Antivirus software applications have emerged in the 1980s in response to early computer viruses. Since then, they have become essential components of cybersecurity, scanning files in real-time and automatically removing or quarantining potential threats.
But computer viruses are just one of many threats organizations worry about these days. In 2021, 10 percent of all breaches involved the use of ransomware, a form of malware designed to encrypt files on the infected device. What’s even more alarming is that Cybersecurity Ventures predicts ransomware damage costs to exceed $265 billion by 2031, up from just $325 million in 2015.
One reason why ransomware damage costs are growing at such a steep rate is the fact that traditional antivirus software can’t reliably stop ransomware attacks. All organizations that rely on it as their sole means of protection enjoy a false sense of security.
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Antivirus Software Vs. Ransomware Explained
To understand why antivirus software fares so poorly against ransomware, we must first explain how antivirus software works and how ransomware differs from viruses.
How Does Antivirus Software Works?
The original purpose of antivirus software was to stop viruses, self-replicating computer programs that are typically designed with malicious intentions in mind. To accomplish this goal, antivirus software relies mainly on the following two detection methods:
- Signature-based detection: Each virus has a unique digital signature that makes it possible to distinguish it from all other software applications. Antivirus software applications come with large databases of virus signatures, and they compare files against them in real-time. Any file that matches a known signature is instantly marked as malicious and handled accordingly.
- Heuristics: Because it’s very easy for cybercriminals to change the digital signatures of their viruses (all they have to do is slightly modify a single line of code), antivirus software applications also come with generic signatures that use wildcard characters and other means of accounting for inexact matches.
Let’s now explain how modern ransomware works to shine a light on why antivirus software is less than effective against it.
How Does Ransomware Work?
Most ransomware attacks start with phishing, a social engineering technique that involves fraudulent email messages designed to trick their recipients into doing something that’s against their best interest.
When a victim opens a phishing email they believe comes from a legitimate sender, they are often asked to click on a malicious link. The link can lead to a website that triggers a known exploit and loads malicious code directly into system memory, avoiding the detection methods used by traditional antivirus software applications.
Once in system memory, the malicious code can latch onto a legitimate application, such as Windows PowerShell, to gain elevated privileges and start encrypting files.
These so-called fileless malware techniques are not used to distribute all strains of ransomware, but they’re becoming more and more common, and their ability to avoid detection by antivirus software shouldn’t be taken lightly.
How Can I Protect Myself Against Ransomware?
Just because traditional antivirus software doesn’t provide reliable protection against ransomware doesn’t mean that you have to live with the threat of a ransomware attack hanging over your head.
To start with, you can replace your outdated antivirus software with a next-generation antivirus solution that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect malicious behavior, such as a privileged software application like PowerShell being launched to execute payload in memory.
You can also focus on stopping ransomware attacks where they typically start—inside employees’ inboxes. By educating employees about the tactics used by phishers, they can become your organization’s first line of defense, instead of being its weakest link.
When combined with other essential cybersecurity best practices, such as regular software patching, backup and disaster recovery, and access control, the likelihood of your organization succumbing to a ransomware attack is guaranteed to decrease drastically.
Schedule a meeting with us at OSIbeyond so that we can help you implement these and other cybersecurity best practices to protect your organization against ransomware and other threats.