdefender are working to future-proof cybersecurity solutions through advancements in post-quantum cryptography.

Homograph Phishing Attacks – When User Awareness is Not Enough

Homograph phishing attacks are based on the idea of using similar characters to pretend to be another site. Most security research on IDN homograph attacks has been focused on browsers but in 2022, Bitdefender researchers tested several other applications and discovered that all Microsoft Office applications and versions were vulnerable to IDN homograph attacks. Read this blog to learn how to make your organization more cyber resilient.

Cybersecurity remains mission critical to organizations of all sizes, across all industries. 2022 revealed new vulnerabilities and brought fresh attacks, but it also ushered in important, new research discoveries and important milestones in the battle against adversaries. At Bitdefender, our mission remains the same and we will continue driving forward and innovating in 2023 as the world’s most trusted cyber security company.

 

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