EDR vs. Antivirus: What’s the Difference?
EDR
EDR, or Endpoint Detection and Response, is a modern alternative to traditional antivirus security suites. For decades, organizations and businesses have invested in antivirus software suites in hopes of solving corporate security challenges. However, as the sophistication and popularity of malware threats have grown over the past decade, the limitations of what is now known as “traditional” antivirus software have become apparent.
In response, some vendors have rethought the enterprise security challenge and come up with new solutions to address the failures of antivirus software.How is EDR different from antivirus software, and why is EDR more effective than antivirus software? And how to replace traditional antivirus software with advanced EDR?You’ll find answers to these questions and more in this article.
What is the difference between EDR and antivirus software?
In order to fully protect your business or organization from threats, it’s important to understand the difference between EDR and traditional or “old school” antivirus software. These two approaches to security are fundamentally different, and only one of them is suitable for dealing with modern threats.
Features of antivirus software
In the days when the daily number of new malware threats could be comfortably counted in a spreadsheet document, antivirus software provided a way for organizations to block known malware by inspecting (or scanning) files as they were written to disk on a computer device. If the file is “known” to the antivirus scanner’s database of malicious files, the software will prevent the malware file from executing.
Traditional antivirus databases contain a set of signatures. These signatures may contain a hash of the malware file and/or rules that contain a set of characteristics that the file must match. These characteristics typically include readable strings or byte sequences within the malware executable, file type, file size, and other types of file metadata.
Some antivirus engines can also perform raw heuristic analysis of running processes and check the integrity of important system files. With the large number of new malware samples emerging every day, many antivirus products have since added these “after-the-fact” or post-infection checks in response to the inability of antivirus vendors to update their databases in a timely manner.
Given the growing threat landscape and the declining effectiveness of antivirus approaches, some traditional vendors have attempted to supplement their antivirus software by adding other services such as firewall controls, data encryption, and antivirus “suite” tools such as process allow and block lists. These solutions are often referred to as “EPPs” or Endpoint Protection Platforms, but are still based on a signature-based approach.
Features of EDR
While all antivirus solutions focus on introducing (potentially malicious) files into the system, EDR instead focuses on collecting data from the endpoint and examining that data in real-time to detect malicious or anomalous patterns. As the name suggests, the idea of an EDR system is to detect an infection and initiate a response.The faster EDR is able to do this without human intervention, the more effective it will be.
Good EDR will also include the ability to block malicious files, but more importantly, EDR realizes that not all modern attacks are file-based. Additionally, proactive EDR provides security teams with key capabilities not found in antivirus software, including automated response and deep visibility into file modifications, process creation and network connections occurring on the endpoint: critical for threat hunting, incident response and digital forensics.
Flaws in antivirus software
There are a number of reasons why antivirus solutions can’t keep up with the threats facing organizations today. First, as mentioned above, the number of new malware samples seen every day is greater than any human signature writing team can keep up with.
Given that antivirus solutions will inevitably fail to detect many of these samples, organizations must assume that they will face threats that antivirus software cannot detect.
Second, even without rewriting their malware, threat actors can often easily bypass detection of antivirus signatures. Because signatures focus on only a few file characteristics, malware authors have learned how to create malware with changing characteristics, also known as polymorphic malware. For example, file hashes are one of the easiest file characteristics to change, but internal strings can also be randomized, obfuscated, and encrypted in different ways in each malware version.
Third, financially motivated threat actors, such as ransomware operators, have moved beyond simple file-based malware attacks. In-memory or fileless attacks have become commonplace, while human-operated ransomware attacks like Hive, and “double ransom” attacks such as Maze, Ryuk, and others, may begin with compromised or brute-force credentials, or utilize Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities that can lead to the eventual loss of intellectual property through data exfiltration. and ultimately the loss of intellectual property without triggering detection based on antivirus signatures.
Benefits of EDR
With its focus on providing visibility to enterprise security teams and equipped with automated detection response capabilities, EDR is better able to address today’s threat actors and the security challenges they pose.
With its focus on detecting anomalous activity and providing a response, EDR is not limited to detecting only known file-based threats. Instead, the main value of the EDR proposal is that threats do not need to be precisely defined as with antivirus solutions.EDR solutions look for unexpected, unusual and unwanted patterns of activity and alert security analysts to investigate.
Additionally, because EDRs work by collecting a wide range of data from all protected endpoints, they provide security teams with the opportunity to centralize the data in one convenient, centralized interface.IT teams can leverage this data and integrate it with other tools to perform deeper analysis and help determine the organization’s overall security posture as it defines the nature of potential future attacks.EDR’s comprehensive data can also support threat search and analysis after the fact.
Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of advanced EDR is the ability to access this data, contextualize it on the device, and defuse threats without human intervention. However, not all EDRs can do this, as many rely on transferring EDR data to the cloud for remote (and therefore delayed) analysis.
How EDR complements antivirus software
Despite the limitations when deployed on their own or as part of an EPP solution, antivirus engines can be a useful addition to an EDR solution, and most EDRs will include some level of signature- and hash-based blocking as part of a “defense in depth” strategy.
By integrating an antivirus engine into a more effective EDR solution, enterprise security teams can take advantage of the simple blocking of known malware by antivirus software and combine it with the advanced features offered by EDR.
Avoid Alert Fatigue with Proactive EDR
As we’ve mentioned before, EDR offers many advantages to enterprise security and IT teams by providing deep visibility into all endpoints across the network. However, despite these benefits, many EDR solutions fail to have the impact that enterprise security teams expect because they require significant human resources to manage: resources that are often unavailable due to understaffing, budgetary constraints, or cybersecurity skill shortages.
Instead of enjoying greater security and reduced workloads for IT and security teams, many organizations investing in EDR find themselves diverting resources from dealing with infected devices to dealing with large numbers of EDR alerts.
However, this is not the case. Perhaps one of the most valuable potentials of EDR is its ability to autonomously defuse threats with absolutely no human intervention. By harnessing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence, proactive EDR can reduce the burden on SOC teams and be able to autonomously defuse events at the endpoint without relying on cloud resources.
This means threats can be mitigated at machine speed – faster than any remote cloud analytics – and without human intervention.
What does proactive EDR mean for your team?
Consider the following typical scenario: a user opens a tab in Google Chrome, downloads and executes a file they think is safe. The program uses PowerShell to delete the local backup and then begins encrypting all the data on the disk.
For security analysts using passive EDR solutions, the job can be difficult. Flooded with alerts, analysts need to consolidate data into a meaningful story. With active EDR, on the other hand, this job will be done by an agent on the endpoint. Active EDR knows the whole story, so it will mitigate this threat at runtime, before encryption begins.
When the story is mitigated, all the elements in the story will be processed up to that Chrome tab that the user opens in the browser. It works by assigning the same story line ID to each element in the story. These stories are then sent to the management console, providing visibility and easy threat search for security analysts and IT administrators.
Upgrade Your Security with EDR
Once we see the clear advantages of EDR systems over traditional antivirus software, what next? Choosing the right EDR requires an understanding of your organization’s needs and the capabilities the product offers.
It is also important to conduct tests, but make sure they have real-world applications. How will this product be used by your team in day-to-day operations? Will it be easy to learn? Will it still protect your company in the event that any cloud services are unavailable or inaccessible?
It’s also important to consider deployment and rollout. Can you automate deployment across all devices? What about platform compatibility? Does your chosen vendor emphasize Windows, Linux, and macOS equally?Every endpoint needs to be protected; any neglected endpoint can become a backdoor into your network.
Next, consider integration. Most organizations have complex software stacks. Does your vendor offer a robust and simple way to integrate with other services you rely on?
For a more comprehensive guide to choosing the right EDR, see the free eBook, The Secrets of Evaluating Security Products.
Beyond EDR | XDR for Maximum Visibility and Integration
While proactive EDR is the next step for organizations that have yet to move away from traditional antivirus software, those who need maximum visibility and integration across the enterprise should consider Extended Detection and Response (XDR).
XDR takes EDR to the next level by integrating all visibility and security controls into a complete, consolidated view of everything happening in your environment. With a single pool of raw data that brings together information from across the ecosystem, XDR enables faster, deeper and more effective threat detection and response than EDR.
XDR collects and organizes data from a broader range of sources, enabling organizations to achieve a more comprehensive threat detection and response, providing an advantage over a single EDR system.
SentinelOne Singularity XDR
Learn how SentinelOne XDR provides end-to-end enterprise visibility, powerful analytics and automated response across your complete technology stack.
Conclusion
Threat actors have long since moved beyond traditional antivirus and endpoint protection platforms (EPPs), and organizations need to recognize that these products are no longer capable of addressing today’s active threats. Even a brief glance at news headlines shows that many large, ill-prepared organizations are helpless in the face of modern attacks such as ransomware, despite having invested in security controls. As defenders, it is our responsibility to ensure that our security software is not only suitable for yesterday’s attacks, but also for today’s and tomorrow’s threats.
