2026 WINNER · CYBERSECURITY STARS AWARDS
Bitdefender GravityZone PHASR
Best Attack Surface Management Platform
Overview
Bitdefender is a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide. Guardian over millions of consumer, enterprise, and government environments, Bitdefender is one of the industry's most trusted experts for eliminating threats, protecting privacy, digital identity and data, and enabling cyber resilience. With deep investments in research and development, Bitdefender Labs discovers hundreds of new threats each minute and validates billions of threat queries daily. The company has pioneered breakthrough innovations in antimalware, IoT security, behavioral analytics, and artificial intelligence and its technology is licensed by more than 180 of the world's most recognized technology brands. Founded in 2001, Bitdefender has customers in 170+ countries with offices around the world. For more information, visit https://www.bitdefender.com.
Key Capabilities
Capabilities:
The modern threat landscape is defined by rapidly expanding attack surfaces, increasingly automated and AI-augmented attacks, and stealthy intrusions that abuse native OS tools. Bitdefender's 2025 research shows native tool abuse is present in 84% of major incidents. Reactive security strategies are less effective, especially for lean teams.
Bitdefender GravityZone PHASR (Proactive Hardening & Attack Surface Reduction) is a first-to-market innovation that delivers tailored, dynamic security hardening for each individual employee, reducing overall attack surface exposure.
PHASR learns how each user works and adapts how security is applied by enforcing hardening and security configurations tailored not to job roles but the actual user behavior. Instead of static rules and exceptions that need to be maintained manually, PHASR can orchestrate optimal hardening in Autopilot Mode, eliminating the manual effort that prohibits deeper hardening today. Instead of relying only on blanket allow-deny decisions, PHASR also uses action-level restrictions, blocking atypical and risky user actions within allowed tools.
Threat actors reuse proven playbooks to mimic legitimate activity and evade detection. PHASR enables security to adapt uniquely to each user, disrupting repeatable attack patterns and preventing cybercriminals from scaling a single bypass technique across environments.
Aside from making PHASR's preemptive security technology available with the Bitdefender GravityZone platform, we also launched it as a standalone solution that augments third party endpoint protection (EPP) or endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms. The standalone release enables businesses to seamlessly add powerful prevention security capabilities and significantly lower risk from excessive privileges, zero-day vulnerabilities, and third-party supply chain threats without disrupting operations or requiring a rip-and-replace of their current EPP/EDR.
How we are different
Bitdefender GravityZone PHASR addresses one of the most pressing gaps in modern cybersecurity: stopping stealthy attacks that abuse legitimate system tools and applications.
Recognized as a "differentiated innovation" in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for EPP, PHASR shifts endpoint security from reactive threat detection to preemptive, behavior-based hardening. Using individualized AI models and live threat intelligence, it continuously learns user behavior and apply user restrictions and policies on unnecessary risky tools and actions.
Bitdefender was one of just five vendors worldwide recognized as a 2026 Customers' Choice for EPPs, based on verified customer reviews on Gartner Peer Insights.
Customers and MSPs have cited 70% and 80% reduction in the attack surface and PHASR blocking multiple ransomware attacks without causing disruption. These results were achieved with PHASR operating autonomously and adapting in real time to changing behaviors and threat vectors to close attack paths and stop attacks before they could start.
These results demonstrate that PHASR is not only aligned with customer needs, but it delivers tangible improvements in risk reduction and operational efficiency.
We are rapidly expanding attack surface management capabilities with in PHASR: we've integrated visibility across vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and human risk, we've expanded coverage from Windows to Mac OS and Linux, and we have added compatibility to the standalone version with Bitdefender GravityZone external attack surface management, cloud security posture management, compliance management and patch management. This supports our vision of providing a holistic 360 view of risk, intelligent exposure prioritization, and automated remediation.
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