The malware and IT security panorama has undergone a major change, and enterprise security will never be the same. Hackers have improved drastically, both in terms of volume and sophistication, new techniques are allowing threats to remain on corporate networks for much longer periods than ever before.

Webinar  on the topic presented by Panda’s own Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.

How Predictive Intelligence Helps to Protect Companies

The task of protecting an enterprise is a challenge because it has hundreds of thousands of computers in its network; and a criminal just needs to compromise one of them to succeed. Security companies have working for decades now to advance security to ensure there is never one computer infected.

In the beginning, it was easy, the number of threats was very low, so being able to identify all threats was enough, computers were safe. Some of those threats were complex causing a nightmare for antivirus companies, as it could take several days, even weeks, for the most expert researchers just to create a detection for them. The creators of these viruses were people trying to show off their abilities, how good they were, and that was it, there was no other ulterior motive.

As the internet rose, there became a clear ulterior motive: money. Once cyber-criminals figured out how to benefit financially from these attacks, things really took off, and security companies, once again, had to adjust.

The number of new threats created is growing exponentially. In the old days a virus could take weeks or months to travel from LA to NY, now in a few seconds a virus could go from Washington DC to Tokyo.

Traditional anti-virus approaches included traditional blacklisting and whitelisting. Both blacklisting and whitelisting worked well for a while, but in the age of advanced threats, they can no longer be counted on. Cyber-criminals can try and fail a million times, but as soon as they get it right once, they win. It’s not a level playing field, and security solutions need to evolve to get ahead.

It is an uphill battle for security vendors, but as an industry, we know what it takes to combat the most sophisticated cyber-attacks. Now, it’s a matter of execution, and enterprises recognizing how important security is to their business objectives.