Five Reasons You Need Next-Gen Anti-Virus
Attackers are constantly evolving and upgrading their programs and tools. Similar to how software programs are always updating, attackers need to change to continually find ways around road blocks that are being placed in their way. They are using artificial intelligence to ensure their attack is successful. Due to the ever adjusting attack vectors, you need a next-gen anti-virus tool to protect yourself from these attacks.
What is Next-Gen Anti-Virus?
Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) solutions prevent all types of attacks, known and unknown. They accomplish this through monitoring and responding to attacker tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs).
There are several reasons to choose an NGAV over traditional tools, including:
1. Traditional signature-based solutions miss many of today’s advanced threats
Traditional AV solutions leverage signatures to detect and block known malware threats. There are several challenges with this approach. First, signature-based solutions are inherently stuck in the past. Each company has to rely on it’s own network of customers and security researchers to detect new threats in the wild. Next they need to update the vendor’s signature databases and then distribute these new signatures to agents running locally on PCs and servers. More importantly, signature-based solutions do not detect malicious behavior, especially those advanced sort of attacks that leverage legitimate software tools for malicious purposes. Examples include memory-based attacks, malicious Power Shell scripts, and macro-based attacks.
2. NGAV is more complete as it inspects files, processes, applications, and network connections
NGAV solutions detect and prevent both malware and other non-malware attacks. NGAV takes a system based approach to security, by analyzing not just files but processes, applications, and network connections. This more holistic approach is able to defend against a range of attacks. An attack that may combine macros running in a conventional Microsoft Word file with malicious outbound communications would be covered with this approach.
These more sophisticated attacks leverage legitimate software, like Word, and exploit it for malicious purposes. In this example, the macro running in Word could be used to initiate communications with a malicious command control server, to download additional malware or to initiate key logging and theft of sensitive credentials or passwords.
3. Collect and analyze comprehensive endpoint data to determine root causes
NGAV solutions are designed to gather and comprehensively analyze endpoint data to determine root causes. Having access to unfiltered endpoint data sets powers a global intelligence network and enables the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict and detect never before seen attack tactics, techniques, and procedures. Being able to automate root-cause analysis is a direct benefit of collecting unfiltered data. NGAV solutions allow an organization to determine the initial weakness that the attacker took advantage of and enables them to proactively address that weakness to stop the attacker from using it again.
4. Leverage the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence
NGAV solutions leverage big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence to ingest and analyze billions of security events and inputs to detect and predict new malicious forms of attack. For instance, Carbon Black, a leader in NGAV, analyzes 500 billion security events across the globe every single day. Of course, it is impossible to analyze that volume of data with humans. To analyze that volume of data, Carbon Black leverages a number of techniques, including cloud computing, machine learning, and AI. These tools and data analytics techniques allow them to see patterns across the globe that help organizations stop the bad guys.
5. Respond to new and emerging threats that previously go undetected with a Predictive Security Cloud
NGAV solutions don’t just rely on big data analytics and machine learning. NGAV solutions also rely on the human security researchers and community of customers to analyze and act on the constantly evolving threat ecosystem. In the end, human participation and decision is critical to building a predictive security solution. Data and analytics only make up half of the solution. The other half of the solution is security professionals at customers and service provider partners who are acting in real time to defend users, networks and organizations. This human feedback loop and customer community, when combined with big data analytics, machine learning, and AI, enables a NGAV solution to respond to new and emerging threats in real time.
Protek Support leverages NGAV to secure and proactively defend its clients. Existing and prospective clients should reach out to Michelle Lawson to learn more how NGAV can help you. Sign up today for a consultation.