VMware Carbon Black App Control Windows Agent 8.7.2 Release Notes

VMware Carbon Black App Control Windows Agent 8.7.2 | 15 DEC 2021 | Build 8.7.2.420

Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

What's New

This document provides change information and installation instructions for VMware Carbon Black App Control v8.7.2 Windows Agents.

IMPORTANT: This maintenance release includes security and stability improvements.

3 March 2022 Announcement:

The Windows agent App Control engineering team has uncovered an issue for customers on Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 where upgrading to or installing any Windows Agent Versions after 8.6.0 will not work as intended.

We are advising customers planning to install or upgrade their Windows Agent on Windows Server 2008 SP2 not to use 8.6.2, 8.7.0, or 8.7.2. Customers on Server 2008 R2 are not affected by this issue. We are working on a resolution to this issue and will update this post when we have more information.

Installation Instructions

As of the 8.1.4 server release, the Windows Agent no longer comes bundled with the VMware Carbon Black App Control Server, nor does it require manual (command line) steps to add it to the server.

You can upgrade Carbon Black App Control Windows Agents without having to upgrade the Carbon Black App Control Server. Please see the latest Carbon Black App Control User Guide for more information.

NOTE: This Windows Agent is compatible with App Control Server version 8.1.4 and subsequent releases

For information regarding which Windows operating systems are supported in this release, please review the Carbon Black EDR sensors & Carbon Black App Control agents document on the Carbon Black User Exchange.

Resolved Issues

There were no issues resolved in this release.

Known Issues

EP-6982: Carbon Black App Control does not support NTFS reparse points as exclusion paths and they should not be used with kernelFileOpExclusions configuration rules

Reparse points include such objects like symbolic links, directory junction points and volume mount points.
EP-6197: Occasionally the agent will complain about metadata not being properly populated and trigger an Error

The Error implies a mismatch in expectation but is not expected to break functionality of the agent and can be ignored.
EP-6107: After upgrading agents on Windows XP systems, it is possible to see signature error events stating that the installer download failed

The upgrade should be successful and there should not be any impact on the upgrade process.
EP-6106: An installation of a new Carbon Black App Control Agent on the latest version of Windows 10 can result in a health check error due to a miscalculation of how many events the agent should send to the Carbon Black App Control server

This problem disappears after a reboot.
EP-6104: Cleanmgr.exe is a windows utility process that runs occasionally and will copy files to the "temp" folder in order to run analysis on them

These files are only copies of other files already on the machine and cleanmgr.exe never executes them.
EP-5498: In some cases, the agent will report an empty installer for a given file

The file will still be correctly approved or not, as expected on the endpoint. Only reporting of the source installer is failing, not enforcement of relevant rules.
EP-5483: The agent currently tracks all the extracted content from the Windows 10 WIM image in the temp directory

A rule to ignore these writes is not yet functioning properly.
EP-2393: The appearance in the console of block and report events related to the Ransomware rapid config may be delayed by a minute or more
EP-1682: Carbon Black App Control does not support in-container enforcement

Users can use the Microsoft Edge Virtualization feature, but Carbon Black App Control will not enforce rules within the container. It will, however, enforce rules on anything that breaks out of the sandbox.
EP-1201: On Windows 2003 x64, you may see a health check reporting improper classifications immediately after installation

This should go away after roughly fifteen minutes.

EP-10542: When uninstalling the agent, a Carbon Black App Control Agent dialog displays informing the user that certain applications must be closed before continuing the installation

This informational message is caused by a known msiexec defect:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ph/help/2745579/same-file-or-service-name-causes-incorrect-fileinuse-dialog

Important: This could occur during a removal of the agent using "add/remove programs" or during an upgrade of the agent if you are using 3rd party software or a manual upgrade using msiexec. Customers that perform agent upgrades from within the Carbon Black App Control Admin console are not affected. When uninstalling the agent or performing a manual upgrade, or upgrade using 3rd party software, you can suppress this dialog with the additional msiexec command line argument "/qb-". This will disable modal dialog during manual uninstalls and upgrades.

Important: This could occur during a removal of the agent using "add/remove programs" or during an upgrade of the agent if you are using 3rd party software or a manual upgrade using msiexec.

Customers that perform agent upgrades from within the Carbon Black App Control Admin console are not affected.

When uninstalling the agent or performing a manual upgrade, or upgrade using 3rd party software, you can suppress this dialog with the additional msiexec command line argument "/qb-". This will disable modal dialog during manual uninstalls and upgrades.

The example below shows how to manually uninstall the Carbon Black App Control agent with the /qb- argument:

msiexec /x {9F2D4E59-0528-4B22-B664-A6B0B8B482EE} /qb-

This issue is not new to the Windows agent and possibly affected customers on earlier releases. A long term fix will be implemented in a future release.