GravityZone is a business security solution built from ground-up for virtualization and cloud to deliver security services to physical endpoints, mobile devices, virtual machines in private, public cloud and Exchange mail servers.

This article provides information on the changes delivered with the Bitdefender GravityZone version 6.1.27-537, released on October 4th, 2016.

Note: These release notes refer to services that may not be present in your GravityZone solution, such as Security for Exchange.

• New Features and Improvements
• Resolved Issues
• Known Issues

New Features and Improvements

Security

• Introduced Anti-Ransomware vaccine. You can now immunize your endpoints against known ransomware by enabling this new protection option in the Antimalware > On-Access policy settings.
• Introduced a set of powerful Anti-Exploit technics that further augments existing technologies to fight off targeted attacks. The new technology is equipped to tackle advanced, evasive exploits that targeted attacks rely on to penetrate an infrastructure. Anti-exploit techniques will be integrated in our proactive Advanced Threat Control technology.
• Added new categories for Web Access Control rules.

  Important: This change affects the predefined profiles and Blocked Websites report. Please review the permissions after the update, as some items might be blacklisted.

• Added the option to configure Active Threat Control and On-Access Scanning to take no action.
• Improved Full, Quick and Custom on-demand scan tasks.

Integrations

• GravityZone now integrates with the VMware NSX platform, ensuring agentless protection of the virtual datacenters through the dedicated Security Server. This feature is available only for Advanced Business Security, Enterprise Security and new VMware customers.
• Starting with this GravityZone update, VMware vCenter Server integrations use security certificates. When adding a new integration or editing an existing one, upon saving you are required to accept the security certificates for vCenter and for NSX (if the case), and then save again the settings.
• Added the option to choose with which Active Directory Domain Controllers the integration is made.
• You are now able to free license seats used by virtual machines from a read-only inventory, such as Active Directory, vCenter Server and Xen Server, where the security agent was removed without running the uninstaller. After this, the target endpoints become unmanaged. To support this feature, the Clear License button was added to the Action Toolbar.

Updates

• You can now enable and set up automatic updates for the GravityZone console.
• Improved update process. Choosing between the slow and fast update rings allows you to better control how updates are sent to your network. For more information, refer to the Administrator’s Guide.
• Improved staging and update publishing. You can now create a policy for the critical endpoints from production. You can update these endpoints only after the updates have been tested in the staging environment and on the non-critical machines from production. This feature is available only for Enterprise Security customers.
• Improved configuration of update locations in the Update policy section by adding predefined locations and the possibility to use capital letters when adding a port to the hostname.
• Added a web interface to facilitate downloading of offline update archives for isolated networks. For more information, please check the Product Offline Updates section of the Installation Guide.

Reporting and Notifications

• Introduced Report Builder. Build custom and powerful queries on the GravityZone database to obtain advanced analytics and insights into your network’s security. Providing an easy to use graphical interface, with Report Builder you don’t need to be SQL-savvy to configure your queries. This feature is available only for Enterprise Security customers.
• Reports are now sent by email as ZIP archives.

  Important: If you use scripts for automated report processors, you must update them to fully comply with this new format.

• The On-demand Scanning report now reflects computer name changes in the guest OS.
• The reporting intervals have been optimized to better match specific purposes. For example, a recurrent report for last year antiphishing activity cannot be scheduled hourly, as the provided information would be the same in all report instances. Instead, it can be scheduled yearly.
• The Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is included in all reports exported in CSV format.
• The Blocked Websites and Security Audit reports now provide the name of the detected malware for websites blocked by the Antimalware module.
• GravityZone notifies you when an update has finished. If failed, the update will run again in 24 hours.
• The notification Update Available now informs you about the availability of a new GravityZone, a new package or a product update.
• Portlets now provide data for maximum one month to offer a more up-to-date protection overview of the network. All previous longer reporting intervals are set to one month.

Usability

• You can now view more accurate information of when an endpoint was last seen online.
• Improved the editing process of policy assignment rules based on location.
• You are now able to use the asterisk symbol (*) in front of a keyword to search its appearance anywhere in the name. If omitted, only results where the name starts with the keyword will be returned.

API

• Updated the APIs createReport method to reflect the following GravityZone changes:
  • Optimized reporting interval for the recurrences exposed by API.
  • Reports emailed as ZIP archives.
• Updated the APIs getScanTasksList method to reflect improved name searching using the asterisk symbol (*).

Resolved Issues

Computers and Virtual Machines Protection

• Fixed the quick and full scan tasks that were not running with low priority, as set.
• Resolved the kernel error message that was showing in the command line interface of GravityZone VA version 5.1.23-472 or later.
• Stopped email alerts about invalid Exchange credentials, which were sent without having Security for Exchange installed.
• Resolved the error message “No deploy package found” displayed at remote installation of Bitdefender Endpoint Security Tools.
• When communication errors occurred, the database was not being updated with the correct version of the kits downloaded on the appliance, preventing endpoints update. The issue is now fixed.
• In some vCenter 6.0 integrations, Windows 10 machines were being identified as servers. The issue is now fixed.
• Resolved the error received at Active Directory integration when only VDI and VS license keys were present.

Exchange Protection

• In some situations, the Security for Exchange license usage information showed no mailboxes protected instead of the actual number of protected mailboxes. The issue is now fixed.

Known Issues

• For clean GravityZone deployments, product kits might be displayed in Control Center > Update page with up to an hour delay, based on your Internet connection.