Cybercrime and cyber incidents grew significantly over the past two years. 80 percent of global organizations experienced increased cyber threats and downtime due to a cyberattack in 2020. At the end of 2021, the number of reported data breaches surpassed total numbers from 2020, costing companies $1.79 million per minute.
As the lucrative market for ransomware, malware and cybercriminal activity has grown, cybersecurity experts have worked hard to stay ahead of attacks. One of the tools that IT Managed Service Providers (MSPs) highly recommend to prevent ransomware, malware and other cybercrime called Endpoint Detection and Response or EDR.
An endpoint is any device that connects to a computer network—whether a computer, printer, server or router. These endpoints are vulnerable to attacks from malicious actors.
EDR protects endpoints by searching for and detecting unusual, unexpected or malicious activity, blocking or containing it, collecting and analyzing data to learn how it behaves, eliminating the threats, and predicting new ways to prevent attacks.
Antivirus software looks for viruses by scanning for specifically identified viruses, malware or other attacks—like a “most wanted” list. It is frequently updated to account for the many known cyberthreats and thwart them. Any program that comes across an endpoint with a signature recognized by the antivirus software is flagged, quarantined and eliminated.
For years this approach has worked well for businesses. However, due to the changing and evolving cyber landscape, there is now a shortfall in protection when utilizing only traditional antivirus software. Traditional antivirus is not able to keep up with the intense proliferation of new viruses and cyberthreats because of how it is designed.
Traditional antivirus depends on digital signatures or a digital fingerprint to identify malicious attacks. If the newest threats do not use digital signatures or mimic a safe signature, the threat can slip into the network undetected. This opens companies up to new viruses or zero-day threats. Zero-day threats are threats that there are currently no patches or fixes for because they are new or unknown.
EDR with Next Generation Antivirus (NGAV), like what Intrada Technologies offers our clients, uses traditional antivirus methods coupled with artificial intelligence (AI). It looks at each file that comes across the endpoint or device with something called continuous file analysis. This analysis looks for “most wanted” list threats and then goes a step further by observing the behavior of the software or program for anomalies with continuous file analysis.
The primary value of EDR is that the threat does not need to be precisely defined, like traditional antivirus. EDR identifies threats before they have been defined by watching the patterns or behavior of activity and issue an alert for a security analyst to investigate.
EDR is very behaviorally-focused. It watches for changes files make and attempts to evade scans or other abnormal activity. It targets advanced threats that are engineered to get past traditional antivirus scans.
Once an abnormal signature or threat is detected, the EDR contains it to prevent it from causing harm to other applications, files or users.
Following containment, EDR assists by providing data and some analysis of the threat to determine where it came from, how it entered, what it was trying to do or attack and other helpful insights that help to inform and strengthen companies’ cybersecurity as a whole. It also restores devices back to the pre-infection state.
By using EDR, businesses are able to protect their companies and mitigate threats.
Recently, a member of our cybersecurity team received an alert about a large threat attacking Microsoft Exchange servers. We reached out to both our traditional antivirus provider and our EDR provider to notify them about the complex threat.
While the traditional antivirus provider worked on a response, they had no way to stop it at the moment. There had not been a Microsoft patch yet either.
Intrada’s EDR product was able to pick up the threat and stop it. Intrada Technologies then immediately reached out to our clients who were affected and encouraged them to switch over to EDR.
Intrada has years of experience protecting our clients with both antivirus and EDR solutions to prevent cyberattacks.
EDR provides a higher level of cybersecurity protection than traditional antivirus software due to its combination of NGAV’s data storehouse and AI machine learning.
If your business gets hit by ransomware, how many hours, days or weeks can your business manage without a computer system and how much revenue will be lost?
Additionally, if your organization has cyber insurance, many of these insurers are now requesting that their clients employ EDR.
Consider making the switch to EDR to better protect your business assets.
To learn more about Intrada’s EDR services, contact James Haywood by calling 800-858-5745 or emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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