Antivirus programs have been designed to protect against the oldest types of malware, known virus infections. In the past, many of these viruses were created from files. Virus creators could easily take advantage of the predictable behaviour of a computer that was infected by one of the now outdated file-based malware types. Today's attackers use completely different attack methods, including fileless methods, credential stealing, and human-operated ransomware, which allow them to circumvent traditional antivirus solutions.
To be more secure today, businesses are moving toward implementing endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), managed detection and response (MDR), and proactive cybersecurity solutions.
The Changing Cyber Threat Landscape
Today's attacks are more aggressive and fully equipped to be stealthy. Attackers utilize trusted and legitimate programs or tools, as well as user login and password information, to navigate and hide throughout a corporate environment.
Human-operated Ransomware attacks begin with extensive background research through phishing, stealing account information, and using unpatched exploits, before the attacker's encryption step begins (i.e., the attacker's actual operation), which is not detectable by standard antivirus solutions.
Why Traditional Antivirus Falls Short
Traditional antivirus must rely on signatures of known threats. It may fail to detect zero-day attacks, fileless malware, and ever evolving malware variants.
Traditional antivirus does not provide adequate visibility on endpoint activity, does not have a clear way to identify who launched an attack, does not provide an understanding of attack propagation, and does not have a real-time containment capability. Therefore, traditional antivirus is not able to function effectively as an independent security solution.
Modern Attacks Require Behavioral Detection
Behavior-based detection is necessary to identify modern attacks on organisations. Attacks today usually use methods such as credential abuse, lateral movement, escalation of privilege, and living off the land. All these methods seem legitimate to traditional signature-based tools.
So to detect these types of threats, we need to track the activity and context of all endpoint and system behaviours over time rather than just looking at the contents of files stored on disks.
Moving Forward: Advanced Endpoint Security
Automated Detection and Response (ADR) continually captures all endpoint activity, identifies abnormal behaviour in near-real-time and allows speed of investigation and containment.
Expanded Detection and Response (XDR) consolidates signal data from multiple anonymised sources; such that they are filtered together across the jurisdiction of their respective diagrams to create cohesive analysis outputs that identify elaborate complex multi-stages attacks.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provides organizations lacking a full-service security operations centre or services and solutions such as; Monitoring, Expert Threat Hunting and Incident Response.
Cybersecurity Services: More than Just Technology
A large percentage of breaches are caused by misconfiguration, poor processes, or untested security controls; not by tools that a company might not have.
VAPT, or Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing, provides a company with the ability to find and fix exploitable weaknesses before a hacker does. The inclusion of a GRC Service enables a company to align its security strategy with global compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2 while ensuring that organizational risk management and regulatory compliance are being pursued in tandem.
How Relying Only on Antivirus Has an Impact on an Organization
Most organizations who only utilize an AV solution are typically not aware of breaches until it's too late, at which time they may have experienced all of the following: extended downtime, the loss of sensitive data, regulatory fines, and irreparable reputation damages.
Those organizations who adopt EDR, XDR, MDR, and other proactive security services are typically able to detect threats earlier, mitigate the effects of those threats, and present a more solidified security posture during their audit process and/or customer due diligence process.
Although antivirus software is still a fundamental component of defending against known commodity threats, it cannot be viewed as a complete solution in the fight against cybercrime. Today's organizations need a use-case approach that leverages all available resources across all facets of the organization – continuous visibility, behavioral detection, and a timely response to unknown and advanced attacks – if they want to maintain their security posture.
Therefore, organizations today cannot simply rely on antivirus to protect against malware; they need a solution that will provide visibility, detection and recovery capabilities for their entire organization.
For organizations to continue to have a proactive posture in the event of a security breach, they must move away from traditional antivirus and use the capabilities available to manage, detect and assess any type of security threat through advanced endpoint. protection and ongoing management of their security program, such as those provided by Ancrew.