Antivirus Solutions
Antivirus solutions are programs designed to protect endpoint devices. IT endpoints are the devices that people use to access company resources. Examples of endpoints are personal computers, mobile devices, point-of-sale terminals, and other various devices where data is created, processed, and stored, such as IoT devices. With so many endpoints and their corresponding threats on your network, it may be difficult to know which antivirus features your organization needs the most. The following are features to consider when you are deciding which antivirus solutions are right for you.
Easy. Antivirus solutions must be easy to navigate for end users as well as admins. A good antivirus program will operate quietly in the background most of the time, only making itself aware to end users when necessary. An example of a situation where an antivirus program may make itself known are when certain actions are interrupted, such as when a website is blocked due to an HTTP connection. End users should have the ability to turn off notifications of background activities such as updates, scans, and firewalls, so that end users do not become desensitized to antivirus notifications.
Automatic updating. Cyberattacks are constantly evolving and new threats are emerging daily. It is important that your antivirus solution is adapting to this changing landscape and ensuring that your protection is up to date. Having antivirus solutions that update automatically ensures that no endpoint falls through the cracks due to a failure of an end user to install the most recent update manually.
Dynamic scanning. Antivirus solutions with dynamic scanning features automatically and regularly check endpoints for signs of malicious activity. Dynamic scanning analyzes live running applications for common vulnerabilities. This is preferable over antivirus solutions that require end users to run manual scans, which will only find infected files after they have already been downloaded and have possibly done damage already.
Polymorphous attack protection. Polymorphic malware is malware such as viruses, bots, worms, keyloggers, or trojans that are capable of evolving and altering their properties to avoid detection by antivirus programs. The malware frequently changes its properties such as file names and encryption keys so that it has already reinvented itself by the time its previous identity was registered into a database, allowing it to continue on a rampage of endpoint infections. Antivirus solutions can protect against this through heuristic scanning, which scans for certain crucial components the threat could share, rather than scanning for an exact match, and behavior-based detection which analyzes the behavior of the virus, rather than its properties alone.
Multi-layered web browsing protection. Features such as firewalls, spam filtering, proactive blocking, secure browsers, and secure deletion of sensitive files such as browsing history and passwords ensure that threats are analyzed and addressed in real-time, preventing cyberattacks.