Late last month, Bitdefender announced the worldwide availability of GravityZone PHASR, a proactive hardening and attack surface reduction tool, and demonstrated the tool at RSA Conference 2025. Though just recently made available to the channel worldwide, PHASR is already helping MSSP StoredTech better protect its customers,
Aleks Pavlinik, CISO at StoredTech, told MSSP Alert.
Bitdefender’s GravityZone Proactive Hardening and Attack Surface Reduction (PHASR) is an endpoint security solution that dynamically tailors hardening for each user to align configurations with user-intended privileges and behaviors and continuously adapt to shrink attack surfaces.
“From our perspective, we’ve seen the demos and gotten briefings on the development of the product, and we’re incredibly excited to see this kind of behavioral analytics feature being added to the Bitdefender GravityZone suite of tools that we’re currently already using,” Pavlinik said. “And it’s exciting, because it’s going to improve the security posture overnight, literally, for our customers. So we’re very excited about this product,” he said.
GravityZone PHASR enables MSPs and MSSPs to shift from a reactive to a proactive defense strategy by analyzing behavioral patterns across various devices to preemptively lock down systems, Rich Tallman, senior director of global cloud security and MSP at Bitdefender, explained. This reduces noise for security experts, allowing them to focus on critical threats more efficiently.
“The tool is particularly beneficial for MSPs and MSSPs, as it helps streamline security responses and adapt to specific environments. Bitdefender’s AI and machine learning technologies have been evolving since the 90s, and PHASR is the next evolution that is expected to significantly enhance security postures for clients,” Tallman said.
Many SMBs that otherwise can’t afford to hire cybersecurity experts, security analysts, incident responders, are turning to MSPs and MSSPs to handle cybersecurity, a SOC, EDR, MDR, and the like, Tallman said. But now, MSPs and MSSPs are facing a similar challenge: How to leverage technology within an MSP or MSSP — often an SMB themselves — to streamline monitoring, management, detection, response, and remediation across hundreds or even thousands of tenants.
“How do you cut through the noise for hundreds or thousands of tenants or customers and streamline the process for them? How can our MDR, SOC remediation, and threat labs narrow and pinpoint where the threat is coming from through all the noise? We have to make it faster and more accurate, because time is often the issue. The faster we can make an attacker’s life hard, the faster we can block them and remediate,” Tallman said.
That’s often difficult when attackers are using tools that are similar to those used by an MSP or MSSP, especially with Living off the Land-style attacks, he said. But PHASR enables an almost immediate shift from a reactive to a proactive security posture that doesn’t rely on signatures but can use behavioral analytics to quickly identify weaknesses in an attack surface and harden them, Tallman said.
“Using behavioral analytics means no longer relying on signatures, but taking into account behavior that’s happening with a user account in a less defensive and more offensive type of situation,” Pavlinik said. “Time is a key factor for us; it’s been reported that the time between the initial compromise and breach is 60 minutes. That’s the window that we’re working in right now. So, any way for us to close that gap in the initial stages and to alert and to get those remediations and responses running faster makes us less of a target and reduces the probability of being compromised,” he said.
PHASR leverages proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) to create profiles of behavioral norms across individuals and groups, focusing on key areas such as data access, application usage, and security permissions, Tallman said, and then tailors solutions to the needs of every environment. This enables a comprehensive assessment of vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors impacting the business and helps MSPs and MSSPs know where to focus their prevention efforts.
Bitdefender GravityZone PHASR is available now, Tallman said, and is available to Bitdefender’s channel partners.
