Why CDR Solutions Are Better Than Antivirus Software

As cyberthreats grow in both impact and reach year on year, the problems with traditional antivirus solutions are only becoming clearer. Many antivirus providers are continually adding improvements and functionality to their antivirus services, adding protection against new known threats that they hope will close the gaps and better protect their customers. Unfortunately, a solution built for yesterday’s problem will never be sufficient for today’s threat landscape.

Thinking outside of the box, and built from the ground up for the unknown, and often random, attacks businesses are facing, Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) technology is the answer the industry has been waiting for.

We live in an age where we have no idea what risks are lurking around every corner.

Let’s look at malware for example. According to a McAfee Labs report from March 2018, the number of new malware samples in Q4 of 2017 was an unprecedented 63 million, and it continues to rise. When antivirus at its core was built to identify suspicious malware files, how can it succeed against danger it has never encountered before?

The same is true across the board. Threats aren’t landing at the door of the obvious targets, or even the biggest names in the industry. Attackers are often opportunists, looking for a vulnerability to exploit wherever it comes from, trying their luck to see what data they can steal or ransom, and what damage they can cause. This is a remarkably unpredictable goal, and so any solution that relies on suspicious behavior or detection can only fall short. Unfortunately, even the most advanced next-gen antivirus solution or EDR still works though mining databases of existing threats, looking for known attack signatures or searching for anomalies in traffic patterns and behavior.

The threats and vectors that attackers use are changing all the time

It doesn’t feel like so long ago that phishing schemes and dangerous links in your email inbox were all that we needed to worry about to stay safe. Today, as IT environments grow in complexity and become dynamic ecosystems of activity, businesses need to protect removeable devices, third party APIs, cloud services, collaboration platforms and more.

Even the cyber-attacks themselves do not fit the criteria for antivirus protection. Drive-by-downloads allow files to be downloaded onto your machine without any user interaction whatsoever, while zero-day exploits make up 30% of attacks, and take advantage of software vulnerabilities or outstanding patch management that antivirus hasn’t adapted for yet and can’t detect or prevent. Advanced persistent threats (APTs) have been known to bypass antivirus and dwell on machines for months or years at a time before they are found and mitigated.

Endpoint security should be a thing of the past

Lastly, it’s clear that in a busy and future-focused business environment, the future is cloud-based, network security. Workloads are now dynamic, autoscaling and provisioning has become the norm, and hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure is growing each year. With these infrastructure requirements, keeping an endpoint security solution up to date on thousands or more machines is an archaic notion. 

CDR: Built for today’s threat landscape

Recognizing that antivirus, even when employing the latest functionality is not good enough to protect todays IT environments, allowed us to create our patented Content, Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) technology. Turning existing methodology on its head, our solution is not interested in collecting information on new threats or looking for suspicious behavior or patterns. After all, we can’t know what the next threat might be or where it could land.

With this in mind, our process is simple. 100% of files that enter your network will go through a sanitization procedure. Before any file can enter your IT environment, it will be disassembled, and put back together as a safe, new sum of its parts. That’s it. No files are marked as benign, and none are alerted to you as malicious – every single file is disarmed, and presented to you in less than one second, invisible to your users, and without any effect on your performance, speed, or operations.

Sounds too simple to be true? More than 500 customers have experienced our 100% success rate over the past seven years. Shouldn’t you be next?