As traditional antivirus vendors attempt to incorporate new technologies such as machine learning into their solutions, their continued reliance on old approaches like scanning limits their effectiveness against today’s cyber threats. This is why we have seen the mass exodus of companies leaving behind their legacy antivirus. Organizations can now secure their endpoints without tolerating the hidden costs of traditional antivirus solutions.
The solution that CentraComm has identified as the most powerful on the market is Palo Alto Traps. Traps replaces legacy antivirus with a multi-method approach to prevention that deploys a unique combination of the most effective, purpose-built malware and exploit prevention methods to prevent known and unknown threats before they compromise an endpoint.
Multi-Method Malware Prevention
Traps prevents malicious executables with a unique approach that maximizes coverage against malware while simultaneously reducing the attack surface and increasing the accuracy of malware detection – without reliance on virus signatures or resource-taxing scanning. This approach combines several layers of protection that instantly prevent known and unknown malware from infecting a system:
- WildFire Threat Intelligence: Palo Alto Networks WildFire™ cloud-based threat analysis service is the world’s largest distributed sensor system focused on identifying and preventing unknown threats. Over 17,000 customers, third-party feeds and technology partners contribute threat intelligence to WildFire.
- Technique-based exploit prevention: Although there are many thousands of exploits, they all rely on a small set of exploitation techniques that change infrequently. Each exploit – known or unknown/zeroday – must use a series of these techniques to successfully subvert an application. Traps renders these techniques effective by identifying and preemptively blocking them the moment they are attempted. Organizations using Traps can run any application, including those developed in-house or that no longer receive security support, without the imminent threat to their environment.
- Post-Exploitation Prevention: Traps prevents attackers from exploiting the operating system. A common kernel exploitation technique involves the creation of a malicious process that steals the credentials of a privileged process, allowing the malicious process to run with system permissions. Traps identifies and blocks this technique, and with it, various other kernel exploits. These methods enable Traps to efficiently, continuously and transparently prevent both known and zero-day exploits from compromising a system. This prevention protects applications and systems whether or not they receive security patches, and regardless of network connectivity or physical location.
Conclusion
Traditional antivirus no longer offers meaningful security value because it is no longer an effective means to prevent security breaches. Organizations now have access to a superior technology that eliminates the need for traditional antivirus; far surpasses it in terms of security value; and avoids the intangible, difficult-to-quantify, unquestioned costs of antivirus. Palo Alto Networks Traps replaces legacy antivirus with a multi-method approach to prevention that preemptively blocks malware and exploits, known and unknown, before they compromise an endpoint.