Your Antivirus Is Antiquated

By Carrie Landry, Rubica

Your antivirus is antiquated. It’s vintage, invented in the 80’s for a completely different world than yours. It’s always chasing yesterday’s virus signatures. It doesn’t keep up with the cybercriminals, their ideas, or their malware. Yet you keep using it for yourself and your businesses. Relying on antivirus for remote workers as a cybersecurity strategy is a huge mistake. And it starts at the very root of how antivirus works both for you and against you.

Antivirus is the cybercriminal’s favorite tool

I was talking to our former hacker, current CTO Riley Eller, also known as Caezar. As the inventor of the DDOS attack, his mind understands security from both the offensive and defensive side. And this is how a malware engineer sees antivirus: as a whetstone. Each day, Norton and the other antivirus companies update their malware and virus signatures. Let’s assume antivirus protected against all kinds of malware (it doesn’t) and on all devices, cross-platform (it doesn’t). But assuming it offered perfect protection against yesterday’s malware…each morning cybercriminals download the latest version of the antivirus software and start the day’s hunt for new, unprotected devices.

Here’s Riley’s analogy: much like a chef sharpens blades against one another, cybercriminals sharpen their malware against antivirus each morning when viral signatures update. Then they analyze whatever new code got pushed at midnight and build an instant variant antivirus won’t catch until at least tomorrow, and you cross your fingers and hope you don’t get the latest invention. Their revenue stream depends on it. He says “as a cybercriminal you come out of that sharpening in the morning knowing with confidence how effective your tool will be that day.”

What antivirus doesn’t do

Typically, antivirus doesn’t protect against phishing sites—which, according to Google’s Transparency Report, is exponentially outpacing the number of malware sites.

Even if antivirus worked, it only tells you whether or not something is bad, like taking your temperature tells you if you’re sick. The thermometer can’t diagnose you or treat you, it just tells you something is wrong. Antivirus is the same way: pretend right now you get a virus notification from your laptop. What do you do next?  Did the antivirus tell you what you had, or give you exact next steps on how to disinfect?  Do you feel equipped to fix it?

Antivirus can’t keep up with today’s malware

Antivirus is a cracked shield from the bronze age. With a critical flaw and made of old, soft metal, it’s a partial strategy that contains the seeds of its own obsolescence. First, antivirus functions by giving you its latest round of virus code each day, as a user, and that means the cybercriminals also have it because they use the products they fight. That the cybercriminals can get to antivirus code is a flaw in the idea of the product itself. They shouldn’t be able to figure out how you’re figuring them out. Riley compares modern security to a bodyguard. Its presence must follow the device and its connection to the internet, everywhere. More than that, it has to be able to tell you what to do about a potential infection instead of either just ignoring it, or telling you your device might be sick, end of story.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in antivirus is that it’s terrible at protecting phones, and was engineered for an enterprise user on a corporate laptop. Remember Riley’s digital bodyguard analogy? 4 in 10 breached businesses last year involved mobile devices, and 75% of users mix work and personal tasks on their phones. When many companies simply can’t afford two devices for their employees, a true digital bodyguard protects, real-time, at the device level so mixed-use devices become a moot point. Device-level security addresses this by detecting bad behaviors that the malware exhibits (like spamming our friends) and raises alarms to get the problem shut down before more people get targeted.

Antivirus misses the power of instant protection for all. If you get a virus, your antivirus company doesn’t block your new, nasty infection from all its other customers; you’re really left on your own, each person an island, and that places a big burden on an IT team. You could potentially be dealing with the same issue with multiple companies or teams with traditional antivirus, instead of having a product smart enough to block that attack for everyone at the same time. Rubica does this while protecting the device’s connection to the internet with a lightning-fast, encrypted VPN.

Eliminate extra work for IT staff

Having a security product that works real-time allows you to have a lighter load for all teams and businesses. Remember how long it took the last time you had to contain an attack on a single device? Next, multiply that out times the number of people that have the same infection. Then let’s talk about a single-app solution: make sure the security product works cross-platform, instead of patchworking one solution for the laptop or workstation and then something else for the phone. Each extra security tool that doesn’t work cross-platform is an extra tool to maintain for your IT staff: an extra set of passwords, dashboards, troubleshooting, and headache.

Antivirus is yesterday’s strategy and it has its place in the Living Computer Museum as something that was once a fantastic idea.

---

About The Author

Carrie Landry is a Marketing Director who specializes in merging the creative and the technical. 

She’s helping grow a team of security-savvy marketers at Rubica, a cybersecurity company bringing cross-platform protection to mobile devices and remote working professionals.