Carbon Black
More info
- Released
- 2002 (as Bit9)
- Owner
- Broadcom (via VMware)
- Type
- Security company / EDR product
The whitelisting vendor Bit9, which became an early EDR player and ended up as a product line inside Broadcom.
It began in Massachusetts in 2002 as Bit9, whose idea was to invert the antivirus model: only programs on an approved list were allowed to run. In 2013 Bit9 was itself breached — attackers stole its code-signing certificate and used it to sign malware, which then sailed past customers' own allowlists. Awkwardly, precisely the attack the product existed to stop.
In 2014 it bought the startup Carbon Black, whose product recorded what happened on every machine so incidents could be reconstructed afterwards. The name took over in 2016 and the product became one of the first in EDR. VMware acquired the company in 2019; when Broadcom swallowed VMware in 2023, Carbon Black came along.