Your Old Antivirus Is Obsolete – Next Generation Antivirus Is Here

Coronavirus is on everyone’s mind right now, but many business leaders are forgetting to consider the risks of another important disruptive virus: computer viruses. Antivirus solutions are a tested “vaccine” that can help prevent computer viruses – but not all antivirus solutions are equal. 

Let’s talk about next generation antivirus and how it differs from the traditional antivirus solutions you may be used to. 

Important! Please Use an Antivirus Solution!

The increase in WFH operations has placed many employees on their own devices. Do you know if their devices are secure enough to keep your sensitive business data safe? Using a good antivirus solution has never been more important, so if you or your staff isn’t yet relying on antivirus, please contact a respected IT managed services provider (MSP) to get help setting up appropriate cybersecurity protection ASAP. 

Honestly, we cannot stress the importance of using an antivirus tool… but perhaps you’re not using one because you’ve been disappointed with antivirus’s limitations in the past? If so, you’ll like the new next generation antivirus solutions out there. 

Traditional Antivirus vs. Next Generation Antivirus

We admit: Traditional antivirus kinda sucks sometimes because it only catches somewhere around half the threats it faces. However, 50/50 odds are way better than the odds of 100% failure, which is what you’ll experience if you have no protection against viruses and malware. 

In other words: 

Even if you aren’t ready for next generation antivirus, you’ll still want to have a strong traditional antivirus solution in place. Like, yesterday. 

As you’ve probably noticed in the past, traditional antivirus has these big drawbacks:

  • Doesn’t recognize variants of existing threats
  • Slows down your computers with constant updates
  • Can’t catch fileless attacks, such as ones run through macros (a programmed shortcut that helps eliminate repetitive tasks) 

These issues are due to the fact that traditional antivirus is based on something called “signature detection,” which means it’s programmed to recognize specific strings of characters in the code of viruses or malware. This used to be enough.  

See, back in the day, there weren’t that many types of malware (AKA viruses), but times have changed. These days, many cybercriminals tinker with the code in their malware to create new variants that have different nefarious qualities – sort of like that weird chile addition that Jesse Pinkman put in his meth originally in Breaking Bad

To combat these variants, traditional antivirus needs to constantly download and update its signature databases (hence the slow performance) and, even with that step, traditional antivirus can’t ID attacks without code in them (like macros).  

Luckily, you can avoid these drawbacks by switching to next generation antivirus

What Is Next Generation Antivirus?

In a nutshell, next generation antivirus largely eliminates the issues in traditional antivirus because it leverages machine learning, AI, and behavioral monitoring to:

  • Determine what’s normal for your environment
  • Quickly identify anomalies that could be attacks
  • Suggest possible solutions to those anomalies (restart the computer, delete a file – stuff like that)
  • Keep away all those other known threats that traditional antivirus focuses on

Instead of being a reactive tool like traditional antivirus, next generation antivirus is proactive. It can stop attacks before they become breaches – and it’s easy to install and manage too, because it’s all on the cloud. 

Prevention Is Key in Fighting Viruses… But…

As we all know by now, prevention is super important when facing a terrible virus. By this point, we’re all experts at hand washing, mask wearing, and social distancing (that last one is really hard!), because no one wants to catch the coronavirus. 

But. 

Even though prevention is critical, you also want to go beyond prevention. After all, prevention is pretty useless if you actually come down with the virus

The same applies to computer viruses. 

If you currently have no antivirus solution, please get one as soon as you can. It’s your first line of defense — equivalent to your mask, hand washing, and social distancing — against computer viruses. 

However, just as preventative measures against COVID aren’t guaranteed, preventative measures against computer viruses aren’t guaranteed either. There’s a small chance your business might still catch the virus – and then you’ll want a way to treat it. Immediately. 

Ready to Learn How to Treat Viruses?

Coming up next in this series, we’ll talk about your next line of defense against computer viruses and malware: Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR).  

You can continue reading the series to learn more, or simply get fast, friendly, fully understandable facts from your local Seattle team of awesome MSPs. Our IT experts at Interplay are happy to help you determine how you can best secure your business against cyberthreats at the office and in a WFH setting.

 

Discover how to secure your technology, quickly and easily. 

 


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