Infographic: Next-Gen Antivirus vs. Traditional Antivirus

Next-gen antivirus vs. traditional antivirus is a question that many businesses over the last year have had to address with increasing urgency.

The cybersecurity landscape for businesses changed dramatically in the 2010s, and the onset of the pandemic in 2020 only ramped up the change.

Attacks became more frequent and in many cases more severe, with unprepared businesses facing the brunt of the damage.

Nearly 20% of all cyber attacks hit small businesses with 250 or fewer employees. Roughly 60% of small businesses close within six months of a cyber attack.

The unfortunate aspect of the vast majority of cyberattacks is that they are completely avoidable when the correct solutions are utilized.

Cybercriminals operate on law-of-averages approach—they are betting that of the many companies they target, at least one of them will have an under- or poorly-developed cybersecurity policy, and those organizations are the most susceptible to attack.

Then when you take into account that 16% of businesses globally are cutting their cybersecurity budgets—not a small number by any means—you have an environment in which a proportion of companies are certain to be breached.

Even many of those who do have solutions have outdated or legacy technology (like traditional antivirus) which isn’t capable of detecting and preventing modern threats, such as:

• Memory-based attacks
• Remote logins
• PowerShell scripting language
• Macro-based attacks

We’ve put together this handy infographic to help get an understanding of what the differences between next-gen and traditional antivirus are, and why it’s important for organizations that take their data security seriously to invest in modern solutions for threats from bad actors.

Infographic in written form:

Next-Generation Antivirus vs. Traditional Antivirus 

With cyberattacks hitting organizations more than ever, businesses need to adapt and respond. One of the primary ways of doing this is by implementing a next-gen antivirus (NGAV) program to replace your outdated legacy antivirus, but what’s the difference between the two?

Take a look at our infographic for a quick breakdown of the key differences.

Traditional Antivirus

• Malware is detected by vendor
• Vendor produces signature after analysis
• Signature is packaged as a file and delivered to endpoint
• Antivirus scans endpoint to check new files against existing signatures

Next-Gen Antivirus

• Malware arrives at endpoint whether it’s been detected or not
• Malware is tested with algorithms against established signature and signatureless models
• Malware begins its process and if it matches any malicious behaviors, is quarantined and removed
• Post-incident data is sent to vendor, which allows them to update their malware behavior models

While there is still a place for traditional antivirus in rooting out the majority of identified malware, next-gen antivirus is necessary today to deal with new attack vectors, specifically fileless, signatureless and zero-day attacks.