{"id":4368,"date":"2015-08-13T16:30:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T16:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kasperskydaily.com\/b2b\/?p=4368"},"modified":"2020-02-26T11:02:34","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T16:02:34","slug":"more-than-an-antivirus-p-2-when-and-why-the-antivirus-alone-became-insufficient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/more-than-an-antivirus-p-2-when-and-why-the-antivirus-alone-became-insufficient\/4368\/","title":{"rendered":"More than an antivirus, p.2: When and why the antivirus alone became insufficient"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0last week\u2019s post<\/a> we mentioned that at a certain moment in history, the cybersecurity field expanded beyond \u201csimple\u201d antivirus solutions. Those solutions\u00a0aren\u2019t exactly simple, but there are many other threats \u201can antivirus\u201d can\u2019t address.<\/p>\n

When did it all begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Internet is arguably the greatest achievement of mankind since harnessing nuclear power led to the formation of what is now known as the threat landscape.<\/p>\n

Many of us, at least people older than 25, may remember those fabulous global virus epidemics \u2013 ILoveYou\/LoveLetter, Anna Kournikova, Code Red, Melissa \u2013 all of them happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Then there was the SQL Slammer worm, resulting in a global Internet slowdown (2003) and MyDoom worm (2004) that possibly still holds the crown for the fastest-spreading mass mailer worm.<\/p>\n

What made them possible is the broadband access to the Internet. Once a quick software delivery became a reality, attackers couldn\u2019t help but abuse it for their malicious \u201cneeds.\u201d Initially, the internet \u201cworms\u201d were acts of vandalism rather than criminal offenses, but as soon as stealing data functionality was introduced to malware (such as a worm taking addresses from a mail client address book and sending copies of itself to them), Pandora\u2019s box was opened.<\/p>\n

More than an #antivirus, p.2: When and why the antivirus alone became\u00a0insufficient<\/p>Tweet<\/a><\/blockquote>\n

There is a decent timeline of malware on Wikipedia<\/a>, covering (conceivably)\u00a0all of the \u201cgroundbreaking\u201d computer viruses\u00a0ever created. It\u2019s clear that the first half of\u00a0the\u00a02000s is when the worms became a primary threat, but everything started changing in the second half of the decade.<\/p>\n

At that time, cybercrime began morphing into something much different than just vandalistic acts. In 2007, Storm Worm and Zeus Trojan emerged, both created with an intent to \u201cgather\u201d the PCs into a botnet. Then Rustock.C, a spambot-type malware with advanced rootkit capabilities, detected on Microsoft systems.<\/p>\n

Add here the ever-growing number of new malware, a phishing threat, that was a\u201dfully industrialized part of the economy of crime\u201d by the mid-2000s, and many other \u201cinternet-borne\u201d threats made possible by ubiquitous broadband connection \u2013 and the fact that crooks recognized how profitable cybercrime can be.<\/p>\n

So there is yet another timeline<\/strong><\/p>\n

Take a look.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>

Click on the image to open the full version<\/p><\/div>\n

That\u2019s a diagram of add functionality to Kaspersky Lab\u2019s security products, namely Kaspersky Internet Security<\/a>. It is a customer-level suite, not a business-grade one, but all of the security solutions Kaspersky Lab offers share the same codebase, so the essential protection is the same.<\/p>\n

This \u201cdiagram of evolution\u201d is rather indicative: The new protective functions were added in response to emerging threats. By 2006, there was firewall, web antivirus and anti-phishing, along with a host-based intrusion prevention system against network attacks \u2013 something that an \u201cantivirus\u201d could not handle.<\/p>\n

In 2008, anti-rootkit and parental control were added, and Kaspersky Security Network<\/a> launched. By 2012,\u00a0Automatic Exploit Prevention<\/a> system was integrated, and by 2014, a rollback against crypto-malware \u2013 in response to exploits and encrypting ransomware becoming all too common threats, for both end-users and businesses.<\/p>\n

By that time, the question whether antivirus is alive or dead had become quite common<\/a>,\u00a0and much discussed. Still, the malware protection modules are not going away, it is still in the core, but many other things have accreted along. It\u2019s just not feasible to call a security solution, either for individual users or for businesses, \u201can antivirus.\u201d There\u2019s more than that.<\/p>\n

In one of the future posts we\u2019ll talk about business-specific threats and the tools for battling them. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not feasible to call a security solution, either for individual users or for businesses, “an antivirus.” There’s more than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":209,"featured_media":15604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1999,3052],"tags":[1251,36,97,422],"class_list":{"0":"post-4368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"category-smb","9":"tag-antivirus","10":"tag-malware-2","11":"tag-security-2","12":"tag-threats"},"hreflang":[{"hreflang":"x-default","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/more-than-an-antivirus-p-2-when-and-why-the-antivirus-alone-became-insufficient\/4368\/"},{"hreflang":"en-au","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/more-than-an-antivirus-p-2-when-and-why-the-antivirus-alone-became-insufficient\/4368\/"},{"hreflang":"en-za","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/more-than-an-antivirus-p-2-when-and-why-the-antivirus-alone-became-insufficient\/4368\/"}],"acf":[],"banners":"","maintag":{"url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/tag\/antivirus\/","name":"Antivirus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/209"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4368"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33548,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions\/33548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}