What is Malware Protection?

Attackers always look for quick ways to steal data. Using readily available automated tools and advanced techniques, they can do so with ease, leaving your traditional network defenses ineffective. Malware is designed to spread quickly, create havoc and affect as many machines as possible. To protect your organization against such threats, you need a holistic, enterprise-wide malware protection strategy.

You create the illusion of security if you only rely on perimeter security, such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems and URL filtering, or focus only on endpoint security, such as antivirus, anti-spam and malware analysis. With the ever-increasing attack surface and the growing prevalence of automated, sophisticated and volumetric attacks, you need a platform approach built for automation. To stay ahead of attackers, you need a malware protection strategy that includes a global threat intelligence community and covers the network, endpoint and cloud.

Threat Intelligence

A successful military operation relies on credible threat intelligence to make executive decisions. Similarly, contextual threat intelligence shared with a global community enables organizations to respond to attacks more quickly. Security analysts can subscribe to premium and free versions of global threat feed to help their teams stay ahead of attackers.

Network

Everything runs on the network. Business transactions, application deployments, access to resources, web browsing and video streaming all depend on the network running smoothly. The network is also a doorway to your most critical business assets, and it needs protection. Firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, URL filtering and sandboxing systems are typically deployed to protect the network by detecting, analyzing and preventing malicious activity.

Endpoint

The main targets for attackers are mostly laptops, desktop computer and servers – wherever there is valuable data. Attackers look for vulnerabilities and target users with credential theft, phishing and social engineering. Organizations can deploy endpoint security products like antivirus, anti-spam and anti-malware in the form of agents that protect against advanced attacks. These agents can provide effective malware protection by employing static and dynamic malware analysis.

Cloud

More organizations are moving their critical assets to the cloud for its scalability, agility and cost savings. However, there are some security risks organizations must address. Hackers go after your data no matter where it lives, so cloud infrastructure is still open to cyberattacks similar to those that target traditional data centers. To protect against malware, you need to gain complete visibility into your cloud infrastructure, provide strong protections for incoming and outgoing traffic, secure your containers, and run compliance audits to expose data leaks.

The key is to seamlessly integrate cloud, network and endpoint security with global threat intelligence to quickly detect and deliver automated malware protections in near-real time. Tight integration across your network, cloud and endpoint environments, coupled with global threat intelligence, simplifies security so you can secure your users, applications and data everywhere.

XDR: Malware Protection Evolved

Extended detection and response (XDR) is a new category of security solutions that can help you stop malware. XDR combines next-gen antivirus and endpoint protection with network detection and response, user behavior analytics and more to deliver holistic security across all your digital assets. The industry's first XDR platform, Cortex XDR, gathers and integrates data from any source to block malware and detect and eradicate stealthy threats.