Time Machine Protection

The Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac product has a Time Machine Protection feature, safeguarding an external disk attached to a Mac that is used to hold a Time Machine backup. The intent is to block access to the backup disk by any application other than Time Machine itself, in order to protect the contents of the disk from ransomware.

Does an equivalent feature or capability exist in GravityZone on macOS? Alternatively, can GravityZone be configured to provide equivalent protection (e.g., by creating and assigning a policy)?

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Andrei_S Enterprise

Hello @Pleonasm ,

On the enterprise side we do not have the exact capability "Time Machine Protection" as the consumer side, however, there is available the File Disk Encryption addon which can encrypt specific volumes using the macOS's FileVault and diskutil capabilities. While the encryption features are not enough for a ransomware attack, the security agent BEST (Bitdefender Endpoint Security Tools) has a dedicated module called Antimalware which includes the Ransomware Mitigation feature designed to protect you against these types of attacks.

All the above features described and many others are managed through policies which can be applied on endpoints.
The entire list of features can be found here: https://www.bitdefender.com/business/support/en/77209-376324-features-by-asset-type.html#UUID-7ff62abb-4fcd-0cf2-8fc2-bbc3324ab94d

Kind Regards,

Andrei

Pleonasm

@Andrei_S Enterprise, thank you for your reply. To clarify, are you saying that there does not exist an option in GravityZone on macOS to create a policy that restricts write access to an external disk to specified applications?

P.S.: The Ransomware Mitigation feature is not available on macOS (see here) - correct?

Andrei_S Enterprise

Hello @Pleonasm ,

Yes, there is no feature to restrict specific applications to an external disk, what BEST has is a feature called Device Control which is intended to protect against data leakage and malware infections from external devices or you have other features which can block application entirely based on hash or path for example.

In terms of Ransomware Mitigation, sorry for the confusion, I was looking only at the Antimalware module which includes the Ransomware Mitigation feature on Windows but yes, you are correct, Ransomware Mitigation is not available on macOS.

For macOS you can also review the article on protecting against malware which provides a step by step guide on configuring the features of BEST: https://www.bitdefender.com/business/support/en/77209-41497-protecting-against-malware.html#UUID-f4826cdd-3284-e4aa-ec51-57f5973961f6

Kind Regards,

Andrei