It´s Time For Legacy AV To Leave The Building: #legxit

Traditional endpoint antivirus has outlived its usefulness. Diverse and changing attack techniques and vectors such as diskless malware, packers and kriptors can all make known malware undetectable by antivirus that relies on commonly deployed checking methods to identify known threats. As a result, it’s becoming harder for organizations to rely on these traditional, static techniques of detection and protection, and many are moving away from antivirus solutions and embracing new technologies to protect their endpoints from malware and other forms of attack.

Is Antivirus Dead?

All the antivirus protection in the world can’t protect against the increasing volume of new, never-seen-before threats that employ advanced techniques to disguise malware. The defensive approach of protection based on existing knowledge of an attack is increasingly futile; attackers can easily alter the code or fingerprint of malware to evade antivirus detection. They can also execute fileless attacks which can be downloaded by simply browsing a website. This type of malware easily evades antivirus and intrusion prevention solutions as it executes only in the memory, rather than the hard drive.

So it looks like #legxit is inevitable, but what do organizations need to consider when replacing it? Here are four requirements you’ll need to embrace in your next-generation AV solution:

1. Self-Efficacy: This means being able to determine malicious activity at the time of the first encounter, (aka prevention) but also having the ability to discern evaluate  in real time whether behaviour on a device is malicious or benign. This is especially important since attackers have learned to interfere with file composition to avoid detection.  This functionality must operate autonomously and offline in the event the endpoint loses network access at any point during the attack.

2. Binary fractal prevention: You need capabilities to identify binary-based malware using machine learning to ID unique characteristics we know binary-based malware employs within its construct. This will help ensure encountered threats are stopped before they can execute on endpoints. 

3. New vector detection: Attackers use a wide range of techniques to breach a system and execute malware; drive-by downloads are particularly common. However, next generation endpoint protection incorporates anti-exploitation capabilities which protect against both application and memory-based exploits.

4. Networkwide integral remediation: During an attack, malware creates, modifies, alters or deletes registry and configuration settings; any change can cause system instability or malfunction. Additionally, removing a threat and restoring an endpoint to its original state is no mean feat, often requiring intensive manual administrative work. Next generation solutions are able to restore the endpoint to its pre-malware state, and provide visibility into what changed and what was successfully remediated.


Clean-up and threat removal should also occur automatically. These capabilities are often lacking in many endpoint and network monitoring products.

The alternative to antivirus

When replacing antivirus solutions, organizations should consider alternatives that integrate prediction, prevention, detection and remediation to protect against advanced threats using a wide variety of attack vectors against a wide variety of platforms.

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