Antivirus is great and all, but it’s important in business to acknowledge that not all solutions you implement are equal. What seems like a good deal could actually put your business at risk. If your antivirus isn’t reliable, you can’t continue with business with the assurance that everything will be okay.
That’s why it’s important to know you can trust your antivirus to work the way it should. Today, we are covering how to know you’ve found the solution that meets your business’ needs.
Antivirus works by scanning your entire network. If it determines there’s something on your network with the same signature as a known threat, the antivirus blocks it.
It sounds simple, and that’s because it is. However, hackers remain busy all the same, constantly creating new variants of malware to break through your firewall’s list of known threats. This means that there’s a near-constant war between security developers and hackers—and your business is caught in the crossfire.
The challenging thing for businesses to wrap their heads around is that hackers aren’t using overtly obvious attacks these days—at least not in the way you see in movies and TV shows. A hacker is more likely to manipulate an employee into acting against the business’ best interests. They can do this in several ways, most notably through phishing, which leads employees to hand over their credentials or grant access to hackers without even realizing it.
This is the key problem with antivirus; it doesn’t look for strange or problematic user behaviors. It references a list of known threats to catch them on your network, but it’s not going to catch someone who enters code provided by an attacker into PowerShell. That’s not what antivirus is designed to do. The firewall recognizes your employees as authorized business users, so it won't catch it.
Since you can’t rely on antivirus alone, we recommend a more comprehensive tool: endpoint detection and response (EDR). This tool shores up the weaknesses of antivirus by monitoring network activity. It can detect anomalous behavior in real time, so you can catch threats in action and respond before they cause catastrophic damage.
For example, let’s say you download a file from an email attachment, and that file tries to encrypt other files on your server. The EDR tool will detect and stop the process, isolating it from the rest of your network. Then, your managed service provider can take action to investigate and solve the problem before they create greater concerns.
Free antivirus software won't give you the results you want for your business. Sure, it’ll get you results, but they’ll probably be in the wrong direction and definitely not up to industry standards.
Your business deserves better. To learn about the solutions we offer SMBs, give us a call at (571) 470-5594.
