Prepare For The Post-AV Era Part 1: Five Alternatives To Endpoint Antivirus

As malware increases in sophistication and the number of new variants rises, antivirus (AV) technologies have steadily become less effective at stopping advanced threats to employee endpoints and servers, and security and risk (S&R) professionals have begun to realize this, as evidenced by survey results showing decreased adoption and interest in AV among small and medium-size businesses and enterprises alike. A growing number of S&R pros are considering replacing their third-party AV tools with native (OS) AV augmented with one or more of the following third-party AV alternatives: application whitelisting, application privilege management, application integrity protection, endpoint execution isolation, and endpoint visibility and control. While most S&R pros are not ready to completely ditch AV, these five technologies offer a number of benefits when compared to signature-based AV scanning. In this report, we examine the use cases, benefits, and drawbacks of each of these technologies.